stuart_roger_miles / Pixabay
Cross-publishing your top content on LinkedIn is a fast, easy and efficient way to generate additional visibility online.
Content marketers know, feeding the content beast isn’t easy, especially if you’re a solo entrepreneur or a small team.
If you want to follow that old adage “work smarter not harder,” LinkedIn recently released some data you’ll want to pay heed to, which underscored the SEO value in publishing on LinkedIn for business.
“The major search engines crawl every post on LinkedIn. When someone searches from Google or Bing, your content on LinkedIn can appear in the results,” LinkedIn noted in a recent blog. “In general, LinkedIn content has high ranking potential. It’s easy to read and share natively published posts. That means more interaction with posts, which signals the search engine that the content is valuable.”
“LinkedIn is a long-standing domain with high domain authority. Let’s say you have a post on your relatively new site with little traffic or interaction, versus content published on LinkedIn that has earned shares and comments. The post on LinkedIn will be more visible in search, thanks to LinkedIn’s domain authority,” LinkedIn adds.
In my work teaching LinkedIn training courses, to my knowledge there is no SEO penalty or negative impact if you publish your content on both your website AND on LinkedIn. In fact, cross publishing your blogs on LinkedIn increases the value of the blood, sweat and tears you spend cranking out blogs as you build your professional platform, attract more clients and generate more sales leads with your content.
Here are three easy tips on how to get the best possible ROI out of publishing your posts on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Tip 1: Reverse Engineer Your Content on LinkedIn to Generate Sales Leads
The key to content marketing that performs well is that it brings value to your target audience. It’s the price you must pay in order to “purchase” a prospect’s time, attention and interest online.
As the world’s largest social network for professionals, LinkedIn is already a place where your ideal customers are hanging out and looking for resources, so the key is to hone in on a niche of potential customers on the platform and earn their trust.
One key way to get your LinkedIn posts noticed on the platform is to understand what your audience is looking for.
“Look at posts performing well for your topic and assess what made them successful,” LinkedIn suggests.
You can do this by using LinkedIn’s treasure trove of data, because the platform indexes every piece of content (status updates, posts, profiles, etc.) by keywords and phrases.
Try and reverse-engineer popular topics, trends or thoughts your ideal clients have when searching for content or help online, and plug those terms into LinkedIn Search.
You can filter what you find by “Posts,” enabling you to see what blog posts are already generating engagement on the platform. Look for headline ideas, styles and formats you can emulate.
LinkedIn Tip 2: Use your Content as Context for Conversations
When people like, comment and share your posts, make sure you ALWAYS engage with them and respond as quickly as possible.
Recommended for You
The more engagement your post gets, the more it is featured to larger audiences and indexed higher on LinkedIn search results.
Furthermore, the content you create gives you context for a 1-on-1, personalized message aimed at someone who you think would find the post helpful.
In fact, here’s a simple script you can use right now to promote your next LinkedIn post via 1-on-1 messages to your connections:
“Hi [INSERT FIRST NAME] – hope you are doing well!
I just published a new post here on LinkedIn I thought might be of interest to you.
It’s called, “[INSERT POST TITLE].”
LINK TO POST: [POST URL]
Hope you find the post helpful and excited to hear what you think of it!”
Using a non-spammy, helpful note like this works well on LinkedIn, provided the post you’re sending to your connections is something they would genuinely be interested in reading or learning more about.
LinkedIn Tip 3: Details like your Headline and Images Matter!
There are billions of content impressions on LinkedIn every single day. In order to “stop the scroll” of someone surfing the LinkedIn news feed, you need to ensure your have an eye-catching headline and image in place.
“Ditch the stock photos and go for something clever, stunning, or both,” LinkedIn suggests.
An eye-catching image and magnetic headline are what will pull readers into your posts on LinkedIn.
Content Marketing = Success
Every single day on LinkedIn, your ideal customers are finding and engaging with helpful, relevant and actionable content that helps them solve their biggest problems.
Once you tap into that ecosphere, you’ll immediately see a surge in the quantity and quality of prospects you attract on the platform.
In addition, cross-posting and sharing your best content on LinkedIn not only gets you in front of your ideal B2B-related audiences, it also provides a simple, easy and effective SEO boost to your content marketing efforts.