How To Become A LinkedIn Influencer

If you’re anything like me you understand the value of LinkedIn. As a business to business company, LinkedIn has helped us promote our services, grow our networks, and increase our traffic and leads. LinkedIn is an invaluable network.

LinkedIn is making the move towards a publishing platform. They have acquired SlideShare as a first step. Then they released their LinkedIn Influencers program. It’s clear that content is important to LinkedIn. In fact, their engagement has been on the up since they have moved to a more content and sharing focused platform.

As you know, I have always supported sharing your blog posts within groups, on your company page and your profile page. This has been one of our biggest traffic drivers and probably one of yours too. Well, it looks like things are going to get even better for you on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is opening their Influencer platform to the public. This means that you will be able to write and publish a blog post on LinkedIn. You will no longer have to simply link to your blog post and hope people move over and read it. Each post you create will live on your profile forever. There are some pros and cons to moving to this strategy completely which you should know.

LinkedIn Publishing Pros

1. Increased Reach
In order for people to read your post, they won’t have to be following you. This will open you up to a whole new network. People will be able to engage with your content as well.

2. Increased Network
This will no doubt allow you to increase your network. Of course as long as your content is good and read. But because you’ll be able to open your thought-leadership to a wider audience, I’m sure people will want to follow you.

3. Increased Content
You’ll have a more robust profile as each post will live on your LinkedIn page. It’s a good idea to look at LinkedIn as a guest blogging strategy. Use it to increase awareness around your business and to introduce yourself to a new audience. (I will also test taking the same content from my blog and see what happens, but I expect Guest Blogging strategy to be much better.)

LinkedIn Publishing Cons

1. Decreased Traffic
Your posts will be registered on LinkedIn and not your actual blog which means that you won’t see traffic to your site when publishing here. You’ll have to put links inside the post to make sure people check out your site.

2. More Noise
If everyone starts blogging on LinkedIn, there will be a lot of noise. You’ll have to figure out how to cut through the noise. I’m sure you’ll be able to do it. 🙂

How To Take Advantage Of LinkedIn Publishing

Hold your horses, it’s not officially launched yet. But it will be soon. So the best thing to do now is to start thinking of a strategy. How often will you post on LinkedIn? How will you use LinkedIn publishing to grow your business? How will you create content that is tailored towards the LinkedIn audience that is different than the content you create for your own sites.

Personally, I am definitely going to publish content for LinkedIn. But I am going to create even more content for my own blog. Why, you might ask? Because my own blog is my asset! I own the content and I can generate leads. Plus, blogging helps with our SEO and social media efforts. Blogging rules!

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