How to boost the growth of your profile after 1000 followers
Or 5 steps toward high-quality leads on Linkedin
Building a personal brand on Linkedin requires consistency and patience. As well as other things related to content marketing. Still, if you’re posting and engaging regularly, in a month or two you will hit 1000 followers.
Being an important milestone for beginners, it’s also a place where you should start applying different tactics to boost your Linkedin experience to a whole new level.
In this post, you will learn how to accelerate your growth and start getting leads from your profile. It’s based purely on my recent experience and experiments with my profile and content.
Step 1: Audit your previous content & make a plan
Usually, when you’re just testing the waters, all you care about is posting each day and making the content relevant to your audience. After several weeks you begin to feel more confident with your content. It’s easier to create, write, and come up with ideas.
Where there was a struggle, comes the fun and excitement. When you start feeling this way, it’s finally time to approach your personal brand strategically (if you haven’t done it before).
Outlining the goal is not enough anymore. Create a content calendar where you’ll place all your posts with links to originals on Linkedin. Divide your posting into categories.
I use Notion and divide my posts by type of content: twice a week I have a carousel, twice — a post with an image, twice more I’m posting just text messages and on Saturdays, I experiment with text formatting additionally. Don’t make the solid rule out of your plan, but it will help in 2 things:
- You can organize and analyze your content easily
- Your audience will understand which type of content to expect on what day and will come for their beloved format (as lots of people come to my page on Saturdays to look at weirdly aligned messages with value coming along).
You can also place highlights on the calendar — when you want to analyze your content (I do it each week on Fridays) and when you want to repurpose it.
If you haven’t analyzed your content performance before, start doing it regularly now.
Step 2: Start building your audience base outside of LinkedIn
After 1000 followers you realize that you already have devoted readers and people who return to your page to support you. It’s another sign that you’re on the right track and it’s time to find a way to nurture these contacts.
Even if you’re not an entrepreneur or freelancer now, these contacts will prove useful in the future when you decide to try some side-hustle business. So it’s important to start gathering contacts of your audience not only on Linkedin but beyond that.
You’re still in the early stage of your personal brand, so don’t try to bomb people with something you need to pay for. Start a free newsletter for your niche, create some ebook or other free digital material, and distribute it upon leaving an email.
Give something for free to make your audience sign up. It’s better to be something people can put into practice, not just read another bit of theory. For example, I provide a free content strategy template upon signing up.
If you’re starting with a digital product, I advise simply gathering e-mails at this stage and doing nothing more. If you’re creating a newsletter, you have more options:
- Create a newsletter once a month if you want to focus more on Linkedin later, not shifting solely to the newsletter. Provide a mixture of actionable tips, fun, and value with a bit of your personality. Once per week remind your audience about the newsletter on Linkedin.
- Create a newsletter each week if you want to shift the focus of your audience from Linkedin to it. But I don’t recommend it, because at this stage you don’t need to change platforms. It’s better to be consistent and slowly build your audience in both places.
Step 3: Experiment with your offers
Working on your offers is a crucial part of building your personal brand on Linkedin, but it mustn’t scare you.
Start small. Outline several things you can help your audience with and create a short offer for each of them.
Here is where the fun part starts: you need to experiment with ways to present your offers.
Several places you can start with:
- Add PS with your offer into your post
- Add your offer to the last slide of your carousel
- Use the first comment in your posts to show your offer
Some offers may have no response at all, some can have little. The trick here is to make your offer short and easy to understand, relatable to your post and to end your offer with a strong CTA that will make a person DM you or book a call.
Don’t go to packaged offers only, try small ones too. For example, I was experimenting with content strategy offers (large offers) and short audits for profiles and landing pages (short ones).
To transfer leads into clients, be ready to provide some small parts of your services for free in the beginning. As your personal brand grows further, you won’t need that anymore, but in the beginning, free consultations or services can help you build trust, receive tons of recommendations and craft the perfect offer. Just remember to limit your free services too.
Step 4: Remind of your offers in the comments section
Remember, Linkedin is all about engagement and networking. It’s also about providing value, lots of it for free. So if you see that your post resonates deeply with the audience and brings a heated discussion to the table, use it for additional lead generation.
Kindly remind your audience that they can write you anytime if they have additional questions on the topic. Ask some questions to find the core of their pain problems.
It will work as native advertising. You didn’t push any services on your audience, but you said that you’re here for them. So when they need help, they’ll remember you.
Step 5: Don’t be scared over the metrics drop
There are lots of guides on LinkedIn about making its algorithm work in your favor, but in reality, the proven mechanics can’t guarantee you all the great results. You’ll be facing ups and downs, your impressions may drop for some unknown reasons and rise again.
Remember not to focus on vanity metrics and continue to be consistent with your content. Don’t decrease the number of posts and their quality because of some metrics drops. Keep your focus on growing the audience and increasing the number of potential and existing leads and fans.
No matter how poorly the metrics of some of my posts this month were, the overall growth is going faster this month. I also got 4 leads this month, one transferred to the client without doing any cold outreaches.
Bonus tip: collaborations
To build a strong brand you need to show your human side too. Admit that you’re not an all-mighty source of information for each topic. While focusing on your niche, ask advice from fellow creators on the subjects they’re better in. Do collaborations to exchange the audiences and build trust in you and your brand.
Plus, collaborations are really fun to do and can show you how other creators organize their work and posting process from the inside.
If you want to follow my growth journey and see how to use these strategies for your personal or brand growth, subscribe to my Copy & Coffee Content Playbook for founders. Additionally, each month I’ll share a new batch of useful tips based on the most recent experience in my blog.
