Career

How to Become an Influencer on LinkedIn

By Jordan Nelson

If I told you that you could increase your income, job offers, and brand awareness by posting on LinkedIn, would you believe me?

8 months ago, I wouldn’t have believed this. But, fast forward to today, and this is something I’ve accomplished. I started building up my personal brand and committed to posting on LinkedIn regularly.

Now, 8 months later, I have recruiters in my DM’s and I’ve increased my income 3x in 3 years. I’ve also been invited to appear on Podcasts, interviews, blogs, and speaking invitations for events. It’s also given me the opportunity to generate passive income for my side hustles, as well as being paid to post!

Before starting this journey, I had an account on LinkedIn and that was it. I was new to the world of Salesforce, and quickly realised that I was just another drop in the ocean. There are so many talented people in the Salesforce ecosystem that I looked up to, and I wanted to reach their level so that I could be found easier in the community. I figured that this would help progress my career, transition into new jobs, and negotiate my compensation package appropriately.

Why LinkedIn is Important

If you want to create a personal brand and become an influencer, then LinkedIn is the best way to network, get recruited, and be seen as an expert in your field.

Depending on your role, whether you are a manager looking to hire, or an individual looking to network. LinkedIn is a great way to stay engaged and up to date with all the latest industry news, as well as start building up your personal brand.

This personal brand is what will help propel your career forward, as it has done for me. People will see you as the go-to person in your industry, which will make you a very attractive candidate for any potential jobs.

Steps to Become a Linkedin Influencer

Becoming a LinkedIn Influencer might seem like a mammoth task, but by breaking the process out into simple steps, you can start laying the foundation to start creating amazing content.

It’s never been easier to start becoming a thought leader in your space, so let’s dive into the simple steps you need to take…

1. Set Your Goals

Firstly, you want to make sure that your goals are clear, these should be aligned with your career development goals. My personal goal that I wrote down was “Become a thought leader in the Salesforce community by being selected as a Salesforce MVP

Your goal could be anything from, increasing your salary at your current job, to getting a following of 10,000+. This will all depend on what you want to achieve out of your personal brand.

2. Do the Research

If you’re just starting out creating content for the first time, it’s likely that you won’t have a huge amount of confidence. In order to combat this, I would recommend to do research into others, and what type of content they are creating. Here is what I did…

  • Browsed LinkedIn’s “Top Voices”, I wanted to get an idea on what others were doing, and what I could achieve.
  • Browsed Salesforce MVP’s to see what they were posting.
  • I started sending direct messages to other Salesforce professionals so I could network, and ask them questions.
  • I researched other Influencers content to see how they formatted their posts.
  • I found out the best times to post on LinkedIn (8:30am has worked well for me)
  • To stay on track, I knew I needed analytics. I found the Shield App which provides fantastic metrics for building your personal brand.

3. Make a Plan

Once you have your goals sorted, and your armed with lots of ideas from the research phase, it’s time to make a plan!

When creating a plan, make sure it’s realistic for you. Don’t set goals that are out of reach, and don’t set goals that are so easy you won’t progress. For me, I had never posted on LinkedIn and was fairly nervous, so my goal was to post once a week about one new thing I learned about Salesforce.

My research told me that the morning in the middle of the week was the best day for posting, so I started posting at 8:30am on Wednesdays. This is where I started, and it was a comfortable goal for me that enabled me to take baby steps until I got comfortable on the platform.

4. Creating the Content

When creating content, it’s important to keep your long-term goals in mind. You don’t want to create content that will just be forgotten about a few months down the line. The whole point of posting and creating content is that it needs to be memorable. The more you post, the more likely people will remember you and come back to your page.

To create engaging content, I ask myself these three questions before I post…

  1. Is it educational?
  2. Is it entertaining
  3. Is it emotional?

These questions are not just used for creating content on LinkedIn, but are universal. If you think back to the last good commercial or movie you watched, you could probably place it within a blend of these three categories.

5. Staying Consistent

At this point, you should be up and running. You’ve executed on your plan, and you’ve now entered the world of being a content creator.

At some point in your journey, you will hit a day, week, or month, where you don’t feel like creating content anymore. This is normal, it takes a lot of effort to constantly produce content. But if you want to be successful, you need to dedicate the time.

This is the step that separates those who succeed, from those who fail, and this is why staying consistent is often the hardest step.

Once you push past this mental barrier to keep creating content, the Shield App has allowed me to find the good, and the bad around my content. This information makes it a lot easier to find out what my audience is responding well to, and how I can tweak it to make it even better.

As you are creating content at the start of your journey, don’t expect to see a ton of traction. As you adjust and tweak your posts, you will start to realise the growth, and the days where you don’t feel like creating content become less frequent. Remember this simple formula…

Time + Consistency = Growth

Summary

I hope this article has provided you with the background necessary to starting becoming an Influencer on LinkedIn.

If you would like some additional assistance, check out my course (Leverage LinkedIn, Get Paid) that I just launched. I will teach you everything I know so that you can fast track your success, and don’t spend months going through trial and error.

The Author

Jordan Nelson

Senior Salesforce Admin @ HealthEquity. I built a course to teach you everything I know about becoming an Influencer on LinkedIn.

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