LinkedIn is two products wearing one interface. There is your profile, which is a public web page that ranks in Google and gets read by people deciding whether to take you seriously. And there is the feed, which is a distribution system with its own logic. Advice that treats these as one thing is why so much LinkedIn effort produces so little.
01The profile is a search asset first
For most professionals, their LinkedIn profile is one of the top three results for their own name. That means it is doing reputation work continuously, for people who never open the app, and it is worth treating as a landing page rather than a CV.
| Field | What it actually does | How most people waste it |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | The line under your name in search, in the feed, everywhere | A job title, which the profile already states |
| About | The longest text field, heavily quoted | Left empty, or three lines of adjectives |
| Featured | Permanent placement above the fold | Unused, or a stale link |
| Experience descriptions | Where your actual work is described in text | Bullet points copied from a CV |
| Custom URL | Part of your search footprint | Left as the auto-generated string |
| Skills | Weak, but used in filtering | Twenty vague ones instead of eight real ones |
- Headline: say what you do and for whom, in plain language, using the words people search. Not a title. Not a slogan. Keep your name standard's one-liner in there.
- About: write it in the first person here, because that is the convention on the platform, but keep the facts identical to your site's about page. Three hundred words minimum, opening with what you do rather than a story hook.
- Featured: pin your site, your best piece of writing and your strongest proof. This is free permanent real estate above the fold.
- Experience: write sentences, not bullets. This text is indexed and quoted.
- Custom URL: set it to your name, matching your name standard.
- Photo and banner: the same photograph you use everywhere else. Consistency across profiles is doing entity work, not aesthetic work.
02How distribution actually works
LinkedIn shows a post to a small sample first and expands based on what that sample does. This means the first hour disproportionately decides the outcome, and it means most of the levers people obsess over are downstream of one thing: whether the first few hundred people found it worth stopping for.
- Post when your actual audience is at a desk, not when a global best-time chart says
- The first two lines are the whole ad. Everything after the more link is read by people already committed
- Replies in the first hour matter more than replies later, so be present after you post
- Reply properly, in sentences, not with thanks
- One idea per post. A post with three ideas gets remembered as none
Everything else, the formatting tricks, the line-break patterns, the emoji frameworks, is noise that changes every six months and mostly makes you look like everyone else running the same playbook.
The first two lines are the entire pitch. Write them last, after you know what the post actually says.
03What to publish
The useful filter is whether you could defend it in a room. Content that survives that test is content only you could have written, which is the only kind that builds a brand rather than a feed.
| Type | Why it works | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| A position you would defend | Nobody else can write it | Weekly |
| Something you got wrong and what changed | Credibility through specificity | Monthly |
| A mechanism explained plainly | Useful, saveable, gets shared into teams | Weekly |
| A real example with real detail | Proof, not claim | Fortnightly |
| Industry news with your read on it | Timely, easy, low ceiling | Opportunistic |
| Motivational content | Performs, builds nothing | Never |
04The relationship between LinkedIn and your own site
Write the durable version on your own site. Adapt it for LinkedIn. Not the other way round, and not only on LinkedIn.
The reason is ownership and decay. A LinkedIn post is functionally invisible after a fortnight and you do not control its future. The same thinking on your own site is indexable, linkable, quotable by assistants, and still working in three years. Publishing only on LinkedIn means renting your entire body of work.
- Write the full piece on your site first, properly, with a real URL.
- Adapt it for LinkedIn: shorter, one idea, conversational, native to the feed.
- Reference the full version rather than pasting the whole thing.
- Let the post do discovery and the page do the durable work.
- Over a year this builds a body of work on a domain you own, with LinkedIn as the distribution layer rather than the archive.
05On links in posts
The received wisdom is that links suppress reach, so you put them in the first comment. This behaviour has changed more than once and varies by account and audience. Do not take it on faith from a post you read.
Test it on your own account: publish comparable posts with the link in the body and in the first comment, several times each, and compare. Whatever your own data says is true for you, and it will be more reliable than any general claim including this one.
06Cadence and what actually breaks
Pick a rate you will still be keeping in month twelve. Twice a week held for a year beats daily for six weeks, and the failure mode is almost always ambition rather than laziness.
What breaks a LinkedIn habit
- A cadence set at your most enthusiastic moment
- Treating every post as a piece that has to be good
- No bank of drafts, so every post is written under time pressure
- Measuring individual posts instead of the quarter
- Waiting for approval on posts that do not need it
07What to measure
Not impressions. Impressions measure how many people scrolled past. Measure whether the right people are arriving and what they do next: profile views from your target roles, connection requests with context, inbound that references something you wrote, and whether your site's traffic from LinkedIn goes to your substantial pages or bounces off the homepage.
What to remember
- Your profile is a search asset and your feed is a distribution system. They need different work.
- The headline and About section carry the most weight and are the two most commonly wasted fields.
- Keep your headline, your site's one-liner and your schema description identical in wording.
- Write the durable version on your own site and adapt it for the feed, not the reverse.
- Measure who arrives and what they do next, never impressions.
Questions people actually ask
How do I optimise my LinkedIn profile for personal branding?
Write a headline that says what you do and for whom in searchable plain language, fill the About section with at least three hundred words whose facts match your website exactly, use Featured for your site and best work, write Experience in sentences rather than bullets, set a custom URL to your name, and use the same photograph you use on every other profile.
How often should I post on LinkedIn?
At a rate you will still be keeping in twelve months, which for most people with a real job is one to three times a week. Consistency over a year beats intensity over six weeks, and almost every abandoned LinkedIn habit was set at an unrealistic cadence during an enthusiastic week.
Do links in LinkedIn posts reduce reach?
The platform's handling of this has changed repeatedly and varies by account. Rather than trusting a general claim, run your own test: publish comparable posts several times with the link in the body and several with it in the first comment, then compare. Your own data is the only reliable answer.
Should I post on LinkedIn or on my own website?
Both, in that order of importance: the durable version on your own site, an adapted version on LinkedIn. Posts are invisible within a fortnight and you do not control their future. Pages on your own domain stay indexed, linkable and quotable for years.
What LinkedIn metrics actually matter for personal branding?
Profile views from the roles you care about, connection requests that reference your work, inbound enquiries that mention something specific you published, and whether LinkedIn traffic reaches your substantial pages rather than bouncing off the homepage. Impressions measure scrolling, not interest.