LinkedIn is the platform everyone agrees is valuable and almost nobody actually shows up for. When I filmed this, a Hootsuite study had found 70% of marketers were confident LinkedIn would give them a positive return, higher than any other network they asked about.
And yet most of us log in twice a month, congratulate someone on a work anniversary… and leave.
So this is what I’d actually do. I’m Maggie Stara, I teach freelancers and small business owners how to market themselves online, and this is the LinkedIn strategy I’d build from scratch: the profile, the content, the selling, and the bit almost everyone skips.
The short version
A LinkedIn strategy has four parts: a profile that reads like a pitch rather than a CV, content that mixes expertise with genuine personal stories, a clear ask, and fifteen minutes a day spent commenting on other people’s posts. The engagement is the part people skip and the part that actually works.
- Your headline should say how you help people, not what your job title is, and should contain the words someone would search.
- Document carousels and native video are the two formats LinkedIn rewards most.
- LinkedIn newsletters get a guaranteed audience, because subscriber notifications bypass the feed entirely.
- Posts with external links lose an estimated 40 to 60% of their reach, so keep people on the platform.
- Spend 10 to 15 minutes a day leaving genuinely useful comments on other people’s posts.
You can watch the whole thing below, or keep reading, both cover the same ground.
Jump to a bit of the video:
1:10 How to stand out on LinkedIn
2:53 Optimise your headline and about section
4:36 Use the featured section
6:15 Create content that connects
9:00 The power of LinkedIn articles
11:31 Be a storyteller
14:33 Start selling on LinkedIn
16:57 Engage with your network
18:51 Send personalised connections
What makes a good LinkedIn profile photo and banner?
A high-quality photo that looks like a human, and a banner that works as a 24/7 elevator pitch. You do not need the staged studio portrait against a white background.
Unless you’re a C-suite executive, that deep-thinking corporate headshot isn’t doing anything for you. And honestly, even actual chief executives have moved on. Look at how Melanie Perkins or Matt Cooper present themselves: still high quality, noticeably warmer, obviously a person rather than an annual report.
The banner is where most of the opportunity sits, because there’s only so much personality you can fit into a photo of your own head. Use it for your tagline, your website, a call to action, any accolades worth having. Neil Patel’s does all of that. Or use it purely for personality, the way Bill Gates does. Both work.
What doesn’t work is leaving it as the default blue gradient… which is what most people do.
If you want to build one properly, I’ve got a separate tutorial on making a mobile-friendly LinkedIn banner in Canva. Fair warning that Canva’s interface has changed a fair bit since I filmed it, so treat the design thinking as the useful part rather than the exact clicks.
What should your LinkedIn headline and about section say?
Your headline should say how you help people or what you’ve achieved, in words someone might actually search for. Not your job title.
“Designer” tells me nothing… and competes with everyone. Something punchy that names the outcome, or the specific niche, or the unusual thing about you, does far more work in the same space.
Think about the LinkedIn search bar as you write it. If someone needed your skill set and typed a phrase into that box, what would the phrase be? Get it into the headline.
Your about section is a story told to your ideal client: how you got here, what you’ve done that matters, and what problem of theirs you solve. One catch worth knowing… you get roughly 370 characters before LinkedIn cuts you off with a “see more” link. So the first paragraph has to earn the click. Everything after that is for the people who are already interested.
What should you put in the featured section?
Your best proof. Media appearances, guest spots, your most popular posts, your offers, anything you’d want a stranger to see first.
This is the one part of your profile where you get to direct traffic… rather than hope. Someone lands on your page, and instead of scrolling your work history they see the thing you’re proudest of.
On my own profile that’s my courses, interviews I’ve done, and pieces I’ve written for publications in my industry. Yours will be different, but the principle holds: whatever you’d mention in the first two minutes of a conversation belongs there.
Company pages work the same way. Logo as the profile photo, a banner that actually says something, and an overview filled out properly so a stranger knows who you are, what you do and who you do it for. Assume they’ll decide whether to follow you in the first five to ten seconds, because they will.
What content actually works on LinkedIn?
Variety… and video most of all. LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards a mix of formats and so does your audience, so text posts, images, infographics, carousels and video all have a place.
Two formats deserve special mention because they punch above their weight here specifically.
- Carousels and infographics. These can be flat on other platforms and are genuinely powerful on LinkedIn, because they let you show expertise rather than claim it. They also repurpose straight to Instagram, which is a lovely bonus.
- Native video. More work, considerably more engagement, and far better at building the know-like-trust thing than anything static. LinkedIn has been pushing short vertical video hard to compete with TikTok and Reels, which means the bar to entry is lower than it used to be. You do not need an hour-long interview setup.
One thing to hold onto: nobody successful exists purely on LinkedIn. Every big name here is also on podcasts, writing newsletters, speaking, posting elsewhere. LinkedIn is one piece of an ecosystem, not a strategy on its own. If you want the full picture, my seven-step plan for social media beginners covers how the pieces fit.
Should you write LinkedIn articles?
Yes… and this is still the most underused thing on the platform. LinkedIn’s domain authority is high enough that an article published there can rank on the first page of Google, above what you’d manage on your own site.
Try it. Search something like “how to become an engaging speaker” and you’ll find LinkedIn articles sitting alongside Forbes and Harvard Business Review. Written, in some cases, by people whose posts got almost no engagement at all. The ranking isn’t coming from their audience, it’s coming from the domain they published on.
Which means if you have expertise but no blog, or a blog that will realistically never outrank Forbes, this is a genuine shortcut. Publish the article, mention what you offer inside it, and someone searching that exact phrase finds you.
The second advantage is that you’re not sending people away. Every platform wants to keep people on it, so a LinkedIn article gets shown to more of your network than a link to your own site would.
That last point has become measurably more important since I filmed this. See the freshness note further down.
How much of your content should be personal?
Most of it should be industry expertise, with a meaningful chunk given over to the genuinely personal. Posts that exist purely to sell are icky, and on LinkedIn they simply don’t work.
Gary Vaynerchuk is the obvious example on the expertise side, posting constantly to five million followers. But the post of his people remember is the one where he admits he passed on investing in Uber early. That’s relatable in a way no framework ever is, because we’ve all got a version of that story.
Steven Bartlett does the vulnerable version well: things that didn’t work, projects that don’t exist yet, the behind-the-scenes of something still being built. By the time it launches, people have been on the journey and they’re ready to buy.
Worth being honest about the asymmetry there, though. Building in public is much easier when you already have authority and money behind you. If you’re starting out, the same instinct still works, it just has to be at your scale: what you tried this month, what flopped, what you’d do differently.
Sharing your values counts too. Sometimes a couple of plain lines about what you believe does more for how people read your brand than an elaborate graphic ever will.
How do you sell on LinkedIn without being icky?
Earn it first, then ask clearly. Decide what you actually want people to do, because until you know that, no amount of content strategy will make sense.
More calls? Appointments? Coaching clients? Product sales? Pick one… it sounds obvious and almost nobody does it.
Justin Welsh is the example I keep coming back to. He shares expertise and experience and his personal side so consistently that when he finally asks people to enrol in something, the comment section is full of people who were waiting for the ask. Sales posts don’t normally get hundreds of comments. His do, because everything before them earned it.
That’s the whole model. Think of the selling as the destination and everything else as the journey, and make the journey worth taking on its own.
How much time should you spend engaging on LinkedIn?
Ten to fifteen minutes a day… in other people’s comment sections. If you only ever post, you will only ever get a fraction of what the platform can do for you.
They’re called social platforms for a reason. You have to give a little to get a little.
The specific move that works: go and find the questions people are asking under other people’s posts that nobody has answered. Jump in with something genuinely useful. You’re not stepping on the creator’s toes, you’re filling a gap they haven’t got to yet, and everyone reading that thread sees you being helpful.
I know people who did nothing but this for a solid year and built enormous audiences off the back of it. It only works alongside creating your own content, mind. Be a great commenter who publishes nothing and people feel short-changed.
And make the comments actually mean something. “Great post, well done” is worse than saying nothing.
How should you send LinkedIn connection requests?
Personalised, and mostly to people in your industry or a field next to it. Tell them how you found them or why you want to connect.
There’s nothing wrong with connecting with your old school friends or the neighbour you met at a street party. They’re just not going to engage with your posts about online courses and marketing, and your feed reach depends on people who care about your topic.
The personalised note does two things. It makes the request easy to accept, and it opens a private conversation the moment they do. That’s a relationship starting rather than a number going up.
Also worth a look: industry-specific LinkedIn groups and virtual events. They’re a decent source of connections and an even better source of content ideas, because you get to watch what your people are actually asking about. And if you’re feeling ambitious, host your own.
What’s changed on LinkedIn since I filmed this?
Quite a lot, and most of it makes the advice above stronger rather than weaker. Five things worth knowing.
- Reach is now driven by topic, not by network size. LinkedIn moved to a unified AI ranking system, and the interest graph has largely replaced the social graph. How many connections you have matters far less than whether your content matches what someone is interested in. Which is excellent news if you’re small and specific.
- Document carousels are the top organic format, at roughly 6.6% engagement, generating two to three times the dwell time of a text-only post. Native video follows at about 5.6%. The carousel advice in this video aged well.
- Newsletters have overtaken plain articles. Subscriber notifications bypass the feed algorithm completely, so a newsletter edition gets a guaranteed initial audience that an ordinary post has to earn. If you’re going to publish long-form on LinkedIn, publish it as a newsletter.
- External links are penalised harder than they were, with estimates of 40 to 60% less reach than an equivalent native post. Keep people on the platform and put the link in the comments or your profile.
- Polls are finished and hashtags stopped mattering. Also, short video does best somewhere around 45 to 90 seconds, and your first hour after posting largely sets the ceiling on your reach.
One thing I got slightly wrong at the time. I framed LinkedIn articles as the underused format, and they still are… but newsletters are now the sharper version of the same idea. Same writing, better distribution.
Where should you start?
Fix the headline… It takes four minutes, it’s the thing every single visitor sees, and most people’s still says their job title.
Then the banner, then the featured section. That’s your profile done in under an hour, and it works for you every time somebody looks you up whether you post that week or not.
Only then worry about content. And when you do, start with the fifteen minutes of commenting rather than the posting, because it’s easier, it works faster, and it teaches you what your people actually care about.
If you want help working out what to post in the first place, my free personalised marketing plan builds it around your actual business, and using AI to build your social media strategy will cut the planning time down a lot. Everything else I teach lives here.
Go and rewrite your headline. Tell me what you changed it to, I’m nosy about these things.
Originally published November 2024, updated August 2026.
