Last month:
I reached a milestone on LinkedIn — 60K followers — and someone suggested I do an Ask Me Anything to mark it.
I did — and so many great folks left me questions about all sorts of things: about my creative process; about writing and copywriting and storytelling; about how I grew the VeryGoodCopy newsletter. Other things, too. Thank you all. I’m lucky to have you, and I’ll be steadily answering your questions as thoughtfully as possible.
The #1 most upvoted question came from Vivek Vanwari:
Thanks for asking, Vivek. :)
Here’s my answer:
Covid was coming.
It was February, 20twenty. I was going into the office every day. I worked at G2 dot com then. I worked on the second floor with the other marketers. We were all there, sitting next to each other, doing walk-bys, having meetings. There were coffee breaks, lunches, handshakes, hugs.
There was a game room with a ping pong table.
Me and Lishen played a lot.
Me and Yoni played, too.
The game room was next to Adam’s desk. He was the VP of Marketing. I talked to him every day, sometimes several times a day. We talked about many things, including work. He was remarkably incisive. I listened to Adam.
One day, he waved me over after a game:
“You know how you post links to your articles on LinkedIn—” he said.
“Yeh.”
“You should post the entire article instead,” he said, “not just the link.”
I nodded and thanked him for the tip. It made sense to me: if people are on LinkedIn, they wanna stay on LinkedIn, to be entertained or informed or inspired in their feed, not somewhere else. They don’t want to be taken elsewhere. It’s annoying.
So, I did it.
I did it the next day and my engagement soared: the post went from my typical 7 or 8 likes and no comments to over 130 likes and dozens of comments — an awesome, almost unbelievable lift.
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So, I did it again: same result.
And again: same result.
Again: same thing.
“Thank you, Adam,” I said.
“Hey—” he said, “it’s your writing.”
Covid came.
Everybody went home, and stayed home. I got my commute back, a couple hours back. I used these hours to repurpose my articles, to make them fit the LinkedIn character count (which was 1300 at the time). And I kept posting. And people kept engaging — and following — because the new approach made it easier to consume my writing.
This is how I acquired my first few thousand followers (beyond the connections I already had):
1/ I began posting entire articles instead of just the links.
2/ I rewrote articles to fit LinkedIn’s character limit.
3/ I committed to being consistent.
I wish it were more complicated, more impressive.
But it’s just this simple thing I did.
I know it will work for you, too.
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