I know way more about this than I'd like to.
Everything I've learned about LinkedIn (and my junior high nemesis).
Happy Friday, friends!
This week, I kicked off my personal challenge of connecting with 100 new, ideal-fit leads in six weeks and it’s been busy - but I’m excited about the early results I’m seeing! More on that at the bottom of today’s newsletter.
I’m also prepping for my Nail Your Pricing workshop in a couple of weeks. There are still spots available, but I’ve also heard from many of you that your more pressing challenge is finding clients. While I don’t have plans to offer another live version of Build Your Pipeline in the near future, I did set up a discount for you on the digital version - use code BUILD77 to get it for $77 now through Monday, May 5. (I just hit the seven-year anniversary of officially becoming an LLC, so the sevens felt appropriate.) You can work through the modules over the weekend and hit the ground running on Monday!
Now - let’s talk LinkedIn. If you’ve been here for a while, you might remember that after spending thousands of dollars and countless hours honing my LinkedIn strategy in 2024, I blew it all up at the beginning of 2025. Today, I’ll share how it’s going, everything I’ve learned along the way, and answer the questions I most frequently hear about the platform.
I’ll warn you that this post is long and perhaps mildly unhinged. But hopefully it’s also helpful. If so, I’d love if you’d give it a “like” - the engagement really does help this newsletter grow.
Let’s start with a little background…
I’ve always been fairly engaged on LinkedIn. Back in my corporate career, I was very consistent about connecting with colleagues, keeping my profile up-to-date, and sometimes even asking for recommendations. But actually posting? Ew, no.
As I built my business, I started using LinkedIn to find clients via cold outreach (more on that here) and worked and reworked my profile (my thoughts on that here) as I refined my niche. But as LinkedIn became noisier and more people got into the fractional and consulting game, I knew I needed to be more active on the platform.
(Note that this is what felt right for me and my business, based on my strengths and what I know about my ideal clients. What’s right for you might look a bit different. Build Your Pipeline is designed to help you come up with the right approach for your business, whether that includes LinkedIn or not.)
I started posting regularly (four or five times a week) the summer of 2023 and stayed very consistent with it - but despite what all the LinkedIn “gurus” were saying, I did not suddenly have ideal-fit clients knocking down my door. I didn’t magically find myself booked out for six months with a wait list. Surely I was doing something wrong. So I decided to throw some money at the problem.
Over the course of 2024, that included:
Taking a LinkedIn workshop
Working 1:1 with a LinkedIn coach
Joining a paid community of content creators
Buying a digital course from one of the OG LinkedIn bros
Honestly, they all preached the exact same sermon. So if you feel like you want to go deeper on LinkedIn, this course (referral link) pretty much covers it all - but I also think there’s a lot of free content out there covering a lot of the same topics. And if you need copy coaching and a little cheerleading, your AI tool of choice can be a huge help (LMK if a post on how I trained my GPT to help with content ideation, structure, and editing in my voice would be helpful).
By the end of the year, I was doing everything “right” (even according to that LinkedIn coach, whose solution was to “just keep doing it”), yet still had not experienced the landslide of inbound leads I’d been promised.
On the other hand, my content was doing a great job of building trust once people found me - it just wasn’t the thing bringing them to my profile. So in January, I rebuilt my strategy around that. I’m still posting regularly (usually three times a week these days), but I’m no longer obsessed with “warming up the algorithm” or “borrowing other people’s audiences.” And I’m so much happier for it. (I’ll share the specifics of what I’m doing instead in the paid subscriber section; as a reminder, this is where the behind-the-scenes specifics of how I run my business now live.)
The last thing I’ll say here is that I do think the tactics these LinkedIn “gurus” teach work - if you’re trying to sell to people who want to sell to people on LinkedIn. But that’s not my audience.
Showing up on LinkedIn
Two years ago, the idea of posting on LinkedIn for all of my former colleagues and ex-boyfriends to see made me want to hide under a blanket. If you find the idea of posting similarly horrifying, here are a few things that might help you move past that:
Curate your feed
Before I started posting, I spent a lot of time scrolling on the platform and honestly, I found it pretty gross. It felt so homogeneous, both in terms of the who and the what of the content. I didn’t figure out how to curate my feed until a few months in, but when I did, it made such a difference. Here are some steps you can take to curate your own feed:
Engage with people whose content you want to see. If it’s not showing up in your feed, go to their profiles, click the bell, and engage with their most recent posts.
Expand your circle by writing a post that highlights your favorite LinkedIn content creators (tag them - I promise it’s not weird) and ask people to tag their faves in the comments.
Proactively block the jerks - they won’t know, and once you do it, it’s like they don’t exist. They don’t see your content, and you don’t see theirs. (You can also unfollow people or flag posts as “not interested.”)
Find your cheerleaders
In December 2023, I curated a group of about 10 friends and acquaintances who were all posting regularly on LinkedIn and wanted to support each other. We started (meaningfully) engaging with each other’s content every Wednesday morning, and are still going strong today. I have loved seeing the very real friendships formed through this group, and now when I have a post I’m feeling anxious about, I’ll share it on a Wednesday because I know I’ll have the support of that group.
You could also do this with just one “LinkedIn buddy” or tap into the #LinkedIn channel that seems to exist in just about every Slack community these days.
Find your nemesis
There are at least a million people authoritatively spewing BS on LinkedIn every day. Pick one that really bugs you and channel that level of confidence. You know you know more about (insert your topic of choice here) than they do. So if they’re out there posting despite their mediocrity, why shouldn’t you share your actual, valuable knowledge?
Bonus points: Read a few of their posts and then go for a power walk. I can almost guarantee that you’ll return to your desk with a few posts of your own mentally drafted.
But which flavor of LinkedIn do you need?
Caveat: I’ve had LinkedIn Premium for years, so I don’t fully know what’s available with the free version, but people are always asking about free vs. Premium vs. Business vs. Sales Nav, so here are allllll my thoughts.
LinkedIn Premium
Listen, I like to be able to look up the girls who were mean to me in junior high and see where they’re at today - without them knowing that I viewed their profile. Turns out one of them has joined the circus. Yes, really. So as far as I’m concerned, Premium has paid for itself.
Marginally more importantly, Premium lets me add a personal note to every connection request I send vs. the five-per-month limit on the free version. And yes, I always add a note. I think doing so increases the odds of a request being accepted (I don’t accept connections without a note unless it’s someone I know), but it also serves as a reminder for future-me as to how and/or why I’m connected to each person.
Premium also lets me see who’s viewed my profile (unless they prefer to stalk anonymously, like me) so that I can reach out to anyone interesting who pops up on that list.
Final note on Premium: I have Premium Business, because I wanted the fancy custom button on my page, plus the service page features. That said, I don’t think these are really doing much for me.
Sales Navigator
I have this, too - for now. Sales Nav is an on-and-off thing for me. It’s great for list-building when paired with my CRM (find a video walk-through of how I do this in the paid section of last week’s newsletter), but I tend to do that in batches, so I don’t always need Sales Nav.
It also comes with significantly more InMail credits than you get with Premium. Since I do 98% of my outreach via connection requests, this isn’t a huge draw for me. However - one important thing to note is that if you send messages via Sales Nav, replies will not show up in your regular LinkedIn DMs. How did I learn this? I messaged an absolute dream client last summer and she messaged right back wanting to set up a call…but I didn’t see her reply in Sales Nav until six weeks later. Thanks, LinkedIn. 🫠
Premium Company Page
I got sucked into this upgrade by the ability to see who’s viewed my company page and personally did not find this flavor of Premium worthwhile.
A company page! Do you need one of those?
I set up a company page early on, because it felt like it made my business seem more legit. It’s fine. It has 76 followers and some basic info that’s probably due for a refresh.
I don’t post content from my company page, because LinkedIn prefers posts from personal pages. Instead, I repost content from my personal page to my company page so that when people make their way there, there’s content for them to read.
Whew. I feel like that was a lot. I’m sharing more specifics of what I’m doing on LinkedIn right now in the paid section below - I hope you’ll join me. But if this is where we part ways, I hope this post has been helpful. If you have questions about LinkedIn or what my junior high nemeses are up to these days besides running off to join the circus, drop them in the comments.
💡 On a related note…
👀 Behind the Scenes
Here’s what I’m sharing with paid subscribers today:
→ How I’m using LinkedIn right now (and a surprising result)
→ An update on my outreach challenge
Let’s dive in!