The LinkedIn Opportunity Most People Still Don’t See

LinkedIn still has massive organic reach, a high-quality audience, and surprisingly little competition

Make no mistake: LinkedIn is the potion, the key, the opportunity. The platform is a monster.

Make content on LinkedIn around your job, around your subject matter expertise. You’ll be stunned by the recruiters coming to you. LinkedIn content will change your life if you want a new job.

The thing that a lot of people need to focus on is where is the attention. Over the last few years, it’s been remarkable how much opportunity there is on LinkedIn. If you’re in this audience and you’re doing B2B marketing and you do not have a LinkedIn content strategy, you’re making a humongous mistake.

If you are not producing an enormous amount of content for LinkedIn, you are missing out on Facebook circa 2011. The organic reach of just posting on LinkedIn as if it was Facebook a decade ago.

It has gone away from being a recruiting tool to a content microphone.

Follow the Attention Before It Disappears

If nobody follows you, if you’ve never posted a piece of content on LinkedIn, your ability to put a piece of content, whether in long-form written word, video, or audio…The amount of organic reach that post will get, if you have even a couple of hundred connections, would blow your mind.

It’s most similar to 2007–2009 Twitter and 2011–2013 Facebook. The ROI on acting like a media company and not an advertiser on LinkedIn is staggering and will go away. This is one big game of cat and mouse.

Organic reach is through the roof right now. Early adopters feel it. It gets talked about. More people do it. Supply and demand of attention shifts. Ad prices go up. The marketplace becomes proper.

I’m going to give you another chance right now, because it’s happening right now. It’s called LinkedIn. You can have no followers, nobody knows you. You make a video, picture, written word, deck, something — you post it — and a lot more people than you think will see it…if it’s good.

Content Is the Way Out

Many people don’t have a lot of other options for their career because they’re not on the offense on LinkedIn.

What I want is for you to post 19 pieces of content tomorrow on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram because they will answer the things that are running through your head right now. If you made no content anywhere else and made pieces every day for LinkedIn that were specific to psychographic, demographic, location, age, gender — you will win.

I always tell people, if you make content on the internet as if you’re the TV show, not the commercials in between the TV show, you will get a disproportionate return on your investment.

Why You’re Not Posting Enough

People are insecure to post at 20. People are insecure to post at 40. Everyone still thinks it’s high school and everyone still thinks it’s junior high. There’s unlimited people here who are stuck and worried about posting because they’re worried about it not getting a lot of views or somebody in the neighborhood making fun of them.

You’re literally not posting, or more interestingly, you are posting because you are now all the PR agents of yourselves on social media. We are posturing for other people’s opinions. Your lack of action is exposing your insecurities.

If you’re educated, if you follow me, and you are not posting 10 to 15 pieces of content a day, your actions are exposing your insecurities. Anybody who makes fun of you for trying is in a crap place themselves and are trying to drag you into their crap.

Do you want to roll in crap with a crappy loser? Or do you want to ignore that and attack?

You’re Stuck Because of Fear, Not Reality

You value the opinions of people you don’t even like. You are valuing the opinion of people you don’t even like and you don’t even want to be like…You’re stuck in seventh grade.

What made you unhappy in middle school and high school is making you unhappy as an adult and you can’t see it. Every one of us is in a slump. Every one of us is not in a slump. The question is, do you believe you’re in a slump? It’s a bump in the road and you’re treating it like terminal cancer.

You’re nervous to ask out a girl because she might say no. You’re nervous in a job interview because you might not get it.

Nothing Sucks. It’s You

My friends, nothing sucks and nothing is awesome. It’s all you. Nothing sucks and nothing is awesome. It just is life, and how you show up is you, period. Stop complaining and pick accountability and optimism.

If you’re fully accountable, everything is your fault, even when it’s not, and you’re optimistic, even though everything sucks right now, you’re going to win in the end. Accountability and optimism leads the way.

If You Hate Your Situation, Leave

Got to apply to other jobs. Go post on LinkedIn and add value for others.

If you don’t have the power to change it, you’ve got the power to leave. Hate your job? Or have bad bosses? You’ve got to leave the company and start something else. But a lot of people want to stay in it and complain about it because they don’t think they have other options. There’s unlimited opportunities right now, and thousands of people who are 59 years old got hired today.

With AI, you can learn everything in two seconds. I don’t understand why people continue to choose negativity.

Impact Isn’t About Scale

If you’re giving, you can’t be taken advantage of. If you’re actually giving, you expect nothing in return. Giving is giving without expectation. Impact is not predicated on reaching millions. Impact is predicated on reaching one person.

There are people that have tons of followers that have impacted them very little, and there are people who have 500 followers who have impacted all 500 people immensely.

If you’re looking for impact, you don’t need to do it out loud and in public. You can do it for one person.

I urge you to start really be thinking about being great at producing written words, audio, and video per the ten platforms so that it’s contextual to the platform.

When somebody’s on LinkedIn, they’re in a business mindset. When they’re on Instagram, they’re in an entertainment mindset. The way you convey your message is extremely important.

The adjectives you use, the analogies you use, the examples you use — it has to be based on the psychology of where people are when they’re on that platform.

These platforms are not distribution channels. They are places you should tell stories.

If I’m trying to sell to a 42-year-old woman executive, what I put in front of her on Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn would be substantially different because of the psychology of her when she’s in that stream.

The Window Is Open, But It Won’t Stay Open

Because I’m yelling loud, half will do it, some will do it, one will do it, then it will get saturated. The attention will be matched by the amount of content. Ads will enter the ecosystem and dominate LinkedIn.

How many times do you need to see this happen? How do you think I dominated social? I lived it with search and with email, and then I said, “Okay, now I get it. I’m not making the same mistake when I see it.”

You are struggling to get leads, win RFPs, and get new business. The answer is LinkedIn right now. LinkedIn is uncomfortably underpriced organic, let alone paid. Go get it done and be on the offense.