LinkedIn opened their publishing platform to every user of the network, which allows more people to share their knowledge and insight into the areas of their interest or career, building their influence. Besides, LinkedIn looks at the submitted content and features only great articles, so low quality articles usually do not appear to anyone but own network. So, how to get featured on LinkedIn Pulse?
What does this mean to you and how to build influence using LinkedIn Pulse? You can increase your exposure, grow network and audience and establish yourself as a leader in your industry. If you look at LinkedIn Pulse, you might find amazing insights, new outstanding authors and, overall, a wealth of professionally-oriented information.
You, yourself, want to be one of those professionals who constantly appear on LinkedIn Pulse.
Articles that get featured on Pulse receive tons of quality traffic, much more than from any other network. People interested in your area of expertise will find your content worth their time. You also might land enticing jobs or gigs by showing your expertise on LinkedIn.
While there is no proven formula on how to build influence using LinkedIn Pulse, all of featured Pulse articles share these common elements.
Catchy headline
Create a hook, so that people will want to open your article and find out what’s inside. Headlines with strong statements, unexpected ideas or “how-to” advises are great ways to catch attention.
Catches your attention, doesn’t it?
Optimized image
Recommended size for LinkedIn Pulse featured image is 698 by 400 pixels. Keep this in mind, as cut-off images never look good. Also, try to stay away from stock images of people in suites. We all know that those are stock, so they create an impression of a “stock” content. Not that you cannot use stock images, but try to find something as original as possible, so it previews high-quality, unique content.
After we’ve created all of these hooks for people to click on your article, don’t let them down with useless content. They will feel like they wasted their time and won’t trust you anymore.
Share your thoughts and insights in an industry of your expertise; share tips and best practices for people who are less knowledgeable in it than you are. Your readers will appreciate these types of articles and will subscribe, or “follow” you, to read your future tips. This will increase your future chances of being featured on LinkedIn Pulse again.
Image: Buffer App
Call to action
After creating an amazing, actionable content, urge your audience to share your article with those who will find it useful, too. Encourage discussion by asking for their opinion.
Now, you created amazing piece of content worthy of LinkedIn Pulse feature. You are ready to see the traffic flow in. Yet, you have a few more things to take care of before you can sit back and watch your influence grow.
Right time to publish
The best time to publish on LinkedIn is during normal work hours. So, aim to publish your content sometime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Keep in mind various peak times, like right before going into work, right before leaving work and lunch hours.
Image: Buffer App
Different channels
You have no power of choosing which topic your article will be filed under. Be mindful of keywords and hope for the best category. Your articles on the same topic cannot be featured on the same channel more than once each week.
Diversify your topics if you really want to grow your audience and get tons of profile views. This doesn’t mean you have to write about things you don’t know. All this means is that you need to get more focused on subcategories.
Say, write about content marketing, digital promotion, and social media marketing. You can create articles about personal finance, investing and an overview of financial trends. Think of related subjects in which you have a better than average insight into and mix topics a bit to get featured on LinkedIn Pulse more often.
Personal promotion
When you’ve published an article, spend some time promoting and sharing it on other platforms. Share it on your Facebook profile and Twitter handle. E-mail it to people who might find this information valuable and relevant. Once your network will start liking and commenting on your article, LinkedIn will push it into more feeds creating more traction for a given content piece.
Submit @LinkedInPulse
Tweet the link to @LinkedInPulse. This will not ensure your content will be featured, but it might speed up the process of LinkedIn discovering this absolutely amazing article you wrote.
Although that might happen, don’t expect your first article to be featured on a channel or to be very popular though. Instead, focus on delivering quality content on consistent basis and watch every article perform better than the previous one. Slowly build quality following and influence.
Have you employed LinkedIn Pulse in your influence building? Share your story in the comment section below.
This article originally appeared on The Social Media Current.
