The Ultimate Guide to Posting on LinkedIn

How I grew to 265K followers - and you can too

I know a thing or two about posting on LinkedIn. In fact, I’ve built my entire $1M+/ year business off of LinkedIn (usually working <40 hours/week).

So in today’s post, I’m breaking it all down:

1. The Elements of a Viral LinkedIn Post

2. 🔒 The Constellation of Activities that Drive Growth

3. 🔒 How to Build Your Market of One

4. 🔒 How to Monetize LinkedIn

5. 🔒 My Story with LinkedIn

6. 🔒 Job Searching on LI

Along the way, we’ll cover the truth about engagement pods, and exactly how I’ve gained 265K followers (at one point ranked #11 creator - and why I purposefully didn’t optimize for that.)

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1. The Elements of a Viral LinkedIn Post

You’ve heard what everyone tells you: you need to post selfies all the time. You can’t have links in the post. You shouldn’t @ people who don’t comment.

Well, are they right?

Let’s take a look at a recent viral post of mine:

Advice is cheap; examples aren’t. Here’s one of mine that broke the ‘rules.’

As you can see:

• No selfie

• There’s links in the post

• And I @’d 20 people, >10 of which who didn’t like or comment

And the post still did well.

So if the rules don’t decide performance, what does? Four things:

1. An amazing hook

2. Top 1% craftsmanship

3. Amazing value in the form of information, emotion, or both

4. Proven Topic

Let’s break these down.

Element 1 - An Amazing Hook

There are certain hook templates that are just proven to work. This post smushes together two:

• The first line follows the ‘If I had to learn X again, I would start here’ hook format.

• The second line follows the ($x thing free) re-hook format.

No one else has used this hook before. It’s not a copy. I’ve picked and chosen from two different templates to create something unique and new.

So how did I do it? Three ways:

1. I have been regularly saving and reviewing great hooks everyday for 3+ years in my swipe file

2. I ask my Claude Project ‘LinkedIn Copywriter’ for 10-20 other hooks for any post before I post it

3. I pay for AuthoredUp to preview a version of the hooks before they go live

Create your own swipe file of hooks. And to get you started, here’s my free hook database:

Why do I use AuthoredUp? There’s lots of weird conditions that determine how much of a hook is shown. Factually:

• You have three lines for hooks, and most creators use one or two.

• The first two lines can be 62 characters and the third line 50 characters.

But it’s hard to really visualize without a tool.

Element 2 - Top 1% Craftsmanship

If you ask all the creators who have grown on LinkedIn, they will all share one thing: an incredibly high bar for what they consider quality content.

Top 1% craftsmanship usually means one thing: spending that amount of time on the post.

It’s better to post one really good post than 5 bad ones.

Especially in the era of “80% good” AI slop everywhere, you can’t satisfice even with a single character in your post.

You want each character and pixel to be perfect.

Chris Donnelly has grown 270K followers over the last 6 months with daily cheat sheets:

He creates content that other people would share to their audience.

What you can see about these cheat sheets is they take effort. 4 steps by multiple people at each step in fact:

1. Ideation

2. Writing

3. Graphic Brief

4. Approvals

It’s much more than 8 hours of effort per infographic. That’s the key to craftsmanship: tons of effort.

Element 3 - Amazing Value in the Form of Information, Emotion, or Both

Information is not the only currency to grow on LinkedIn. In fact, my most viral posts include both information AND emotion.

For instance, here’s my most viral post ever:

The hook doesn’t look like any modern LinkedIn growth influencer’s:

Meet America's first hot sauce billionaire: a Vietnamese refugee who built a $150M per year empire with no marketing or sales team.

It’s way more than 7 words. It wraps to over three lines.

So why did it go insanely viral and drive over 20,000 followers?

The emotions it drove in people.

• Americans: “Go Made in USA!”

• Asian Americans: “That’s an Asian guy succeeding here, like me!”

• Asian Audience: “That’s an Asian guy succeeding in America!”

The Americans felt pride, the Asian Americans a sense of kinship, and the asian people, inspiration. (Gross reductions I know, but just to illustrate.)

My most viral posts all combine emotion and information. You see, the information in this post is also awesome.

For instance, here’s a clip:

Early on, one of Tran’s packers suggested his product was “too spicy.” They suggested to add a tomato base to sweeten it. Friends agreed, saying it would pair better with chicken. Tran stood firm: “Hot sauce must be hot… We don’t make mayonnaise here.”

It’s not a high-level story. It’s concrete details that I found after 8 hours researching it over 6 weeks.

I also was using the latest in cutting edge AI technology.

I spent over 2 hours rewriting the post with GPT-4, which was not even out at the time. I was accessing it via the Microsoft Edge browser which pre-released GPT-4 by a few days.

I remember asking it for over 100 hook ideas.

I would have never thought to start a post with the word ‘Meet.’ It was GPT-4 via Microsoft Edge Browser that helped me do that.

So, in total, I spent over 10 hours on the post and used the most cutting edge AI tools to do it.

That’s how you make a viral post.

Element 4 - Proven Topic

Why did I spend 8 hours over 6 weeks researching a post?

It was pre-validated content.

I had seen both Sahil Bloom and Trung Phan threads go viral on it.

You can provide all of the above: an amazing hook, top 1% craftsmanship, and amazing value, but the post can flop.

That’s if you’re writing about something that people don’t care about.

Certain topics are “pre-validated” in some way. These tend to do the best.

(Think AI agents right now. It’s just super-validated. Everyone wants to hear about it.)

Going with pre-validated topics allows you to graft off things about the topic you may not even fully understand (yet).

For instance, even I didn’t really understand the emotional component that attaching that picture to the David Tran story would do to the post at the time.

I just got a little bit lucky because I chose a pre-validated topic.

Quick Note

Now let me be super clear about something! DO. NOT. COPY.

When you are using pre-validated content, the easiest way to obliterate your reputation is to not cite your sources.

The best thing is to have a Credit: with an actually active @. But if you don’t do it in the post, do it in the comments.

You Can Always Throw an Element Out

Each of these four elements generally will help a post.

But, there are plenty of posts that break the rules. For instance, you could go for top 0.001% information, or you could go for top 0.001% craftsmanship.

Take my friend Chloe Shih, whose videos are better produced than much of what comes out of Hollywood:

And yes, I know she’s great at hooks, value, emotion, and topics.

She exemplifies top 0.0001% craftsmanship. And this is her performance on a sponsored post! Most creators dream of those numbers on their best days.

You could also go for top 0.0001% hook or topic. (As you see with some of the AI influencers, a great topic can do a lot.)

Keep it Simple

I could’ve included 15 more elements, but I wanted to keep your checklist small.

I’ve coached 100s of folks to LinkedIn growth, and these are the 4 that matter.

If you’ve read this far, you’re going to do well on LinkedIn. You have what you need. But there’s many layers to this science. Let’s crack open the rest.