Hello and welcome to the 175 new subscribers of Creator’s Compass! I’m glad you’ve joined the party 🥳

Today I will share with you the 6-step framework that helped me grow my LinkedIn following from 0-25,000 followers in only a handful of hours per week.

This was the most requested topic for me to write about. It’s for all you busy founders, entrepreneurs and creators who are constantly too short of time to make content.

Let’s dig in!

💭 Thought of the week

Build the right systems once. Let them scale 100x.

Visual credit: Elliott Aleksander

I’ve been there. You have a dozen things on your to-do list and, soon enough, writing that LinkedIn post no longer becomes a priority.

And when you eventually do find the time to write, your post doesn’t perform. Frustrating, right?

This is where building the right habits comes into play. Before you even write content, you need to lay the groundwork for long-term success.

You need a content system.

Once you’ve put the initial set-up time in, this 6-step process will allow you to consistently create content, increase your engagement, and build a powerful following.

All within 2-3 hours per week.

The 80/20 content rule

The “Pareto Principle”, otherwise known as The 80/20 Rule, states that 80% of positive outcomes stem from 20% of your inputs.

Content is the same.

In this newsletter, you’ll learn how to take your current content flow from 0-100 in a fraction of the time you’re currently operating at.

1. Identify who you’re posting for

This one sounds painfully obvious, but bear with me.

The more you invest into understanding who you’re posting for, the more you can tailor your content towards them, and increase the likelihood of higher engagement.

In general, a good place to start with this is to ask yourself a few questions:

• What skills do you have, that others would pay to learn, that you could give away for free?
• Who is 1-2 steps behind you in their entrepreneurial/professional journey?
• What are a few questions that you get repeatedly asked by colleagues/friends?

These questions are a strong way to underline your value, a potential target audience, and the problems they face that you could solve.

2. Build a Capture Habit

Now that you’ve underlined who you want to post for, it’s time to think about your content funnel.

Here’s the thing: there’s going to be other creators out there who solve similar problems for your audience. They’re, in other words, your competition.

For a time-strapped creator, this is the ultimate blessing.

Why?

Because someone has already done all the heavy lifting for you. Other creators who have, through trial and error, found a winning formula for their content.

Now, all you have to do is pick out their best posts to take inspiration from. I spend 20-30 minutes per week generating content ideas from some of the leading names on LinkedIn. You should too.

👉️ Scroll to the end of this newsletter to grab my ‘Idea Capture’ Notion template for free 👈️

3. Post consistently

I posted every day on LinkedIn when I started out five years ago. But as my process was inefficient, I soon hit burnout and didn’t show up for nine months!

I needed systems, fast.

As I looked to pick things back up, I became way too ambitious about how often I could post. Too many things got in the way, and I ended up getting demotivated very quickly.

It takes two months to build a habit, apparently, so I recommend that you aim to post 3x per week for two months. Posting 3x per week is enough for your content to gain traction. Any less and you’re just making a splash.

When you build a habit of writing for yourself, your audience begin to learn what they can expect from you. This expectation, and reliability, turns passive scrollers into engaged fans.

After you’ve proven to yourself and your audience that you can show up regularly it’s time to scale up.

4. Understand the platform better

No platform stays the same for any meaningful period of time. In 2022, for example, LinkedIn was heavily emphasising poll content. In 2023, this shifted to carousels.

Keep up to date with each platform’s features and experiment. Remember, LinkedIn’s algorithm caters to the platform’s own interests. If LinkedIn release a new feature it’s pretty obvious that they’d boost any post using it, as it’s essentially free advertising for them.

You can view the latest changes to the algorithm here.

Quick tip: 💡 Subscribe to newsletters from platform experts and let the information come to you.

5. Analyse and experiment

So, you’ve been posting consistently for about a month or two. Great, you’ve built the right creative habits and the foundations are set.

It’s now time to figure out what’s been working, and what hasn’t.

Each platform has its go-to analytics tools. For LinkedIn, I’ve been a big fan of SHIELD for years now having started on a free trial to test the waters.

This is a screenshot of my content over the last three months. See those spikes?

Analytics by SHIELD. Sign up for a free trial here.

We identified that jam-packed educational carousels lead to the most followers for me. This insight has allowed me to be a lot more intentional about what I post and why.

This post with 178,000+ impressions led to:

• 1636 new followers
• Increased my audience by 7.6%
• 244 newsletter sign-ups
• Increased my newsletter by 135% (Creator’s Compass had just launched)
• Generated 6 qualified leads

Now for the last, and arguably most important piece of the puzzle…

6. Networking and engagement

We’re often guilty of forgetting the core purpose of social media platforms: to build relationships.

A smaller, engaged audience of 1000 people is worth infinitely more than an audience of 10,000 that isn’t interacting with your content.

For me, this starts with two pillars:

• Responding to engagement on your own content
• Engaging with other creators’ content

Take a look at your list of “competitors”. Chances are, you’ll learn a ton from just following and interacting with their content. I see other creators as inspiration as you’re not actually competing with anybody. There’s enough to go around.

Platforms like LinkedIn have given me the opportunity to build my business, and get in rooms with some of the leading names in the creator economy.

Nine times out of ten, it started with a comment on someone’s LinkedIn post.

Take 15-20 minutes per day, before and after you post, to support other people on the platform. Share your insights thoughtfully and after a few touchpoints, bring the conversation to the DMs.

Yes this does take time, but if you’re serious about building a personal brand that will change your life, it’s worth it.

My weekly output:

With the above, I spent 30 minutes capturing ideas throughout the week on autopilot, I spent around 1.5 hours creating content, and approximately 1 hour engaging with other creators per week.

In total, that’s 3 hours to show up every single week to build my personal brand.

The good news? The amount of time this takes doesn’t need to increase in the future. It can actually decrease.

After showing up for months, you’ll be able to delegate aspects of the process as you can clearly highlight what’s been successful for you, and what you’d do more of if you had the time.

If you build the above systems, you’ll transform your content. It’s only a matter of time until you pass growth milestones and enjoy the wonders of compound interest.