I posted on LinkedIn daily for 100 days and reached 1.7 M views | My top 5 learnings

I hadn’t posted on LinkedIn for years. 

But 100 days ago, I decided – I should totally change it. 

At the beginning of 2024, I said to myself, “I need to post on LinkedIn every single day.”

(EVERY SINGLE DAY)

No excuse. No “I have no idea what to write about”. No “I have other tasks, I’m busy today”.  

Was it hard? 

• 100% 

Was it worth it? 

• 1000%

Over 3.5 months, I reached 1.7M people on LinkedIn organically. 

But let’s put this “1M views on LinkedIn” aside. Because views don’t really matter a lot. What actually matters is how many people you network with (how many of them become your clients, partners, friends, etc). 

And that’s totally NOT a vanity metric! For example this is just a small part of people who invited me to become a guest on their webinars/podcasts/interviews: 

Or even more significant metrics — how many emails to our lead nurturing I managed to collect, using LinkedIn content!

We collected 4.6k emails with only 2 LinkedIn posts promoting our new Ebook.

Just imagine: 

2 LinkedIn posts

4674 email collected 

$0 budget spent on ads

Btw, if you want to download this Ebook about my learnings as a startup founder who reached $7M ARR in a fully bootstrapped way, you can do it for FREE here. 

Now you can say: 

“Wow, it’s so cool! But how can I build personal branding, so I can get similar results?”.

Again, 100 days ago I had 0 LinkedIn posts. Every single day I was writing, and I failed a lot. But because my main goal is to inspire and educate other entrepreneurs & growth marketers, I wanted to share all (ALL) my learnings. 

I spent 100 hours on writing posts, posting, and engaging with people on LinkedIn. But you can grab all my learnings just for 10 mins. 

So let’s dive deeper! 

Why LinkedIn?

Before we start diving deeper into the LinkedIn game, let me share a bit about myself. I’ve been building Expandi (LinkedIn Outreach Software) for 3.5 years and I was lucky enough to reach $7M in ARR in a fully bootstrapped way. I went through failures and wins on my road. 

Once I reached this impressive milestone, I decided to share all my knowledge with others. Because this is exactly what helped me at the beginning of our journey. I spent hours talking to successful entrepreneurs about their mistakes & learnings. It’s priceless.

The story begins with my LinkedIn account being banned.. 

No, not because of software or scam or spam. The reason was: 

I’m a founder of Expandi LinkedIn Automation software, the coolest software on the market . Even though LinkedIn couldn’t detect people who are using Expandi, it could detect me as a founder. 

My name was everywhere (and on my LinkedIn account as well).

They decided to ban my LinkedIn account, so that I can’t promote Expandi. 

I wasn’t happy about it, but I said “it’s ok, I can still keep going”. 

So, during the last 4 years I was sharing everything I know on Twitter: 

But 6 months ago I could get my LinkedIn account back! 

It was so exciting to jump back into LinkedIn content creation.. And over the last 100 days, I came up with 1 important conclusion. 

LinkedIn is the best social media platform to build personal/company branding in B2B. 

Let me explain why: 

What’s the most essential thing for you when it comes to purchasing services or products in B2B? 

It’s trust. 

You can’t make impulsive purchases, since it is the money of the company you spend. You need to see the value of the solution/service offered. Also you need to trust the supplier that this is exactly what will help you. 

But how to build trust? 

The answer is -> people need to trust you. Once they do it -> they will trust your company. 

But how to achieve this? 

You need to accomplish 3 things: 

1. Be a good person 
2. Be an expert in your field 
3. Let people know that you’re an expert and a good person

How? 

Share content on LinkedIn. 

Let’s dive deeper into the reasons behind this:

How does LinkedIn make money?

As all social media platforms, they earn money from showing ads. 

So for them it’s critical to have people scrolling through the newsfeed more and more. For this, they need good quality content for users, so users can spend more time on LinkedIn. 

But since LinkedIn wasn’t a platform for content creators for years, there is almost NO good quality content. 

What LinkedIn does is trying to take that small amount of good posts and show it to more people. Meaning, if your post is good enough, it can be shown to 10x of your followers count. 

You can check it by opening your own LinkedIn newsfeed. Almost 50% of organic posts will be from people you don’t follow.

(it’s almost impossible for FB, Youtube and so on). 

Moreover, since it’s not just about “trends” but about really good content, you can do it again and again. 

Here is the proof: 2x more views on my post (I have 8k followers, and this post reached 17k!)

Sometimes your posts can go even crazier: 

So let’s analyse the learnings: 

Learning #1 The rule of 100 

How to become a pro at something? 

Practice. 

I love the law of 100 that Noah Kagan shared. 

That actually means that if you want to become a pro at something you need to do that “something” for 100 days or just 100 times. 

With only 1 add-on to this rule: every single day/try you need to put all your heart and soul into making it better. 

Practical example? 

Your personal branding on LinkedIn. 

Day 0-10: You don’t know how to write posts. 

Day 11-25: You get the first result and try to experiment to find “your format”. 

Day 26+: You try to replicate what is working better. 

You can’t just become viral from your first post. I mean, you can, but you can’t replicate it and get the same results again. 

At the very beginning, you won’t get the outcome you expect. Here is my 2d day’s post: 

You just need to continue no matter what. 

Learning #2 Stick to 1 language only

I’m Dutch and I speak both Dutch and English. Since Expandi’s audience is worldwide, I decided to write in English only. 

But at some point I thought what If I try to catch 2 groups of audiences at the same time – Dutch-speaking and English-speaking? 

I tried to rewrite my best-performing LinkedIn posts from English: 

As you can see, the results are extremely different! 

Learning #3 LinkedIn posts can bring you traffic & leads

LinkedIn, as any other platform, doesn’t like when people leave the platform. That’s why if you just share links to your blog articles or website within the post -> it’ll fail. 

But how to get leads and visitors in your site/articles? 

Good question! Here is the secret hack we’ve found: 

1. Share the teaser of your content (or your service) 
2. DON’T share the link within a post 
3. Ask people to engage with your post and DM people with the link 

Here is the example: 

Why it works: 

• People engage with your content and for LinkedIn it’s a signal that your post is valuable and it starting showing to more and more people 
• Since people don’t get an access to a content instantly, but they need to 

Also you can automate this process by using the “Post engagement” outreach campaign in Expandi: 

You just copy the link to your post. 

And create a Post Engagement campaign, to reach out to everyone who commented or liked your post with the link!

The results are amazing!

You can distribute your articles again and again.

Learning #4 Practical content

Until you have 100k+ followers, it doesn’t make sense to post “inspirational” content. You need practical value bombs to be helpful for your audience.

Why? 

At the beginning of the road people don’t trust you (I mean they don’t trust you THAT much). So whenever you say the right (but too general) words for them, it looks like a “new copycat of Gary V or Tony Robbins”.

If you don’t want to be a “copycat” of huge influencers, you must offer genuine value to your audience. 

Here are some examples: 

As you can see, the second example really nailed it! I reached almost 40k people with it: 

So try to focus on “what are the most practical and useful things I could share”. 

Learning #5 Connect, connect, and connect

Your post can reach millions of people. See this spike: 

At this moment you go viral. But if you don’t connect and build your network on LinkedIn, these spikes mean nothing. 

Why? Because LinkedIn’s algo works like this: 

1. First of all, whenever your post on LinkedIn, it’s shown to 10-15% of your 1st degree connections 
2. They engage with your content -> LinkedIn starts showing it to 15-25% of your 1st degree  connections and to a small amount of 2nd degree connections (aka “friends of your friends”)
3. They engage -> your post becomes really viral 

But not every single post can become viral (just believe me, a lot of my posts were stuck at 1-2k views milestone). You CAN NOT always be in front of your potential audience’s eyes. 

Only 1st connections will see you. So try to increase the amount of 1st degree connections through outreach.

Here’s my 1092% growth of the number of followers (aka connections):

Summary

If you want to grow your LinkedIn network using outreach, try Expandi. If you want to know more LinkedIn growth hacks, join the FB group.