Alejandro I. Sanoja is the founder of Latinpresarios, a leading personal branding agency and has been named ‘1 of the 6 Personal Branding Experts to Follow’ by The American Reporter. Below he shares his top tips on how solopreneurs can create a LinkedIn content strategy that generates leads and revenue growth.
Today’s Need For a LinkedIn Content Strategy
The recent shift to remote work has accelerated the rise of the gig economy. Every day, more professionals are testing the waters of freelancing. If you’ve made the shift from employee to freelancer, you know that at some point it can feel like a trap.
At first, it’s likely you’ll get clients from previous employers or past colleagues. If you do good work, referrals will start to trickle in. But at some point, these kinds of opportunities will not show up as often as you’d like them to.
A common challenge freelancers face is that there is no consistency in lead generation and sales. There might even be some periods of low to no cash flow. The opposite challenge can sometimes be true as well.
Too many projects come up at the same time and you won’t have enough time to service these. You might feel pressured to say yes because you don’t know when the well will run dry.
All of these scenarios lead you to dread what you once loved. You might even think that going back to get a normal job is better than what you are currently going through.
At this point a big change needs to happen- you must go from freelancer to solopreneur.
Solopreneurs build systems, processes, and automation, so they can scale. This might mean working with other freelancers, leveraging technology, or creating repeatable processes.
Below are the best ways on how to create a LinkedIn content strategy that can help you create consistent revenue growth.
Professionalize Your LinkedIn Profile
Most people use their LinkedIn profile as a resume. And it can certainly serve that purpose.
But you should start treating it as a landing page. A place where you can tell a story about who you help, how you help them and lead people to learn more about what you do and how they can get in touch with you.
LinkedIn has been adding features to your profile, such as the ‘Featured’ section, where you can add links to valuable resources or articles on your website.
The musts of your LinkedIn profile are:
- Photo
- Headline
- Banner
These are the three elements that people will notice when they visit your profile. If these are not attention-grabbing, or professional, you will not gain the chance to gain the trust of your visitors.
Photo: Make sure it is professional. No cropped photos of you at an event or with a noisy background. If you cannot afford a professional photography session, you should at least take a “Portrait” style photo using your phone. Do so in a professional background—it could just be a white wall.
To enhance your image and maintain a polished look, you can create a profile picture with Adobe Express, which allows you to refine lighting, adjust composition, and add subtle enhancements for a more professional appearance.
Headline: This follows you everywhere, it is prime promotional real estate. It’s like a billboard on the most traveled road in your city.
Are you sure you want to use this billboard to list your current position? Here are some examples:
- Joe the Founder of Agency X
- Helping solopreneurs generate consistent revenue by leveraging LinkedIn
Which one do you think is better?
Keep in mind that people can find out about your position and where you work by scrolling down. Your headline should be the place where you share your personal branding statement.
You must quickly let people know how it is that you can help them.
Banner: Your banner should be an extension of your headline. It should add to the promise you are making with your personal branding statement. It could be a call to action to a specific resource so that people can learn more about the work you do and the results you can help them get.
You can visit my profile if you want to see a real-life example of all these elements put together.
Leverage LinkedIn Carousel Posts
There is no point in having the best LinkedIn profile in the world if no one is visiting it.
A great way to lead people to your profile is to share valuable information through content. Educate your target audience on how they can take some steps towards solving the typical problems you help them solve.
Pro-tip: Make sure to leverage carousel posts.
The truth is that most people are lurkers on LinkedIn. They will see your posts but they won’t engage with them.
Even if they actually like it or find it valuable, only a small percentage of people will actually click the “like” button or leave a comment. Or maybe they find it valuable, but they secretly hate you or envy you, and they don’t want to support you.
When this happens, the algorithm will rate your content as not as valuable because not a lot of people are engaging with it.
A way to get around this is to share carousel posts. Because people at least have to click to get through all the slides.
Here is a guide we have created, with an easy-to-use template, on how you can leverage carousel posts on LinkedIn.
Lead People from LinkedIn to Your Website
I recently had a conversation with Michelle Griffin, a personal branding strategist who teaches women entrepreneurs how to stand out online and win clients by building their personal brands, about LinkedIn, and I will never forget something she said.
Michelle said that we must “think of LinkedIn as if it was a huge networking event”.
In this event, we get to know people, we attend some sessions and learn, we get to see some keynote speakers and get inspired or educated, but we are not there to sell.
It would be rude if you right away try to sell something to someone you just met. People don’t go to networking events to buy products or services. This is why you should not sell on LinkedIn.
That’s what your website is for.
For this reason, your end goal is to get people to know you and like you on LinkedIn and build enough trust to accept an invitation to your website.
And it is on your website where you will go deeper into your services, your case studies, your pricing, and at some point schedule meetings to sell your services.
If you do everything right, if you build enough trust, you should only be scheduling meetings with people who are a great fit for you and are ready to buy.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can leverage your personal brand to go from freelancer to solopreneur by generating consistent and predictable revenue growth, feel free to visit our website or follow Alejandro on LinkedIn.
For more on LinkedIn content strategy and marketing advice, click here.
