The Ultimate LinkedIn Content Plan

As with everything in business and in life for that matter in order for you to be successful you need a plan in place. Once that plan is in place you need to stick to it to ensure consistency and that you successfully achieve the goals you are looking to attain through that plan.

Your LinkedIn Content is no different. So if you’re sporadically sharing content, writing posts when you get a chance, feel as if you have no structure and you’re spinning your wheels. Well, today is your lucky day because here’s an ultimate LinkedIn content plan you can stick to that will help you get maximum cut through from your LinkedIn marketing efforts without overwhelming yourself with too much content that you need to find, develop or share.

Step 1: Create a Schedule

First things first you need to create a schedule of when and what content you will share. Unless you have a lot of followers on your company page, we wouldn’t worry about sharing content through that unless you have over 500 followers.

For now stick to your personal profile for sharing purposes. For a personal profile we suggest once a week and we post at 10:30AM every Thursday with a new piece of content.

With LinkedIn – less is more. It’s not like a Twitter, Instagram or SnapChat where you are creating a running commentary of your life. Make your content richer and more impactful. We even suggest to people starting off that posting twice a month is enough because you don’t want to fall into the trap of creating too much content which takes you away from the most important part of your business – sales and marketing.

Step 2: Decide on the content

Next step is to decide on the content you want to share, for us our standard content we share is either a LinkedIn article we have written or our Ask linkfluencer® Show and we will alternate between these each week. For you it might be 2 LinkedIn pulse articles and 1 or two other pieces of unique content you create from another source like a YouTube video.

Whatever that content might be, just make sure it’s high quality and you spend time ensuring its a high value piece of content. Remember this is a reflection of your personal and company brand.

Step 3: Create the content

When creating content we like to use a batch process, where we will book out a Saturday and write the articles we need for the month. Generally it will take 1 – 2 hours to write a quality article. Then with our Ask linkfluencer® Show we will schedule 4 in a week so 1 month is out of the way within a few hours.

So all up we spend about 4 – 6 hours creating content per month that we schedule to complete before or after business hours so it does not cut into times where we are out doing sales and marketing. Be strategic with your content creation to ensure your time efficiency is maximised.

Step 4: Schedule the content

Once you have the content created it’s time to get it scheduled up and posted at the right times. For your LinkedIn status updates you can schedule them up at the start of the month through a scheduling tool such as the Buffer App. This will make it easy as you can do it all at once then forget about it for the month as it will schedule the content up at the times you set.

For our LinkedIn articles we have our assistant format and post them up at the scheduled time each fortnight. Our LinkedIn content schedule is fairly simple, here is an example of what one could look like based on ours:

• Week 1 – Thursday 10:30AM: Ask linkfluencer® Show Episode #1
• Week 2 – Thursday 10:30AM: LinkedIn Article (The State of Advertising on LinkedIn)
• Week 3 – Thursday 10:30AM: Ask linkfluencer® Show Episode #2
• Week 4 – Thursday 10:30AM: LinkedIn Article (5 Steps To Leveraging LinkedIn For Major Media Exposure)

Step 5: Be consistent and stick to your plan

Once you have your schedule and you have your content you need to be consistent and stick to it. There’s no point setting this up if you aren’t going to be disciplined to keep going with it. It takes patience to start getting traction with your content so just keep putting it out there as per your plan and it will reap rewards.

And as we touched on earlier, don’t go overboard on your content and get stuck into the content trap feeling like you need to post every day. Quality over quantity is much more effective on LinkedIn.

On a final note, you also need to make sure you have an outcome from this content, do you want to be generating 5 leads a month, 50 opt ins to your database per week? Ask yourself these questions, then start to measure the success of these campaigns.

Developing great content that gets engagement and turns followers into raving fans takes skills that are not created overnight. Our founders content gets hundreds of thousands of views, comments and likes each and every month.

This then results in hundreds of opportunities whether that’s leads, partnerships and speaking engagements that come from that content. Hope you have enjoyed this piece and now have a better game plan in place for your content marketing through LinkedIn.