In this episode, we’re talking about how to use LinkedIn for personal branding. LinkedIn is one of the most well-known platforms for professional networking. But the way that most people use LinkedIn for personal branding, it actually does more harm than good. So, in this episode, you’re going to learn how to use LinkedIn in a way that will strengthen your professional reputation. It’ll nurture relationships, and it will support your overall personal brand strategy. Let’s dive right in.
Why Consistent Branding Matters
The first thing to understand about LinkedIn is that your branding there should be consistent with your entire online presence. Your messaging should match your website, social media, and YouTube. So, when somebody goes to your LinkedIn profile, they should see the same story there that they see everywhere else. This means the solution you provide, the audience that you serve, and the problems that you solve should be clear and consistent. Clarity helps people understand exactly how you can help them, and LinkedIn is no exception.
How Your LinkedIn Profile Should Work
Unlike other social platforms, on LinkedIn, your profile is the most important part. The way you position yourself on LinkedIn will go a long way to impact your personal branding. Many people treat their LinkedIn profile like a resume, but that’s a terrible approach. Most people set it up that way, but that’s why they don’t get any results from it. Your profile should function more like a landing page. When someone lands on your profile, they should quickly understand who you are, who you help, what problem you solve, and what solution you provide. It should clearly communicate the value that you bring.
Your title and description are especially important because they are often the first things that people read. Just like any good landing page, there should be a clear path for someone to reach out to you if they want to learn more. It’s also important to understand the current reality of LinkedIn.
The Current Reality of LinkedIn
LinkedIn used to be a stronger marketing platform for content discovery, but in recent years, content went from low searchability and a little bit of indexing down to zero. Of all the social media platforms, LinkedIn was the first to create a type of evergreen content that was indexed and searchable. They called it articles. What happened? I had high hopes for articles. They weren’t the best, but instead of working to improve them, LinkedIn scrapped articles. So currently, there’s no way to post content to any social platform and have it be searchable by topic. At the same time, LinkedIn has become worse in another way. Today, LinkedIn has been flooded with spam. It’s flooded with cold outreach messages and automated marketing, and as you can imagine, this has turned a lot of people off.
Where LinkedIn was once a great discovery platform, today it’s only a professional relationship platform. In other words, it’s better for nurturing connections than marketing to a new audience. Look at LinkedIn as a professional reputation platform. If someone hears about you somewhere else, they’ll often look you up on LinkedIn. They want to see how you present yourself. They want to see your experience. They want to understand what you do.
I do this regularly myself. If someone is referred to me or if I discover someone through online research, I’ll often pull them up on LinkedIn to see their profile. I want to see how they position themselves and what kind of expertise they can demonstrate. That’s why having a strong profile is so important. Your profile becomes a part of your professional credibility online.
Next Steps for Engagement Strategy
Once your profile is strong, the next step is to experiment with how you want to interact on LinkedIn. For me, I’ve actually personally become anti–social media, so I stopped posting and reading social media content. That doesn’t have to be you. If you enjoy LinkedIn, you have a few options. You can post content to regularly nurture your audience, or you can engage in conversations and comment on other people’s posts. The key is to find an approach that you enjoy and that helps you nurture relationships. LinkedIn works best when it feels like a professional community, not just a marketing channel.
A Better Approach to Outreach
Outreach on LinkedIn has been ruined. It used to be amazing, and now it’s full of spam. Going back over a decade ago, LinkedIn was my primary lead generation tool. If you do decide to reach out to people on LinkedIn, I’m going to recommend a very different approach than anything that you’ve ever seen. It’s what I did that worked the best, and it was drastically different than what everyone was doing back then, and it will be even more drastically different than what everyone is doing today.
Most cold outreach messages look something like this: someone sends a message explaining what they do and immediately pitching a product or a service. Even the softer versions of this approach still feel promotional. They might say something like, “I thought you might find this helpful,” but the intention still feels like marketing.
Here’s a new approach that’s worked well for me in the past and is much simpler. Instead of pitching anything, simply offer a sincere compliment. If you find someone on LinkedIn who represents a dream client or someone that you’d like to connect with, you might simply reach out and acknowledge something you genuinely appreciate about their work. That’s it—no promotion, no pitch, no agenda.
What often happens is pretty impressive. They’ll look at your profile to see who you are, and sometimes they’ll also visit your website. They’ll check out your content. They’ll visit your YouTube channel. Then they reach out to you. It often leads into a very real conversation. Back when I was doing this, I had a 60% reply rate—a 60% reply rate to every compliment I posted on LinkedIn.
What to Watch Next
Genuine human connection is still far more powerful than any automated outreach.
Now, if you want to position yourself so that people consistently discover your expertise when they’re searching for answers in your field—not just on LinkedIn, but across the internet—there’s a strategy that I call category dominance. Category dominance means becoming the person people find across platforms like YouTube, Google, and AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. When someone searches for answers in your niche, they keep finding you. That’s when your personal brand begins to generate real opportunities, real influence, and real revenue.
If you want to see how that strategy works, go watch the episode. It’s called Achieve Category Dominance. I’ll walk you through the process step by step. I’ll see you there.
