LinkedIn is made for showcasing your professional background experience, skills, and know-how. Beyond your LinkedIn profile, there are so many options to shine a spotlight on your career and what you have to offer others. One of the options the platform gives you is to write an article on LinkedIn.
If you’ve ever taken my 7 Day Self-Promotion Challenge, you know I help you build your self-promotion muscles enough to publish a LinkedIn article. Let’s talk about whether this option is a good one for you.
What is a LinkedIn article?
You're reading one! A LinkedIn article is like a blog post that you publish on LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is a professional networking site, ideally the topic of the article will relate to where you want to take your career next. It’s a way to showcase industry insights and trends, projects you’re working on, your interest in career relevant podcasts/other writers, and more. The article can be as short as a couple paragraphs (~300 words) or longer (1200 words). My suggestion is to keep your article to 500 - 750 words.
What should I write about in a LinkedIn article?
Your LinkedIn article needs to relate to a subject you’d like to build professional credibility in. To get started, ask yourself these questions before you before writing:
The key here is to write for the person you want to be, not the person you’ve been (unless you want more of the same, which is also valid).
What are the benefits of writing an article on LinkedIn?
There are many benefits to writing articles on LinkedIn. Here are six benefits that I want to call out:
1. The primary benefit: it builds your perceived credibility in a visible way.
Regardless if you feel uncomfortable with writing or not, when you publish a piece of writing, it nudges your audience into believing you are confident in what you have to offer - a new perspective, advice, data, etc. - even when you’re not.
As leadership coach, Tara Mohr, points out “Confidence likely won’t always be with us as we forge new paths. But we don’t need confidence to do what we most want to do in our careers. We need to learn to take action in the midst of self-doubt, and we can each begin practicing that today.”
In summary: confidence isn’t the issue. Taking action on your career writing is. Which leads me to the next benefit.
2. Writing an article on LinkedIn can lead you to believe in yourself.
If you are someone who doesn’t believe they have anything original to say, you’ll quickly talk yourself out of giving LinkedIn article writing a try. Having the goal of originality is a tall order!
Instead - what if you were open to the possibility that you have something to say that could be useful? Because you do! No one has had your exact career, which means they don’t have your lens.
When you start writing, the goal is to write. Not to say things perfectly and eloquently. In her popular 1994 novel on writing, Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott, encourages us to write “sh*tty first drafts.” Here’s an excerpt:
“People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.”
So write a sh*tty first draft and get a trusted friend to read it and give you feedback. The best writers have editors. The more you write and click “publish” on LinkedIn, the more comfortable you’ll get with sharing your ideas.
3. Writing an article on LinkedIn can help with a career pivot.
So you want to change career paths? Writing articles on LinkedIn about where you want to take your career is going to help. When a recruiter, future supervisor/colleague, and/or hiring manager pulls up your LinkedIn profile and sees you’ve been writing about the industry/role you’ve applied for - it helps them connect the dots.
Especially if what they read under your Experience section is not well aligned.
Your LinkedIn articles can be a bridge. My recommendation is to have at least three articles published that relate to this new career path.
4. Writing an article on LinkedIn showcases your writing skills to others.
Because LinkedIn is a public platform, your writing will be visible and it can also be shared. This may make you want to run in the other direction - I encourage you not to! If your career involves writing in some way, you’ll want to prove your chops and writing a LinkedIn article can help you do that.
Relatedly, you can also post other written content that is hosted on other platforms. You can either link to it in your LinkedIn article - or - post about it and pin it on your Featured Section in your LinkedIn profile.
Recommended by LinkedIn
5. Writing an article on LinkedIn gives you something to post on your feed.
It’s one thing to have an updated LinkedIn profile, it’s entirely another to have a LinkedIn strategy. And no, lurking is not a strategy!
Posting content is a way to show up and build credibility on LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn profile has a section called Activity where it shows everything you’ve ever posted, liked, commented on, and published. When you click on “Show All Activity,” the reader can sort it to see if you are posting and writing LinkedIn articles.
If a hiring manager or someone you’d like to connect with goes to your profile and sees you’re writing, it indicates you care enough about the topic/your career that you actually contribute content.
When you post an article on LinkedIn, it will prompt you to create a post for the news feed. You’ll want to say yes and add a caption. You can even quote something you shared in the post.
Check out my LinkedIn posts for examples.
Even if folks aren’t clicking to read your articles, you still get familiarity credit with them by showing up in their feed! Think about it: how many times a day do you like a post and don't read it?
The people who show up most in your feed are the people you remember the most because of a bias called Familiarity Bias. This is what is behind brand loyalty. We tend to go with brands that we see frequently, know, like, and trust.
The same can apply to you - if you post frequently enough. And writing a LinkedIn article will give you content to share.
6. Writing an article on LinkedIn can help you decide whether you need a professional website.
In many ways, LinkedIn can act like your professional website. You can write and publish articles (like a blog), and then feature them on your LinkedIn profile. You can share your posts in a newsletter through LinkedIn and email all of your LinkedIn followers. You can feature external links and content on your profile. You can also customize your LinkedIn url (which goes on your resume and cover letter headers!)
Utilizing LinkedIn like a professional website can save you a lot of money and time in web hosting and web design.
If you are making use of these LinkedIn features and find that you need something more dynamic, it’s likely time to develop a professional website. If you don’t know Wordpress, the easiest way to get started is to use a website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly.
Anything you write for your professional blog (or otherwise) can be repurposed and published on LinkedIn as an article. Make sure to credit where you originally published the content at the bottom of your article.
What are the negatives of writing an article on LinkedIn?
There are none! Okay, fine, everything has a shadow side.
If you’re not a good writer (e.g. bad grammar and spelling, lack of a central theme / purpose) then you may want to avoid writing on LinkedIn. Unless - you have someone you trust to be your editor or can hire a ghostwriter. Yes, people hire ghostwriters to write copy for them.
I’d also avoid writing an article on LinkedIn if you’re going to obsess over your numbers - how many likes, who has read it, that sort of thing. If you are someone who has trouble shutting off “vanity metric fixation,” I’d get curious about what you’re making the numbers mean. And is that meaning helpful or harmful to your mental health?
Next steps to start writing articles on LinkedIn
Hopefully I’ve made a good case for writing an article (or many) on LinkedIn. To get started, I recommend:
Swiping through my IG post: 5 prompts to get you off the writing bench and into the career building game
Reading this blog post: How to Shine As a Thought Leader as a Virtual Conference Attendee.
Signing up for my 7 Day Self-Promotion Challenge
If you liked this article, my blog is chock full of other advice like this!
Happy LinkedIn writing!
Lindsey Lathrop (she/her) is an ICF-Certified Coach, Gender Equity Consultant, Speaker, and Top 100 Global #IamRemarkable Facilitator. As a coach, she helps women work smarter, not harder by building negotiation and self-promotion skills. Learn more at lindseylathrop.com.
