Stop Following LinkedIn Creator Advice: What Actually Works for Real Businesses

Ghostwriters, brand consultants, LinkedIn influencers – their full-time job is being on the platform. Taking their advice is like getting fitness tips from someone who trains three hours a day when you've got 30 minutes between meetings.

I built Contentin specifically to solve this problem. Now with nearly 5,000 users and over 250,000 posts published through the platform, I'm not a LinkedIn creator – I run a SaaS company. And the data shows something crystal clear: what works for creators absolutely does not work for people with an actual business to run.

Today, I'm ranking the most common LinkedIn strategies across four tiers: Trash, Creator Only, Solid, and Gold. Some of these rankings will upset people. Let's get into it.

The Four-Tier Framework

Before we dive in, here's how this ranking system works:

• Trash: Waste of time for everyone, no matter your goals
• Creator Only: Works if LinkedIn is your business, not feasible if you have an actual job
• Solid: Useful for founders, consultants, agency owners – basically everybody
• Gold: What actually moves the needle and where you need to spend your time

I've tried all of these strategies. Some of them embarrassingly long. Here's what the data actually shows.

Trash Tier: Just Stop Doing These

Engagement Pods

I'm genuinely ashamed I ever used these. For anyone unfamiliar, engagement pods are groups of people agreeing to like and comment on each other's posts to trick the algorithm.

Yes, it used to work – if you're looking at the wrong metrics (impressions). Here's what actually happens:

• You post and drop the link in a group chat
• Everyone leaves fake engagement from irrelevant people
• You get a small bump, then plateau at slightly higher than your organic reach
• The biggest problem: It dilutes your actual analytics, making it harder to figure out what works

You're getting likes from 15 people with zero interest in what you sell. If your best LinkedIn strategy requires a group chat with 15 strangers, that's not a strategy.

The algorithm has gotten significantly better at detecting this behavior. But even if it hadn't, you're optimizing for engagement from people who will never become customers.

Hashtag Stuffing

I can't believe we're still talking about this in 2024, but I get questions about hashtags constantly.

This worked in 2020. It doesn't anymore. The algorithm has evolved. Nobody follows hashtags anymore – it's an obsolete feature. If anyone is still telling you to use "three to five targeted hashtags," they're recycling advice from years ago.

Just move on.

Creator Only Tier: Works for Them, Not for You

This tier is where it gets interesting. These aren't bad strategies – they're strategies designed for or by people whose business is LinkedIn. They've been sold to everyone as universal advice, but they're not feasible for people with actual jobs.

Daily Posting

Every LinkedIn creator tells you to post every day. Some post twice daily. For them, it makes perfect sense:

• Posting is their product
• More posts = more visibility = more course sales or ghostwriting clients
• Their entire revenue model runs on platform visibility

But our data shows something different: Three to four quality posts per week with solid structure beats daily posting with mediocre hooks and content every single time – for people with a real business and real product.

If you're a founder, you don't have two hours a day for LinkedIn. You shouldn't. Post less, but post better.

Comment Marathons

The creator playbook says: spend 30 minutes before and after every post engaging with other people's content. That's an hour minimum daily. Some push for two hours and 50+ comments.

If LinkedIn is your job? Fine, that works. But if you have a product to ship, clients to serve, and a team to manage, this isn't feasible. It's also not necessary.

Spending two hours on LinkedIn comments isn't a strategy – it's procrastination that feels productive.

The alternative? 15 minutes of highly focused, laser-targeted comments on posts from people who are actually in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Not random viral content. Not other creators. People who could actually buy from you.

Here's a fun experiment: Go to the biggest LinkedIn creator you know and check the comment section on their next viral post. Count how many comments come from people trying to sell LinkedIn stuff versus people who could actually buy from them. The ratio will amaze you.

Build in Public as a Content Strategy

This one will generate some angry comments, but hear me out.

Building in public – sharing founder journeys, revenue updates, feature launches, hiring struggles, the emotional roller coaster – works brilliantly if you're a creator building an audience of other founders.

For most businesses, your customers don't care about your journey. They care about their own problems.

Across our data of 250,000+ posts, build-in-public content doesn't fail more often. It actually succeeds at roughly the same rate as other content types. But when it succeeds, it succeeds smaller and with the wrong people.

I do build-in-public content myself because my audience is founders. But even then, my best-performing posts are never "here's my MRR update." They're posts where the build-in-public story connects to a problem my audience has.

There's a difference between founder navel-gazing and useful storytelling.

The test is simple: Would your ideal customer find this useful, or just other founders?

Solid Tier: What Actually Works

Now we're getting to strategies that drive real results. These work for founders, consultants, and agency owners who need business outcomes, not vanity metrics.

Personal Stories with Business Takeaways

If you want to nail one format, master this one. In terms of the 80/20 rule, this is it.

Add a professional or AI-generated picture of yourself. It works. Last week, a founder went from 10 likes to 81,000 impressions by changing how he talks about his expertise. That's with just 1,500 followers.

Same expertise. Same audience. The only thing that changed was wrapping his knowledge in a personal story.

But here's the key: The story must connect to something your buyer cares about. Not your morning routine. Not your hot take on remote work. The specific problem your buyer has.

Examples that work:

• A coach sharing a client transformation story
• A SaaS founder sharing a real problem they solved
• An agency owner sharing what went wrong on a project and the lessons learned

This is what builds trust. This makes someone think, "This person gets it. I should talk to them."

Consistent Posting Schedule

Not daily, but reliable.

Consistent posters grow 6x faster in our data. But consistent doesn't mean daily. It means showing up on a schedule your audience can rely on.

Three times a week, every week, beats five posts this week and zero posts next week.

Consistency isn't a willpower problem – it's a systems problem. Solve the system and the willpower part goes away.

Gold Tier: What Nobody Talks About (Because It's Not Sexy)

This is where real business results come from. It's boring. It's not carousel-worthy. But it's what separates people who get likes from people who close deals.

Writing About Your Customer's Actual Problems

The biggest shift I see when someone starts getting real results from LinkedIn: they stop writing about their industry and start writing about their customer's problems.

Remember what I said about build-in-public content succeeding smaller? Here are the actual numbers from our platform:

Same people. Same profiles. Just writing about different things.

And critically, the 4,500-impression posts are reaching potential buyers – people dealing with those pain points. The 1,900-impression posts are reaching other founders.

Consider this example:

• A recruiter writing about recruiting trends = other recruiters engaging
• A recruiter writing about why the best candidates keep ghosting founders = founders engaging

Same person. Same expertise. Different audience.

5,000 right followers beats 50,000 wrong ones. Your LinkedIn isn't a stage – it's a trust-building machine for the 500 people who could actually buy from you.

Content + Direct Outreach Combo

This is the gold tier nobody talks about because it's not sexy enough for a LinkedIn carousel.

Neither content nor outreach work well alone. Content warms people up. Outreach closes them. The combo is everything.

Here's how it works:

1. Post content that addresses your ICP's specific problems
2. When the right people engage (comment, view your profile), reach out directly
3. Not with a pitch, but with a conversation: "Hey, saw you commented on my post about X. Are you dealing with that right now?"

That's it. Sound like a human. Start a conversation.

This isn't about spamming people with automation. It's about targeted outreach to the right people at the right time.

The founders and consultants getting actual deals from LinkedIn are doing exactly this. Creators will never teach it because their business model doesn't need outreach. Yours does.

This is why we built Contentin the way we did – not for creators with three hours a day for LinkedIn, but for founders and consultants with 30 minutes, if that. Structure your thinking, stay consistent, get back to your actual business.

LinkedIn Success vs. Business Success: Two Different Games

Here's the truth: LinkedIn success and business success are different games.

I know creators with 100,000 followers who can't sell anything that isn't a $20 LinkedIn course. I know founders with 2,000 followers who close six-figure deals on the platform every quarter.

The difference isn't talent. It's not even content quality. It's knowing who you're writing for and what game you're actually playing.

If your business isn't LinkedIn, stop playing the LinkedIn creator game.

Your Next Step: The Profile Audit

Here's what I want you to do right now:

1. Look at the comments on your last 5 posts
2. Check the last 10 people who visited your profile
3. Count how many could actually become your customer

If the answer is close to zero, you're writing for the wrong audience. Fix that first.

Everything else is secondary.

Get the Free Resources

We have a bunch of free resources on our website to help you implement this strategy:

• Hook writing guides
• Post templates from top creators
• Content calendar creator
• LinkedIn strategy creator

All completely free. Grab them here.

And if you want to make the switch to a customer-focused LinkedIn strategy without spending three hours a day on it, Contentin has a 14-day free trial. Built for people who have a business to run, not a personal brand to manage.