Hello again, Networkers! We’re halfway through the last quarter of the year. How are you doing on your LinkedIn goals? (Did you set goals for 2024?) My goal was to make it to 10,000 followers, and I won’t make it because was really inconsistent on LinkedIn from August through October. I’ll think I’ll get to 8,000 by the end of November, though, and now I’m determined to make it to 10,000 by the end of January.

Of course, follower numbers don’t tell the whole story of LinkedIn, not by a long shot. I drive significant revenue (close to $400k annual recurring revenue in 2024) through my LinkedIn, regardless of my follower count.

Someone else with influence far beyond his follower count is this week’s interviewee, John Cook. I met John around a year ago and have watched him grow from essentially zero presence on LinkedIn to nearly 6,300 followers—which took me almost 20 years to do! He’s a testament to how consistency really does move the needle on LinkedIn. Read on for his humble wisdom about how to build your LinkedIn from the ground up.

Welcome, John. Please tell us about yourself.

I have two. I have a day job as a senior imaging technical writer for Optum on contract, and I also have a side business that I'm trying to build.  I'm looking at the three pillars: storytelling, some sort of content/copywriting/ghostwriting, and then coaching around ADHD, especially for people who have discovered that they have ADHD as adults.

What’s your industry?

Broad marketing. Because I know straight-up marketing people, and they are way more skilled than I am. I'm way down in the kiddie pool as far as marketing is concerned. Yet, that is where I am at the moment.

What does LinkedIn do for you?

To talk about that, I have to talk about my story. I was a technical writer for 22 years in radiology, cardiology, and imaging systems. That was something I didn't go to school for; I just had a knack for it. But I was caught up in the tech layoffs in the summer of 2023, and I found myself plopped back into LinkedIn.

I joined LinkedIn in 2005. But at that time, LinkedIn was where you parked your resume with the expectation that if you ever needed it, a headhunter would find your resume and contact you.

When I landed back on LinkedIn in 2023, the landscape was quite different. Everybody had a cadence or a kind of writing to each other that I didn't understand. I found [LinkedIn top voice] Lara Acosta, did a favor for her, and she sent me a very excited DM and a connection request. That changed my LinkedIn life and brought me into this much larger world.  I was able to start to make my own way from there. 

LinkedIn right now is my non-day job world. I've met and am friends with people from across the globe. It's something incredibly diverse. It's opened up my horizons and my opportunities. I feel more alive now than I ever have.

What are your main goals for using LinkedIn?

I told my wife that when I first landed back on the platform a summer ago, my goals were to either figure LinkedIn out or land another job for more money. I did both by the end of the year. 

For this year, I told her my goals were to make my first internet dollar and land my first ghostwriting client. I did those in July.

My goal for next year is to equal my day job income with the side business, and then we'll decide where to go from there. What it does is it gives me options. I was ready to ride out the rest of my career, updating the same suite of documents over and over. But LinkedIn is the best thing that ever happened to me. There's a lot of opportunity here, and I appreciate having a second chance to figure out who I am, what I want to do, and who I want to help.

John’s content strategy

Who’s your target audience on LinkedIn?

It's like holding up a mirror to myself. It's somebody in middle age, a little later in life, who has an opportunity to strike out in a different field than they were for their day job. 

Maybe they're retired. They want to write a book. I can talk about that. Maybe they're trying to figure out LinkedIn. I can talk about that. Right now, storytelling is a very, very sure thing. That is something I'm good at and something that I enjoy. Not everybody knows how to do it. That's one of the things I can talk about as well.

How do you differentiate your content from others on LinkedIn?

I don't worry about it. I try to find my own authentic voice, and I feel like if I do that, it will resonate with somebody.

What makes your content successful with your audience?

One, I hit the fundamentals, and then I brought my own unique view to it. On the fiction side of the house, you have to know the rules before you can break them. It's kind of the same thing here. I looked back recently at my very first LinkedIn post after I landed back on the platform, and it was embarrassing. If there were 10 things you have to do with every post, I'd done 9 of them wrong. It was just like a who's who of how not to write.

I've come a long way. Now I know the 6 or 7 elements to a post, a hook, a re-hook, all that stuff. Then, I bring my own personal voice or aesthetic to it. That has been very effective for me. It's just figuring out what the rules for writing LinkedIn posts are and then applying your own genius, your own brilliance, and your own creativity from there.

What are the processes you use to create content? 

• Schedule in advance ✅

• Batch create content ❌

• Optimize for SEO/keywords ❌

• Follow an editorial calendar ✅

• Have specific content pillars/themes ✅

• Repurpose content to/from LinkedIn or reuse on LinkedIn ✅

• Use AI in any part of the content writing process ✅

• Have team/human support for any part of your LI process ❌

• Keep a list of potential topics somewhere (Notes, Notion, etc.) ✅

• Design or source visuals including infographics and carousels and video ✅

What types of content do you post to LinkedIn?

• Text only ❌

• Polls ❌

• Audio ✅

• Video ✅

• Carousels ✅

• Photos of yourself (selfies) ✅

• Photos of other people or things ❌

• AI generated images ❌

• Infographics (single image) ✅

• Links to outside content ❌

• Reposts of others’ content (repost only) ✅

• Reposts of others’ content (with your thoughts) ✅

• LinkedIn Live events ✅

• LinkedIn newsletters ❌

How much time does it take?

How much time do you spend each weekday on LinkedIn on comments or Direct Messages (DMs), outside of content creation?

2 to 3 hours a day.

Are you active on LinkedIn on the weekends, either posting or commenting or both?

I schedule on the weekends. I might make a lot of replies to comments on Saturday. But I try not to do anything on the platform on Sunday because that's one of the ways I can be effective during the rest of the week.

How do you use DMs (direct messages) in the service of your goals?

It's probably 75% normal chatter. Then 25% cold outbound. I'd like to improve that, but that's not where I'm at the moment.

John’s biggest growth levers

What has contributed most to your growth?

I don't want to say nepotism, but I have become friends with a lot of big name creators, and that has helped me for sure. But it's the storytelling. My story resonates with a lot of people.

A lot of people found themselves pushed out into the open waters, out of work. They're like, how do I figure LinkedIn out? What do I do next? Is there room in my life for a pivot at this stage of my career? And so that's a lot of grist for the mill.

How do you track what’s working and know what to change?

I have a Notion table that I keep up with, but I found that Saywhat.ai also shows me analytics. And I have another tool, Kleo, a free extension from Jake Ward. Kleo is fantastic because it will show you everything: comments, likes, oldest, newest.

How John makes money

How do you generate revenue in your business?

Right now, I'm not generating a lot of revenue through LinkedIn. I'm getting revenue through people who sign up for a 60-minute call. So I'm doing a little coaching, and I have one ghostwriting client I'm servicing, but it's still in the very early days.

How do you quantify your success on LinkedIn?

When I first landed back on the platform in 2023, I reached out to Stan Miller, who specializes in helping people tell their stories in five minutes or 30 minutes, or 60 minutes in an interview. He did a webinar called Tell Me About You, where you figure out what your story is. If you're in an elevator and you have 30 seconds, you can tell your story. That was really instructive in the early going for me.

Because of that, I was able to interview very well and land a final interview for my current position. Stan had given me a question to ask when the moment was right—and it happened. It happened because I found Stan on LinkedIn.

There are people who know things we need to know, and this is where we find those people. That's how I got my [current] gig. Without LinkedIn, I don't know where I would be. I would probably be on unemployment.

John’s top tips

What challenges have you faced on LinkedIn? What’s made you almost—or actually—quit? What got you back on track?

Writing every day can be hard. There comes a time when I don't know what else to write about. I'm sick of doing this. It's taken me two hours a day to write a post. I'm getting 13 likes and one comment. Why am I doing this? You're doing it because it's a muscle, and you have to start at the beginning. You have to build the muscle. 

Vision is another thing, not knowing specifically what my vision was. I'm seeing all these people who appear to be doing very well, and I'm sort of not making a lot of money at the moment. That's difficult. But there are so many people who are so invested in helping us to get over the hump that whenever I feel like things aren't working, I close everything and do a little pattern interrupt. After a while, I try it again. I'll come back and I've got a new sense of energy, and we can build from there.

What advice would you give others who are looking to grow and, ideally monetize their LinkedIn platform?

My LinkedIn journey started with Lara Acosta, and she's got a thing she's doing right now called Literally Academy, and she's poured herself into that thing. Lara knows more about personal branding than anybody. For somebody like me who didn't know anything about marketing, didn't know anything about copywriting, it was a great place to start.

She gave us frameworks; that is what worked for me, and that's what I suggest. Keep looking around until you find the thing that scratches your itch. There is no end for people who have programs, courses, or cohorts. You just have to look around a little bit.

John’s best post

Stephanie’s note: I’ve asked each Networker to give me one “best post,” based on their own criteria.

Read this post on LinkedIn

Why John considers this his best post.

I think this is my best post thus far, a big production carousel featuring 12 creators from across the spectrum, with Jasmin Alíc leading things off, each sharing about how to improve your storytelling in their own voice.

This is the carousel where I learned the most about using Canva, in typical ADHD fashion, in the literal 11th hour before going live. I've done three of these, but this one's my favorite.

How to network with John

• Follow John Cook on LinkedIn

What’s new related to LinkedIn? Here’s what caught my eye this week.

• LinkedIn provides tips on how to best use their video feature. (Social Media Today)

• More on video: it provides 1.4x more engagement than text-only posts. (AdWeek)

• And video yields 3x more engagement. (Search Engine Journal)

• Keep your eye on these 5 signs your LinkedIn account has been hacked. (Forbes)

• The number of people adding preferred pronouns to LinkedIn is growing. (Business Insider)

I’ve just wrapped up three weeks of teaching digital marketing, and my students each wrote a series of LinkedIn posts. One of them, Ahmed Afzal, really stood out with a post about not being afraid to take photos (which I think I’m terrible at).

This post gave me more confidence in my photo-taking abilities, and I hope it does for you too.

Read this post on LinkedIn

I’m always on the lookout for something that changes the way I use LinkedIn. It could be an idea, a tool, a process, or something strategic.

Have a tip I should consider? Hit reply to this email and let me know!

That’s all for now—I look forward to seeing you again next week for another Networker interview.