How To Become A Linkedin Influencer

Linkedin is a business-orientated social network and is mainly used as a platform for professional networking. What makes Linkedin powerful and unique is its demographics as it attracts a highly educated, relatively mature, professional audience and has 400 million users.

And, in addition to providing a platform for you to connect and network with anyone in any industry, LinkedIn also allows its users to become LinkedIn influencers. A Linkedin influencer is a designation given to LinkedIn users who are the most engaged, prolific, and thoughtful contributors. A LinkedIn influencer is the equivalent of a magazine editor. Someone who writes and publishes content that sparks inspiring professional conversations.

A while ago, anyone was able to become a LinkedIn influencer, provided they past the special application process. Now, users can become LinkedIn influencers by publishing “long form posts”.

To publish a long form post, simply login to your Linkedin profile and click on “publish a post” instead of “share an update”.

A long form post on LinkedIn is the equivalent of a blog post and should be helpful and relevant to your target audience. The more your long form post is informative, unique and interesting, the more likely it will be shared by your target audience.

The first step to writing a quality long form post is to make your title and header attractive to readers using good copy writing skills. Titles and headers should be intriguing, emotional or provocative.

For example, should you be a sales consultant wanting to further grow your authority in your industry, catchy titles could be “How to easily overcome the 5 trickiest sales objections” or “The 5 biggest mistakes you are making that are sabotaging your sales”.

To further increase the appeal of your long form post, make sure to illustrate it with a 700 x 400 pixels image.

The image you choose should be relevant to the topic covered in your post and interesting. Avoid at all costs cropped images or low resolution ones, as they can make you look unprofessional.

The second step is to give invaluable insights, answers and solutions in the rest of your copy. To get ideas, a good habit to adopt is checking the existing long form posts published by influencers in your industry and featured in LinkedIn Pulse Channels and trying to match their quality and appeal. Another good habit to adopt when researching topics to write about is listening and learning about what your existing LinkedIn connections are interested in by checking what content they engage with the most.

Another handy tool to use when researching topics for your long form post is www.buzzsumo.com as it will list all the most popular blog posts ever published in your niche so you can avoid a lot of time spent in trial and error.

To make your post easier to read, remember to break down your content in paragraphs and bullet points, as well as remember to add images and videos to illustrate your information.

The third step to follow is committing to publishing long form posts on Linkedin on a regular basis, as acquiring the LinkedIn influencer status doesn’t happen overnight. You will have to publish these posts weekly if possible, and test which topics or themes created the most buzz. To make sure you maintain the habit of publishing your article weekly, block a specific day and time every week dedicated exclusively to putting your blog together.

The fourth step is adding tags associated to your post. In other words, adding keywords relevant to your content to make it easier for people to find your content. When typing your tags, a dropdown menu will appear with tags suggestions and make the whole process much easier for you.

After you’ve followed the steps above on how to become a Linkedin influencer, you can then either save your post to publish it at a later time or to come back to it later, or publish it directly. Make sure you publish your content when your audience is the most active on LinkedIn to increase the chances of your content being read.

The benefits of becoming a LinkedIn influencer is first and foremost the increase in views and therefore the increase in traffic and sales as every time you publish a long-form post on LinkedIn, your connections receive a notification with the title of your post in real time.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed these Linkedin secrets on how to become a linkedin influencer. Remember to share this post and leave a comment below. To receive more social Linkedin secrets, make sure you subscribe to our Youtubechannel.

 

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