After Publishing 30 Articles On LinkedIn In 30 Days, Here’s What I Learned

On January 1st (cliché I know), I decided to publish an article on LinkedIn each day for a year.

After writing and publishing 30 articles in 30 days and I wanted to share the three biggest lessons I’ve learned.

I’ll warn you these lessons are less about LinkedIn and more about planning and execution in general.

Lesson 1: Be careful who you take advice from

I decided to post on LinkedIn because of a comment from someone who is NOT a social media expert. This was dumb…and why I took their advice, I don’t know.

They had purportedly done research and found that LinkedIn was making a concerted effort to promote people who write articles. Big promises were made (I was basically going to bigger than the Kardashians if I published articles regularly), but they weren’t accurate.

About a week into the process, I looked into what I’d been told and couldn’t find anything to support the idea that regularly publishing articles on LinkedIn was a good approach. In fact, I found the opposite…everywhere. Everything I read basically said NOT to write articles.

Lesson learned. Don’t take advice from someone because they’re an expert; take advice from someone who is an expert on the subject matter you’re asking about.

Lesson 2: Start with the end in mind and plan accordingly

Several people have asked me why I decided to publish an article a day on LinkedIn.

The reality is, I just wanted to force myself to publish something each day, and this seemed like a good way to do it since I like to write. It was NOT!

If I were running my own business and using these articles to get clients, I could perhaps justify the time it takes to write them each day as a worthwhile lead generation and conversion tool and a task I could do during working hours.

I’m not running my own business, and I’m not looking for clients, so these are being written in the evening and weekends and take ninety minutes to two hours to write, research, revise and publish.

This was NOT the way to achieve my goal. Partly because my goal wasn’t well defined.

Publishing daily is an activity, not a goal.

I mixed up what I was doing with other activities in my life, like working out. About a year ago, I made the commitment to go to Orange Theory Fitness (a group workout facility) five times a week. I knew that by doing this activity I’d get in better shape and be healthier overall.

In this case, I had no general goal and even if I did, I’m not sure the activity of publishing an article each day is the right way to accomplish any goal.

Which brings me to my third lesson…

Lesson 3: Don’t be afraid to change your ‘how.’

It’s vitally important not to get to attached to HOW you’re going to accomplish a goal, but instead, stay hyper-focused on WHAT you’re going to accomplish.

Several years ago, I was hired to run the marketing for a social media ad agency that wanted to create an info-marketing arm. The idea was that I was going to take the lessons that they learned from running social media ads for hundreds of people and distill this down into courses and monthly coaching.

This way, we could reach more people who couldn’t necessarily afford a full-blown agency, plus it was way more scalable.

We had identified financial planners as the ideal target market because of the agency's success with using social media ads to get them more appointments.

Several months in, we’d had moderate success and were prepared for a long but successful journey. About that time, the owner of the company shared a little strategy with me that she used for her clients to get them 10,000 Facebook fans in just three days. And it was legit. It wasn’t a black-hat technique or anything, and it followed all of Facebook’s rules.

Less than nine months later, the new division hit seven figures in revenue, all driven by this little strategy about getting 10,000 fans.

I knew that this was a much faster and easier way to the REAL goal, which was to build a multi-million dollar info-marketing company. Less than two years later, this company made the Inc 500 list.

And it had nothing to do with financial planners…the companies original focus.

By being flexible on the HOW and focused on the WHAT, we permitted ourselves to change direction without feeling like quitters. Because we weren’t.

Quitting an activity that won’t get you to your goal at all, or as quickly as another, is just a good practice.

And sometimes, we fall in love with an idea of how we want to do something at the expense of falling in love with simply accomplishing it.

Those are my three biggest takeaways that I hope are helpful to you.

Take advice from subject matter experts only. Have clear goals and work backward from there. And don’t be afraid to change HOW you accomplish something.

There are more lessons, and I’ll probably use them as amusing anecdotes in the future but NOT in daily LinkedIn articles.

Those stop now.