How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
April 1st, 2021
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One hundred million LinkedIn views.

It’s not impossible.

I’ve been there and I’ve still been consistently hitting that ballpark.

And, those views can be yours.

Today, I’ll teach you how to get there. We’ll help you write better posts to drive more traffic, more views, and more conversions, and I’ll even show you what to do after that post.

Ready to take those LinkedIn views to the next level?

Step 1. Understanding Your Audience – Your LinkedIn Views Depend on Your Audience

Before you can even reach out with your posts and content, you have to understand the audience that you are communicating with.

LinkedIn has more than 645 million members, and out of these, about half are active.

There are 180 million senior-level influencers, 63 million decision-makers, and there are a lot of C-level people hanging around, too — about 10 million of them.

how to get more views on LinkedIn


Did you also know that 87 million millennials, with 11 million of them in decision-making positions, are active on LinkedIn?

What does this mean?

It means your content has to adapt to the age group of your audience, and you can structure your content depending on the audience that you are trying to reach.

But, it doesn’t just stop at understanding the general market on LinkedIn.

You have to dive deeper.

Here’s what you should do:

  • Take stock of your current connections, do they fit a certain profile(s)? If they don’t then there’s something seriously wrong with the way you’re making connections.
  • Group those connections via the ideal customer profiles that you have, these are the people that you want to connect with, and there are also the people you will want to write for.

If you don’t have ideal customer profiles set up you’re in for a world of pain, you’ve got to do something about it ASAP. I’ve put together this guide here for you to check. Please do.

Step 2. Thinking Mobile

Here’s what.

You’ve got to start writing for mobile devices. 

Everyone including their grandmas is on mobile.

This means writing your LinkedIn posts in clunky sentences isn’t going to get you the same number of views anymore.

No one likes long paragraphs on little screens. They’re harder to read, and they look long and tedious.

You have to remember you’re competing with attention span and longer paragraphs mean that they will have to spend longer on your post.

how to get more views on linkedin

You see how this particular post is so much easier to read.

Nobody – including you and me – wants to read a novel on LinkedIn

You have to maintain engagement, and that means being able to maintain attention spans.

Do you want to experiment? Then, try previewing your post on your phone before you publish it.

Step 3. Planning a Pattern

Anticipation.

That’s what people feel when they see this design.

You’re about to run down a hill.

As you start running – you pick up speed.

The anticipation of moving faster excites you.

Now if you’re running on a flat street there’s a lot less of it.

This type of curvature in the picture below is like that of a hill.

You see the sentences shortening.

Your reading speed increases.

Then it stops.

Maybe it’s a one or two-word sentence.

It packs a punch.

Boom.

All the emotion makes you want to read on.

So, you continue with the next sentence that’s much longer.

And the pattern repeats.

Think about this for a second.

 Do your eyes look for a pattern when you read?

 Aren’t you subconsciously searching for a structure?

 You know you are.

Like this.

Just like those lines above, you need to be able to structure the sentences like waves. You are trying to build anticipation for your reader, so you need to control the speed at which they read. 

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

By shortening sentences, you are increasing their reading speed

By creating a structure you are controlling their reading pace.

This is helpful if you want to drive a point in two to four words.

You want them to feel the anticipation that as you shorten the sentences, their eyes run faster – or vice versa – until they hit that one-liner that packs that emotional punch that you have.

But wait. 

Do you know how powerful that one-liner is?

It makes you want to read the next sentence afterward. By playing with anticipation and pace, can create more engaging posts on your LinkedIn.

Step 4. Starting Your Post

There are plenty of ways to start a post, and there are hundreds of openers that you can use to grab attention.

You can start with:

  • Pain
  • A shocking statistic
  • or anything with a pattern that keeps them moving forward through the article

Here are a few examples:

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

 

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story
linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story
linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story
linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

Check out other lessons here!

Once you can get on the same level as your reader, you become relatable. And, relatability is something that you have to establish early on so that the reader will even read your post, to begin with.

There’s a caveat to all of this. 

You have to make it short enough in order for someone breezing through LinkedIn to be able to notice it and read the first line in its entirety.

This is the reason we advise that you start your post with a simple sentence. A sentence that’s relatable and captivates the audience with emotion will do wonders for someone scrolling past.

You can always explain yourself later. This isn’t a news article where you have to provide a summary in the first sentence. These posts are supposed to excite your audience and keep them reading.

Step 5. Writing the Post

Now that you’ve engaged your reader, you need to think about how you want to write your story down. Apart from being relatable, your post must bring about emotion.

You want them to feel and not think.

Here are a couple of tips to keep your post engaging.

Shorter sentences

Avoid using words such as “and,” “but,” and “or” because it lengthens your sentences. You want to be able to attack the post with shortened sentences because this allows you to keep the reading momentum going even with longer posts.

You do not want to make your writing daunting for your readers.

But, don’t be afraid to use those words in the beginning of your sentences, like what I did in this one.

Using Questions in Your Posts

There are only a couple of instances where you should be using a question.

At the beginning of your post, at the end to make a statement, a self-conscious thought you are writing about, and in some cases where you want to create a dramatic effect. 

However, apart from these instances, you should avoid using them in your LinkedIn posts because they make your reader pause and think.

The pausing won’t help what you are trying to achieve. 

Am I right?

Reenact Moments

Spoiler alert.

Storytelling works.

It works so well because people rather be in the middle of the story rather than be told about it.

How do you do that?

By showing them and reenacting moments.

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

Here’s our quick tip on doing this.

Reenact how a conversation went on between two people in the story.

This puts the reader in the scene, they become a part of what’s going on.

They react, they feel, and they are witnesses to the events.

Spice up your adjectives

It’s time for you to stop using common adjectives such as “great,” “best,” “big,” and “bad.”

The reason being is that it leaves room for interpretation, and they are way too general.

You want to be specific with the emotion that you are trying to convey in your post.

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

Simplify your vocabulary

While we’re on the subject of vocabulary, you have to make sure that you don’t use overwhelming vocabulary.

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

Look at how this post is constructed.

It doesn’t matter if they understand what “discombobulated” means.

If you lose a fraction of a second of your reader’s attention because they were discombobulated with the word “discombobulated,” then you’re in trouble.

Plus, this isn’t an essay or a white paper.

It’s a post!

Getting them disinterested or allowing them to lose attention is distracting them from the emotion that you want them to feel.

Adverbs

Some of the posts that we’ve crafted have used less than two adverbs because they allow a reader to think.

Or, don’t use any adverbs at all.

Adverbs do modify a verb, and they make for excellent writing, but in the type of posts that we are going for, we aim to target emotion.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, when we get our readers to start thinking, there is a possibility that we lose that emotional momentum. 

Step 6. Ending Your Post

Now we’ve dealt with a number of themes in writing a post, from being relatable to eliciting an emotional response from your reader. The ending is as important as the post itself.

The end is where the reader will finally decide if they want to share your post or react to it. It is where you genuinely get engagement.

The way to end a post is simple. You have to be able to drive at your what emotion you wanted to elicit from the beginning. 

It can either be a reiteration of the emotion at the beginning coupled with a call-to-action, it could be a hanging question that lingers in the reader’s mind, or it could be something directed at the reader themselves.

You have to end your post with intense emotion, or they won’t do anything about it. 

But here’s a list of other things you have to remember.

  • Use two to three relevant hashtags, it helps LinkedIn organize where your post should go.
  • Put in a CTA, you want to build engagement, this helps make it viral!
  • Don’t put in links in the post. You don’t have to, if you’ve built your profile to be a landing page, interested prospects will visit your profile and get stuck in a funnel in any case.

I created a guide on LinkedIn hashtags so you can use them properly. You can check it out here.

Step 7. Copyedit

Proofreading is checking for grammatical errors and facts that could be misplaced, but copyediting is something else.

In posts like this, you’re allowed to break the grammatical norms for writing – any English professor would get annoyed at the number of short sentences we were using- not to mention the line spaces.

However, writing posts of this sort is an art so the rules can be bent. 

What you need is a fresh set of eyes to look over what you’ve done so far. This is why we advise that you let someone else have a look at it before you post it. Also, don’t forget to use Grammarly.

Ask for feedback, and watch how they react to it. This allows you to check if you’ve done a good enough job at eliciting emotions.

Step 8. Making Sure It Goes Viral

Virality is your goal

Why?

It ensures that your posts get the traction that it needs to maximize their reach.

And, yes, virality on LinkedIn is achievable. Getting more than 100 million views on LinkedIn in one year depends on getting some of your posts viral.

Here’s what.

The average lifespan of a post on LinkedIn is 72 hours.

linkedin views, How I Got More Than 100 Million LinkedIn Views: A True Story

That means you only have a short window to make the most out of your post.

So, How Do You Go Viral on LinkedIn?

Engagement.

The first couple of hours that your post is up are the most critical because this is where LinkedIn decides if it is worth showing to other people.

You see it’s simple business really.

LinkedIn’s business is to keep people on their platform longer so that they can be fed more ads.

If your post is gaining traction and engagement, it is highly likely that it will keep other people on the platform longer.

In this way, they want to incentivize you by showing your post to more people.

There are a lot of ways to build engagement.

  • Repurposing posts that have already gone viral helps – we’ve included templates in Step 10. In this case, you already have a blueprint for proven success since the post was previously viral.
  • Get proper CTAs in place, they might sound like a worn out tip but they really help.
  • Add gateways for giveaways. Make people comment on your post before you give something away.

These four tips should help dramatically increase your engagement rates.

Step 9. (Optional) Use a LinkedIn Pod

A LinkedIn post is basically a group where you can post a link to your content.

These people will then engage with the content and get you the initial round of traction that you need to go viral.

A good tool to use is lempod. You get access to like-minded individuals who actually care about the posts that you are putting out.

Step 10. (Bonus) Viral Template Posts You Can Follow

I’m including the link to the four viral posts that we teach at the influencer program here.

It’s free of charge and we’re hosting it on the website.

You can check it out here.

Why are we doing this?

Because we want you to succeed, and we want to show you that going viral can be done.

Look.

If I can get over one hundred million LinkedIn views in a year, you can do it, too.

Takeaways

There are a lot of ways to write posts and gain or increase views, but this formula has got us so much engagement that it’s a shame not to share it with other people.

Most of the time, people try to reinvent the wheel with their posts, but sometimes you don’t have to.

Sometimes all you need is a better driver. 

Growth hack with your LinkedIn posts today if you want those views.

What’s stopping you from writing your own growth hacking story.

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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14 comments

  • Avatar for Houston

    This is the most simple and straight-to-the-point guide in writing I have ever read.
    Thanks for sharing your brilliance Houston!

  • Avatar for Houston

    Some great insights here Houston, thank you, great work. Noticed one typo, James Alutcher > James Altucher.

  • Avatar for Houston

    Some great insights here BAMF, thank you, great work. Noticed one typo, James Alutcher > James Altucher.

  • Avatar for Houston

    I wanted more.
    The truth: This is all I needed.
    To write.
    To make it happen.
    Thank you BAMF!

  • Avatar for Houston

    I could write before I read this blog.
    I was wrong!
    I have still lots to learn.
    Like writing in short sentences for mobile.
    Reading his blog has made me a better writer.

  • Avatar for Houston

    Can I do this?
    Takes alot of skill
    Lots to digest
    Good thing I’m hungry
    Most writers fail
    It will take time
    Got to master the rules, succeed.

  • Avatar for Houston

    I could write before I read this blog.
    I was wrong!
    I have still lots to learn.
    Like writing in short sentences for mobile.
    Reading his blog has made me a better writer.

  • Avatar for Houston

    This is the most simple and straight-to-the-point guide in writing I have ever read.
    Thanks for sharing your brilliance Houston!

  • Avatar for Houston

    Can I do this?
    Takes alot of skill
    Lots to digest
    Good thing I’m hungry
    Most writers fail
    It will take time
    Got to master the rules, succeed.

  • Avatar for Houston
    Turgut Can

    Love reading your feedbacks and insights, thank you 🙂

  • Avatar for Houston
    Turgut Can

    Love reading your feedbacks and insights, thank you 🙂

  • Avatar for Houston

    Some great insights here BAMF, thank you, great work. Noticed one typo, James Alutcher > James Altucher.

  • Avatar for Houston

    Some great insights here BAMF, thank you, great work. Noticed one typo, James Alutcher > James Altucher.

  • Avatar for Houston

    I wanted more.
    The truth: This is all I needed.
    To write.
    To make it happen.
    Thank you Houston!

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