LinkedIn, AI & You in 2026 | Growing Your Brand with Melanie Goodman, LinkedIn Growth Expert

We're live. Amazing. Mel, thank you for joining me. I've been so excited to talk to you for a while now. I've been learning so much from you, from your posts. I think everybody's going to know who Mel is. But Mel is... Yeah, she was the link tank and really, in my mind, the top expert in LinkedIn growth. But if you can introduce yourself and just... Tell us a little bit about what you're doing, both in Substack and LinkedIn. Sure. Yeah. So those of you who don't know me, I'm Mel Goodman, and I've been on LinkedIn for well over a decade. Actually, surprisingly, it feels the same amount of time. I've actually only been on Substack for about nine months. And I can talk a bit more in a few moments about what brought me over. But yeah, I specialize in LinkedIn training and LinkedIn marketing, generally business development. So the focus is really on converting your connections into clients because that's what most people want to do. LinkedIn is more sort of about client generation and pipeline than Substack is a bit more creative. Together, they form a fantastic flywheel because you can basically monetize your LinkedIn connections without sounding too materialistic. That's really what you can do because you can build a community on Substack, which is much harder to do on LinkedIn because LinkedIn groups just don't have the same feel as Substack. that community which already in nine months is a very is you can build a really warm place i've you know met great people built some fantastic relationships um you know people have come to me for training and you know linkedin consultancy um and it's very it's a different field too which is a bit which is more corporate um linkedin is obviously more corporate um and so you know it attracts there is some crossover with people who are on both platforms more people coming across and seeing that flywheel work now from linkedin to substack because they want to obviously use both together um so that's really what i've been teaching people uh recently how to do that um but uh yeah my my background um originally was law um so i was originally a real estate lawyer many many years ago i still actually hold the practicing certificate because i draft social media policies bums um so when i'm not linkedin training and creating content that's what that's uh what i'm doing is uh i draft social media policies which sounds really dull but i can't enjoy it oh that's awesome that's awesome yeah i mean it it's so interesting to see how i mean see some of your posts that i've read substack and linkedin can really complement each other they they're so different and they can really complement each other now you came into substack recently And the story of why you came to Substack is pretty crazy. And I think now looking back, you probably think that it worked out for the better. But I'd love you to tell that story. Yeah, so it definitely worked out for the best, but I probably wouldn't want to go through it again. So it was June last year and I just woke up one morning and I was engaging on people's posts like I always do. And then suddenly 11 o'clock in the morning, I get it flash up. um you've been permanently restricted so it wasn't even a temporary restriction they've gone like all in with their permanent restriction i was like what on earth is going on um i wrote obviously wrote to them did it all use your channels raised support tickets by um via twitter actually x which is actually the quickest way to raise a support ticket if you really yeah if so if you can't raise one on linkedin but if you don't sometimes you don't get a response and if you do it by a um x help so you go to linkedin help on x and it's the only time i ever use that chat that platform is to if i if i've ever needed to um to go onto the help um help desk and basically they can they can actually raise a ticket for you um that's pretty cool yeah so it's it works much quicker if you can't get a response from um from linkedin quickly but basically back and forth with linkedin they wouldn't tell me what um what was wrong and they just said we're not putting you back on the platform that was your business yeah i explained that and they just said i even went to the i because i live in london i went to the linkedin offices i went to their head offices and um And they were super nice. And they sent through a letter to like the California office. I still didn't have any joy. I still was getting these silly like responses saying they can't tell me what's wrong because of privacy reasons. And this was like, and after about literally about 25 emails, I just basically gave up and then I was like, you know, I need to move on with my life. Like, this is like killing me. And I just decided like, cause the last, last resort I wrote to, I wrote an email to Ryan was Lansky. uh ceo and and um so i wrote to him and then i also wrote and copied him in i wrote to their lawyers in california who i knew represented linkedin and i wrote to one of the partners there and said look for all these reasons um it's basically you're you're you're it's against the law to take down my account like that And I gave all the reasons because I had the advantage that I could look up the law and I knew what I was talking about. So I laid it all out exactly why they contravenes and even as a platform, as a large networking platform. they don't have the right to put in terms and conditions that are against the law like they have to their terms and conditions need to comply with the board not the other way around so anyway i obviously put all this and they obviously realized actually like she's not going to go away because she actually knows what she's talking about so so and so within 24 hours in fact less than that i was back on the platform to their lawyers and that was it then they phoned me they were really apologetic i had a phone call with them They apologized. They did give me some compensation. That wasn't why I did it. I said to them, actually, I don't need anything. It wasn't like anything great, but they gave me some months of my account free. And I said to them, actually, I don't need anything because I've got my account back, which was what I wanted. But there's a problem with your systems. And they were really apologetic. But during that time, I had this hiatus. Actually, it was 12 weeks. I've said it in about three minutes. it was three months that i didn't have an account for wow so i mean the only thing that was lucky about it and i'm trying to like look on the bright side was that it was over it was over the summer where a lot of people were and i had obviously i had from my business trevosan i had um existing clients so it wasn't like i couldn't do any work i have no had no pipeline because a linkedin trainer without a linkedin account is a bit like a struck off doctor so you know i'm a linkedin consultant so to not have an account has been like difficult so i um i started on substack i was like okay i'm gonna have a look at this other platform which i know exists but i've never had the time to really look into so and i just as i i said to you before i went all out in those like but i it i was on holiday actually with my family for three weeks every morning I'd spend like two, three hours, like basically learning, consuming Substack, like literally before anyone else was up, like set myself up. I brought over. Luckily, I was able to bring over most of my connections from LinkedIn and said, look, I'm now on Substack. You've been following. We're connected on LinkedIn. I'm now on Substack. I really hope you'll follow me there. Obviously, a few people dropped off. But actually, I was really fortunate. I mean, obviously, I don't have personal relationships with me. followers but i do have like i do know quite a lot of people actually i've had conversations with them over the years and i had i've got really supportive community actually over on linkedin of like other marketing people as well and like most people followed me over so it was great i had like a great platform to start with and then I just was like wow I was like blown away by the tech on Substack compared to LinkedIn it was like wow I've been missing you know this is what I've been missing this is what LinkedIn is missing and and then sort of once I was like settled on Substack and sort of was starting to grow it quite fast and I was like this is they have and obviously Substack has these great like great incentivization with their you know I was like oh I've got to try and grow on this and um so I was like, I was sort of, I spent my summer being quite competitive to try and really sort of almost get to where I was on LinkedIn on Substack, which obviously I haven't, I'm not at that level. But, you know, you've obviously been on it much longer than me and you're a complete expert on Substack. But what I realized was that, and this is where actually I've sort of really honed in the last sort of like six, seven months, is showing people how you can use the two platforms together. And that's a challenge. But it's really, it's the platforms actually, they sort of all slot together. I ran a bootcamp with Christina God a few weeks ago about the LinkedIn Substack flywheel. the recordings are actually available if anyone wants them just to dm me i can send you the link to get the recordings but they um it was like a four-day camp and we just showed people how you can use the two platforms together like really make the most out of self-stack really make the most out of linkedin bring them together and you basically like double your reach um because You know, and, and as I said, you're monetizing your presence on LinkedIn much more directly because LinkedIn, obviously you can, I've run a business using LinkedIn and I'm growing my pipeline there for the last 10 years. But the difference is that on sub stack of it, it's much more direct because you can, people will subscribe to you. So they, you know, they've taken annual subscription and then, you know, they're in your, they're in your world for at least 12 months. Yeah. And, and it's, At least from what I've seen, I haven't had the best experience on LinkedIn just because I feel like everybody coming to me is wanting to sell me something. And I started the newsletter, the same articles that I post, I tried posting on LinkedIn. It didn't work. I could tell people commenting were probably not even reading them. But in Substack, you get people, you can't... what i'm trying to say is you can't use linkedin as a sub stack you really have to know how to use the strengths of each to to supplement i mean i've actually learned a lot about doing that from from you so you're very active you are very active on linkedin as well i know that like i'm learning i'm learning from mel so anybody who's not following mel you you're missing out uh so please make sure make sure to follow um but one of the things especially when you bring up that you've been on it for a decade. There's been so much going on over the past 10 years. And I'd like to zoom out a little bit. We live in a time where really, at least in my analysis, there hasn't been a good competitor to LinkedIn. If you're a professional and you want a professional network, you have to be on LinkedIn. So what is the biggest shift that you've seen in... in the use of LinkedIn as a coach leaders, as you talk to people, especially as AI started taking hold of the world, really? Well, I suppose it's definitely harder to have a really distinctive personal brand because there's so much AI-generated content. So I think that that's really the key at the moment to really making yourself stand out, is to really think about how you write and not be sort of... sucked into the the fact that you can write a post in under 30 seconds because the odds are it's going to look like 10 other people's posts from the same sector and and i think that there's definitely a bit of a backlash that we all do it and because you know you can you can now generate an infographic in like a minute two minutes you can generate a great infographic or a carousel and they look really professional it's what you know i mean i have to admit my i give probably i give probably two-thirds less work to my graphic designer than i did five years ago because uh it's so this generation is so quick now and producing you know branded um assets for for a linkedin post but that said by far the posts that do the best on linkedin are those that come from and i was talking to somebody else about this this morning real life experience so those those posts that talk that usually start in so my big piece of advice if you want a post to go to go far to have a great reach start in the first two lines and put the word i so i felt i i experienced um i did i so put an i in rather than like a generic start to a post and nearly always people will read on because and you want them to click past the see more that's that's the key when they're looking on mobile because about 60 of um of sessions on linkedin are now from a mobile um so really the key is that you want people to click see more and normally if people think that you're going to be talking about something real your experience a case study as a client experience they're much more likely to click on and then you can go into more detail that makes sense further on into the post so sometimes i'll be like you know so i might say like i was i was you know i was um really you know like um i was really heartened to read that um and then i will go on and explain like how someone can do something on linkedin like it might be using a linkedin feature you know like for example i might say um well i actually i've got an example i can think of so um somebody reached out to me um two days ago using the linkedin services option so they came they saw my the services on my LinkedIn profile which by the way I would advise anybody if you haven't got your services page set up you if you don't do anything else please do that because you will immediately rank above everybody else in searches that haven't got it set up so immediately it's like easy win anyway she she had found me through my LinkedIn services page obviously LinkedIn had suggested me as a service provider she's looking for for help with her LinkedIn branding and content And she's now set up a call with me. But, so what I will now do, what I can now do is I will start a post with, I was approached, like where's the effect of like, I was approached last week. Oh, I get it. Yeah. And then I will explain to people how to set up their LinkedIn services page. So you can start with the personal and then shift it to the informative. And the key at the moment for LinkedIn to the algorithm is that you sort of stay in your niche, that you stay on track. So like if I start going off and talking about AI, which is more your department than mine, LinkedIn will see like a misalignment between my profile and what I'm talking about. So if it's something like, it's something sort of happy clapping, I'm talking about, you know, about feel goods, you know, helping. I don't know, helping homeless people or something. They'll push it out because it's a feel-good post. But if I'm just going off on a tangent and talking about metaphor or AI or something that doesn't match up with my profile, it actually won't push the post out as far. So you really want to stay on. That's interesting. Yeah. The new algorithm is called 360 brew. And one of the things that... um it looks for when when you post in the first round there's two rounds of like testing of your post what they do is they show it to a few people first and if it passes that they pass it out to more people they show it to more people so you you've got to get past that first initial that first initial um sort of uh showing of your poster to a small number of people on linkedin um and hopefully but usually if you've started that post with something personal people will want to read it So make sure your services page is set up and then start with personal, move to informative and stay within your... And that normally works. And still like pictures, if you've got photos of yourself, they weren't really well on LinkedIn still. I mean, even though they've tried to, over the years, you know, they went through a stage where they're saying, oh, you know, selfies, et cetera, aren't going to do really well anymore. But actually they still are always the highest performing posts for people. You know, because also I think because it used to be if you posted a really good infographic, you were good to go. It would be really excellent. But now there is the platform. It's so easy. They're flooded with it. And it's no longer like, oh, he must be really clever to have made that. Because a lot of people know how to do that now. So it doesn't look quite as impressive as it did. I mean, it worked quite well when AI first came out. And if you were sort of ahead of the curve a bit and you played with a few apps, it was like, oh, I can do this, actually. And most people can't. But now so many people can use them that it's like, OK, it's like the secret's out. So do something else to make yourself stand out. So things like lives. videos i did a i did a video yesterday afternoon actually because i'm on the committee and raising money for cure parkinson so i didn't i couldn't yeah that's awesome i've seen that you saw my video yeah so i did i did a quick video yesterday afternoon and but videos even though they don't often get the most reach they're really great for people seeing you in real life a bit like doing a live they get a feel for what you're like because i might write a short know 70 characters on sub stack but that doesn't really showcase my personality it doesn't it doesn't really show much about me whereas if you do a live or a video or you know it people sort of get more of a feel for what you're like to work with and just what you're like as a person yeah and i think it's especially important in the age of ai when so much of the content is ai generated or ai helped it's just good for people to know there's actually a person behind this personality behind exactly I love that with Substack. The going live is fantastic. You can just press a button, whereas there's none of this buffing with Restream and StreamYard and all these other platforms that you have to with LinkedIn, which is something LinkedIn needs to get onto. Yeah, and the clips, the automated clips. And now you can post the clips automatically to LinkedIn from Substack Lives. Oh, I haven't done that. I actually haven't done that. It is risky. It may have you in a weird... weird face yeah i think i might i think i want to see what i'm gonna what i'm gonna look like before but i'm sort of always wary about things that sort of all automate what goes out in in that way i'm saying it's like i would never auto like automate comment generation or anything like that because it's just quite too risky as to what however much you train an ai um platform to sound or speak like you I would never trust it to actually talk for me. Yeah, yeah. And it's so interesting because you have, I talk about this often, you have the lazy AI versus strategic AI use. Lazy AI is, AI actually replaces your thinking. You just kind of lean back on your chair, you just hit whatever it is, post or create article or write this email for me, whatever it is. it's replacing your thinking and little by little, you become less of an expert because you're just not training that muscle. Where strategic AI is, you know, you're focusing on your coaching so that you use AI to maybe outline ideas or to help find new possibilities or new contacts or help. I use it for a lot of content repurposing. So I write an article and then I get teasers that go out. So in LinkedIn specifically, as you're coaching leaders, as you're talking to people, what does good AI use look like in 2026? Research, to research trending topics in your industry, using it to find out what people are actually asking, their pain points and their struggles. So even going back to Google, old school Google, which now is like, oh, Google, that's a hole. But it actually... People, when you say you're Google, people just look at you a little... Yeah, it's like, oh, you're still using Google, bless. No, it's... But actually, if you use... Actually, if you start typing into Google, like your... Say the niche of your client. So just say that I wanted to work with family offices. um if i start typing in family offices linkedin it starts to show me what family offices are asking about linkedin what they've typed into google like how to use linkedin or you know how's the best way to get clients on linkedin that immediately tells me what people want to know about and that's a really good way to structure your articles and your newsletters on linkedin so we're on sub stack um but i find actually perplexity um is actually the best for for them taking those ideas and going into more detail. So what I'll do is I'll often get the ideas from Google and then I will ask perplexity to research them and give me some titles. And even sometimes, it depends what it is, provide a structure. And that is when I would say, come to the table and actually put in what you know and your knowledge and add to it and actually then craft it, then craft the article and then get it checked by, so then get it checked by, well, Claude is really good for doing that. So get Claude to analyze it and see if it's got any suggestions to improve it, given and if you have set up your code correctly uh well not correctly but you've taken the to put it to input into it sort of examples of linkedin newsletters or sub stack newsletters that have resonated well structure-wise so it knows um you know what's the best way to structure for reach etc so it doesn't just provide you with like 2 000 words of of prose that is dense and no one's actually gonna read like i mean there's certain i i know like on subs on sub stack um you know if you have too much dense text people are a bit like oh and they don't spoil the way down um so they pretend to and they just write oh that's like nice nice toast um yeah so um so yeah you want to make it actually actually readable and um i mean you can even say i actually don't do this but i know somebody um i know somebody who does but there is a reason i don't use it but a lot of people do is that the alphabet apparently The average reading age on LinkedIn you're aiming for is, I think they call it like grade seven, which is quite low actually. Really? Yeah. And so if you ask AI to check their reading grade. Now, I actually for most of the time don't do that because a lot of people that I'm connected to on LinkedIn are quite capable of reading above that and they post. that are fairly high level. But that said, if I'm writing something really hard, it's like a reading grade of like- Write us for a seventh grader. Yeah, exactly. Write it for a 10-year-old. But people, you know, sometimes, especially like on soft stuff, people are just going there for a bit, almost like a bit of enjoyment, a bit of downtime. It hasn't always got to be super serious every single post that you write. I mean, I would say keep it 80%, well, on LinkedIn, 80% professional, and then, There's some room for maybe your Saturday post, which Saturday is a great day to post. They do really well on a Saturday. I think for everybody, I don't know anybody who's posted on Saturday that do well. I think there's just physically less competition on the platform. I'm learning so much. I never post on Saturday. I can see Micah said that he divorced GPT. I haven't looked at my chat GPT. Probably about two weeks, three weeks. I'll occasionally go on to it because I built some custom ones there. So I'll go from my old custom GPTs. I've imported most of it into Claude now anyway. So I don't do much. Yeah, Claude is amazing. For the SEO piece, for example, I have a really thorough skill on ChatGPT. So once I have a draft of a post, I give it to Claude. runs through a marketing checklist and then an seo checklist and it usually gives me hey these keywords are resonating these are not this is so there's there's so many if you can have your reach be increased by just by just being smart and doing a few different things just some of the things that you're saying i at the front um at services all of a sudden the same content can reach five to have this many people there's no reason not to do that Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, hashtags have now been demoted on LinkedIn. Oh, really? Yeah, so there's no need to add, like, lots of hashtags. Well, certainly don't add lots of hashtags to a post. If you are, like, between three and five is optimal, but there's now not a – you don't have to add them for your post to go out. You have to add, like, hashtag investing, hashtag communication, hashtag – but now – and luckily, I really like the fact that on – the non-self stack like you don't have every note sort of uh yeah that would be heavy that would be a lot yeah well on instagram it's still like that and it's like yeah um so yeah it's quite nice to have that but no that's that's awesome so a question that i that i had is what is the biggest miss that you see from people using uh you know experts, people who really have the skills on LinkedIn, you can see they have the background and they're just, they're just missing it. It's just not, they're not getting it. Um, it's probably the headline. Um, cause especially senior leaders who were just having their headline, like CEO at or partner at, and they're just missing the whole search and SEO. um angle because although once someone lands on their profile it might look impressive there's a ceo of wherever of uh forcter and gamble but the point is that they did that they um hi ashley but it but they won't come up in searches and that's really key so and even from like from a company point of view from a branding point of view you want all your teams to be coming up in searches. So your idea is to have everybody search all their profile search engine optimized, which will just push your company brand because company pages don't go very far in reach. They're a bit near. They always have been there and they still are. I never tell people to invest too much time in their company page. Yes, post on them so they're active, but they're a shock window. You can really still push out your company page if everybody from their personal profiles is set up correctly, is search engine optimized. That makes sense. It has a branded profile and has customized their URL, got their headline in place, services page, skills, et cetera. There's umpteen different sections and you want people to read on. So they see the headline when someone comments on a post and they read on. And that's really what you're aiming for. yeah yeah no i i've seen some headlines that you just shake your head there's there's so much yeah there's someone like i'm not gonna name and share my i have one the other week but she commented on a post of mine and um i can't actually say what it is because it will it will be able to pick her up um but it was like it was a it was i think she meant i think she was trying to be funny But she would have come up in zero searches for anything because no one would ever be searching for that on LinkedIn. And I thought, like, I'm not even sure that I can't even see how it would sell her as a brand, as a person. It wasn't a particularly attractive vision of what she was calling herself. And I was just like, wow, like she's a marketing person. I know she obviously wanted to stand out. But marketing 101, you're not going to come up in any searches. And as much as you want your profile, you want it to be aesthetically pleasing and to catch people's eye and to be beautifully graphic designed, you also want it to be set up so that it physically comes up in searches when people are searching for what you do on LinkedIn. Otherwise, for most people, it defeats the object of actually being there. Yeah. It really is a dance that we're getting into now. And I feel like AI is just going to maximize this. But I coach leaders on AI strategy and AI implementations. And there's just part of leadership now is having to manage both people and AI, whether it's something in LinkedIn. Hey, optimize your profile for people, but also to be found by the algorithms. people who are applying for jobs. Yes, you have to be interesting in the eyes of the person hiring. But for most companies, you have to get past the AI review in the front end that's going to match keywords and it's going to match. So increasingly, it's becoming a world where you do have to kind of swim in both lanes. And it's difficult, but it is skill. And I think that's where you are so valuable. I mean, you can't ignore AI. So the people who are like sort of anti-AI like, oh, you know, it's not, you know, it's not authentic. It's not, it depends how you use it. If you use it smartly, then it helps you. It saves you time. It probably produces better content than you would have done before. However, it's not the finished article unless you've read it, you've used what you know in your experience, which it doesn't have. Because it can't possibly know if every, I mean, you can upload your meeting notes into it, but it still won't know every in-person meeting that you had. It won't know how you felt when someone said something to you. And it's these sort of lived experiences which will, it will propel your content above the next thought leaders. or above your competitors or make somebody hire you and not the next person because you'll have shown that actually you have this experience and even though on paper you might look the same and offer the same services. And as we said, things like personality will always play into it. Yeah. No, that's a good point. And it's hard. It's hard. That's why I love that there's coaches, that there's experts. I mean, on Substack, there's... There's so many resources. You can use AI. And I tell people this. You can use AI. It is going to be helpful. But a big part of growing, a big part of business is differentiating yourself. And if you're fully generating with AI, if there's none of you in there, there's no experiences, there's no... Then a hundred other people are going to be posting the exact same content. And there's nothing that stands out from your work. No, I agree. I agree. Peter's just asked about kickbait content. I don't know whether you ever use, you might say something different to me. I mean, I don't, I can't, I'm trying to think, I can't ever remember using it. I might have done one post or something in years and years of doing this sort of comment X to get Y. So, you know, same deal and I'll send you a PDF. I mean, I don't engage in that. Maybe I should. Maybe I should. Maybe I'd get more views. But I don't because I think that most people who see it know that it's a gimmick, know that it's a marketing gimmick. As it happens, LinkedIn are clamping down on that sort of post. At the moment, they've said that they are not going to promote posts like that. But I still do see. I know people who are doing very, very well on Substack and LinkedIn, and they use that as a very common strategy. I should probably do one and test it because I've always been anti-doing it just because I feel it's a bit low rent. I feel it's a bit like everybody knows what you're doing and I would just rather not do it, have maybe... okay maybe 3 000 views instead of 13 000 but i'm sort of okay with that on some posts and obviously we all want more impressions but it just feels a bit icky so i don't i i tend not to do that but um but you might say differently joel like you might you might use that frequently and say that actually it works really well you know i get 50 000 impressions on every post i do that home so you know yeah i i personally don't i personally don't don't use that um i see it on sub stack too and it's subscribe hey everybody who subscribes i'll subscribe back and it it isn't it seems that sub stack is pushing it because i see it all the time in my feet um but i personally don't though i i feel the same way i don't i'm not judging anybody who's doing it yeah that's right i mean now i'm sort of thinking well maybe i'll do i'll test a couple um but i've never done it it's just not my it's just It's just not my style, so I don't do it. But that said, there are people who I think are doing very well from it. The other thing also is that you can't always tell because a lot of people who do it are in... groups where all the people are commenting why are people you're in there like in a group with them so it so it's not always um transparent as to how well it's that's true funny enough there's somebody who i who i know um i think you probably know him too who uses it quite a lot and actually i was i think i'm gonna have a conversation i'm actually interested to know how it's working now this because linkedin have said that they're going to really calm down on people doing that so it will be quite interesting i think i know who you're talking about and yeah it's i feel like when there's big resources like hey i created this resource i've seen it work there um hey i have this 20 page report if you comment x you'll get it i don't know i've never tried it so if you do try it please uh i'll be glad to read that post i've got a million resources i could do one tomorrow and tell you what i tell you what happened but i suspect that just i'll get like a few people who will say but most people i know won't fall for that sort of clickbait you know the most of the people i know so yeah it also stays with your brand so if you haven't ever been doing that it's going to strike people as like you were saying a tangent from what you normally do with my brand i try and like sort of uh be fairly classy with it and it's like that's it's not really on brand for me so yeah yeah i get it um so we're we're reaching the end i one one question that i didn't want to get to is what do you think leaders creators need to prepare for as you look at what's coming over the next six to 12 months you obviously can't predict what's happening but as you see kind of the tide that's coming and then how things are changing where where do you see things heading Definitely not to put all your eggs into one basket. So I would say that you need to diversify. So I'm not saying that you need to join Facebook and start going all out on TikTok. But definitely, I would suggest making sure that the platforms are moving, that it's moving sands. And especially on LinkedIn, you're on rented land. So at least with Substack, should it all go wrong, you have people's email addresses. which is one of the big advantages of Substack. Or start an email list. Even if you've been on LinkedIn and you're still a bit unsure about Substack or vice versa, just always make sure that you have as much data downloaded from each platform as they will give you on a regular basis. um yeah i would always suggest that once a month you download your data um from especially from linkedin um and substack you can export as well you can export your subscribers and then you just always have something that is sort of yours to then do something with um to take elsewhere to build on um away from the social media platform so i think that the smart leaders will have networks in real life on LinkedIn, on Substack, on email. They won't just have... You're not dependent on just one source. Yeah, I think that's really important. No, that's awesome. That's good. So if people go to your channel, to your Substack today, what is the first resource that they should go to? Ooh, I've got quite a few. I've got quite a few. Actually, no, I just launched, because I said to you, I just launched the analytics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is super cool. That was yesterday, where if you've downloaded your data from LinkedIn, you upload your messages file. It will analyze all your messages. It will tell you who you need to re-engage with, who's gone cold. You get an incredible report. But if you haven't done that, I would look at my articles about optimizing your profile and download my checklists. um i've got a lot also lots of there's a free linkedin tools on my on my home page of the link tank so if you look for free linkedin tools there's lots of things that you can just use on there prompts etc So, and also asked about LinkedIn newsletters. Do I have any tips on LinkedIn newsletters? Yes. When you, when you set up your LinkedIn newsletter, every time you publish, go to the settings and make sure that you put in your SEO title and description. People don't even realize it's there and you're losing, you're like missing a huge opportunity to, to sharpen searches. So that's my tip. That's awesome. And also, I mean, if you're not doing on, if you're creating on Substack and you're not doing that. that is that's also awesome i usually have a different title for my fco title within substack than my actual title on the post just because yeah you're you're speaking to you're speaking to google and here i'm speaking to my readers um it's it's it's interesting do you use ai to create your seo title a hundred percent a hundred percent um and then what i do every once in a while and it's actually worked really because i i do everything on cloud but every probably once a month i'll go through google search console for example and i'll download every page how many views it got versus how many clicks it got and i'll put it down to cloud and i'll have it analyze it and it'll see okay these kind of this is resonating more you know this is getting views this is not getting views this is what people so a lot of times it's not that the content needs to be different but just The title needs to be worded a little different. These kind of wordings, if I start with how-to, it does a lot better than if I start with five ways to, I don't know. No, no, I have to say all my how-to articles do the best on social media. Same on LinkedIn as well. Because you're imparting practical tips for people. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's at the heart of it. Are you adding true value to people? Are you actually being helpful? And if you are, it tends to resonate with people. It tends to go far. So I'm just so thankful that you've joined us on Substack. I feel like I've known you since the time that you started on Substack. And I've just seen how everything, and I've learned so much from you from LinkedIn. I really appreciate your time today. you for inviting me it was great yeah it was fun we'll get the clips and yeah for everybody on chat we'll be posting the full recording later as well um so you'll be able to get all the tips and everything else that you've got there's been so much information so thank you mel you take care thanks joel bye

LinkedIn personal branding for leaders in 2026 — what actually works when AI is changing everything about content creation?

Is LinkedIn still worth your time in 2026? With AI changing how content is created and consumed, what does it take to actually grow your personal brand and business on LinkedIn today?

In this episode, Melanie Goodman — a leading LinkedIn growth expert — joins us to break down exactly how leaders and entrepreneurs can use AI strategically on LinkedIn without losing their authentic voice.

What you'll learn:
• What's actually working on LinkedIn for leaders in 2026
• How to use AI strategically without losing your authentic voice
• Melanie's proven frameworks for growing your LinkedIn audience
• The content strategy that drives leads and influence for executives
• Why personal branding is a leadership imperative, not optional

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🔔 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://LeadershipInChange.com
🤝 Work with Joel (Coaching & Fractional CAIO): https://jsalinas.org
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