How I’d grow to 250k Followers on LinkedIn Again if I had to start from scratch

0:00 I'm about to show you the exact blueprint that helped me go from zero to 250,000 LinkedIn followers in record time. And I'm going to be walking you through it step by step, even if you were starting from zero. This works even if you don't have a niche, an audience, or any idea of what to post. But here's the thing. I'm not going to repeat generic and overused tactics because you probably tried them all and they didn't work. What will work is understanding exactly how someone who's only been doing this for three years managed to grow a following and generated over seven figures in revenue and has been named one of the fastest growing entrepreneurs on the platform for 3 years consecutively. And yes, that's me.

0:36 And then you can use these exact same tactics and strategies so you can implement them into your own content. So here's the exact sevenstep blueprint you need to follow. Now, if you follow all of these step by step, I can guarantee your following will grow. I've tested these with hundreds of clients who have helped launch and scale their personal brands, generating millions of impressions and thousands in revenue for themselves. Now, step number one is where 99% of people go wrong. Because just like if Nike was to start a brand new shop without a logo or design, but didn't tell you it was Nike, you'd actually walk straight past it. Not because the shoes aren't great, but because nothing tells you they're worth your attention. And this is exactly what's happening with most LinkedIn profiles. You're creating content.

1:18 You're showing up daily. Damn, you might even be engaging for like eight hours commenting everywhere. But your profile says nothing about who you help, why it matters, or why you are different. So, no one is really coming to you. They ignore you instead. So, to fix this, we're going to be focusing on positioning. Because if your profile doesn't look like someone worth following, your content won't even matter. Now, here's how to fix it in three simple steps. If you want to stand out immediately, you need to make people stop and pay you attention in literally 5 seconds. And three key elements that come into play are your headline, your photo, and your banner. So, we start there. This is why you'll often hear, "Have a nice, professional, and welcoming photo and have an optimized banner on your profile. Make sure your headline is specific." This isn't just typical advice. It's actually positioning in this, guys. You're becoming your own landing page, and you need to make sure people want to buy from it. So, in order to become the bestselling product in your niche, you need to first position yourself like it.

2:18 Statistically speaking, your headshot and your headlines are shown in around 10 different places on LinkedIn. So, having both nailed is essential. Your profile photo is now your logo. So, ideally, it needs to be high resolution, clear, and a direct reflection of what you want people to feel and see. Every single photo you see on screen was carefully selected and cured to represent them in a specific way. You can see the pattern in all of these professional, clear, and with a clear background. But all of them feel different and as they should because they are differentiating themselves within their niche. Now, having a headline has been proven to increase profile views multiple times for me and my clients. It being catchy, short, and clear is key because it explains exactly what you do and how you help. The formula to a winning headline is simple.

3:04 Get clear on the key problem you solve, and then get clear on who this is for and how you solve it. then add it to your headline. The old way to do this was say what you do, who you do it for, and how. So something like, I help consultants get leads using email. This used to work insanely well, but it's been overused by literally everyone on LinkedIn. Now, the better way and what I've seen performing well across all of the best performing profiles is to state the problem they have and how to solve it. So a few examples would be, "Want some leads for your business?" question mark. Click on my profile photo. then slash entrepreneur and public speaker then slash three times exits. Something else would be building AI automations for creators to save them time. Get my free course here slash 100k plus followers slash1 million plus generated in revenue. This is the new proven way.

3:53 Solve a problem, offer a simple entry solution and then show authority. The tactic here is you have the solutions first and the fancy keyword seconds because they help for SEO but not for direct sales and conversion or traffic. Now, let's talk about the most underrated tool when it comes to profile. The banner, your 24/7 billboard. It communicates your offer, your next event, or even where else to find you. I've collected three of my favorite banners so you can get some inspiration of how to best present your offer or even main statement. Firstly, obviously mine, personal branding that moves the needle beyond LinkedIn allows me to have multiple sub offers based on personal brand and LinkedIn and it's clear now. Secondly, no shames from invisible to influential. It communicates the problem her audience has clearly and in four words, then adds context right below. Lastly, we have Chase Diamond. I help ecom brands make more money with email marketing. It doesn't get any clearer than that. He literally tells you who he helps and how he does it and doing what in seconds.

4:51 One thing to note with these three banners, and the point many miss here is the social proof in them. The offers are clear, but what makes them sell at scale is other people having bought from them before. This is a move you need to make to gain trust and get them to book a call with you. This is cognitive bias in action. We trust what others have already trusted and it shortcuts your customers decision-making process. You're not just showing proof, but you're removing risk. Because if you validate that your work worked for other people whom they already like, know, and trust. They want to work with you without even booking a sales call. I've done this multiple times with people I've trusted because of their headlines or profile photos or even banners because they had so much awareness and social proof in their content. Now, we'll get into all things monetization in a second because none of this matters until you know how to play the attention game. This is the exact game all big companies like Apple, Nike, and even Tesla play. But here's the problem.

5:45 You're not Apple. You don't have a million-doll ad budget, and you don't have a team of designers or fans lining up to talk about you. you've got you and maybe 183 followers and one of them being your mom. Hi moms. Which means that if you want to win the game, you need a different strategy. One that doesn't rely on log ads or going viral, but on leverage, specifically content that turns heads and opens doors for you. Let me show you how to build that.

6:09 It's the new way of buying trust at scale. You don't need ads. You don't need a team. You need attention. And the easiest way to start is to start distributing your knowledge for free on LinkedIn. And to do that, you need a winning content strategy that grows your audience fast, but also gives you the authority to sell them in the short and long term. The best personal brands do two things very well. They educate and they storytell. But the ones that grow the fastest and become the best known do both. I've started multiple clients accounts from zero and have speed ran them to tens of thousands of followers in months. We've used this strategy to get them to their ideal results. So step one is the content calendar focusing on quality over quantity. Three to four posts per week. Because we're trying to do both build an audience while building authority, we're going to go hard on both themes. Two times educational post and two times storyled post. You need to kick off with storytelling though because no one cares about what you do until they care about you. Here's a template you can follow for a story. I call it the transformation post. The idea here is that you take something that you've done before that your ideal audience and even ideal client wants to achieve or has achieved and can relate.

7:17 Here's a post and a template for you to use. Let me read it out. At 15, I dreamt about being an entrepreneur. At 21, I built my first business. At 25, I crossed my first six figures. The journey was long, but it was worth it. When the path gets hard, don't change the goal, but just change the plan. I always knew I wanted to build a business, so I acquired skills. Iworked like crazy. I worked for free. Even when no one believed in me, I did. My parents and friends did. All it took is 10 years for this overnight success. And for you entrepreneur reading this, it might take longer or less. But just know this, when you have a dream, go get it. And as a piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, work for free. It will open more doors than anything else. P.S.

7:54 What was your first business? Here you've introduced yourself and your journey without making a big deal out of it or needing to get soppy and overshare. Now, for step two, the next post needs to educate your audience on this business that you've now shared. And this is my favorite type of post. I call it the educational storyteller framework. You're still telling a story, but you're educating people through it. Here's an example of a viral post that I've written for clients multiple times and it's worked every single time. I've worked with hundreds of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and creators. Here's one thing the most successful ones do. They focus on the 80/20 of LinkedIn. One, create a simple offer. Two, focus on the problem to solve. Three, create content around it every day. Four, build a portfolio of your work on LinkedIn.

8:37 Five, connect with 10 people a day and DM. Five, this is exactly how you turn your LinkedIn into the perfect funnel. Then market yourself shamelessly. Listen, if you want leads, solve a problem for your audience. If you want conversion, DM those who engage with you. If you want to double your visibility, post three to five times a week. This is simple, but it works every time. Apply this framework, test your content, and iterate. I've seen this change lives. What's stopping you? This post uses my slave framework where you tell a short story, then you share actionable advice, then you share a lesson, and then you turn it into a you question at the end. This has never failed me, no matter how much the algorithm changes. I've rotate through different iterations of both these transformation posts and education posts every single week with different narratives and problems to solve.

9:23 Ideally, you'd have three transformations and three main topics to educate people on. And just as a piece of advice for the beginners watching this getting overwhelmed, I see you. Your transformation doesn't have to be a million dollars. It could simply be how you did something small like losing 2 kilos or learning how to drive or quitting alcohol for 2 weeks. And highlevel education doesn't mean working with hundreds of people and getting them results. It could be as simple as you talking about something you learned.

9:48 Now, creating content is only half the battle because if it was that simple, then AI would literally have taken over social media by now. The real key to the game is hidden in something far less talked about. It's not a tool. It's not a trend or a hook template. It's a simple exchange that can take you from no one to someone. Think of LinkedIn like going to your local gym. The first time you show up, no one knows you. But after a few weeks of nodding at the same people, you sort of become friends.

10:16 You're no longer a stranger. You're part of something like a community. And on LinkedIn, this exact same feeling comes in the form of engagement, i.e. commenting and messaging back and forth. Most people want to post and ghost. But the reality behind building a personal brand is that you have to be personal, build connections, network, and help other people grow. Just because top personal brands like Alice Orcosi or Steven Bartlett don't do it, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't. They can afford to not do it because they have the leverage in form of attention, teams, and time. They don't need to comment on 10 posts per day or reply to every single DM, but you do, at least for now.

10:51 Last year, my impressions dropped by around 30% and it wasn't because of the algorithm. It was because I stopped building connections and nurturing them. When I realized this, I quickly fixed it. And this is exactly the strategy I followed in order to grow faster and get myself seen every single day. This engagement strategy is divided into four phases every single creator needs to follow. Phase one is broad visibility. If there's one thing I do, if I could only do one thing to grow my LinkedIn account, would be commenting like this.

11:20 I block one or two hours on my calendar every single day. I comment for 30 minutes on every account I see on my feed. Then for the next 30 minutes, I comment on specific accounts that match my brand. So maybe I'm a copywriter, so I'm going to add all the copywriters. Maybe I'm a fitness coach, so I'm going to go and engage with all the fitness coaches. Maybe I'm a finance and accountancy expert, so I'm going to go and engage with all of these finance and accountancy experts. Okay? Then for the next 30 minutes, I'm going to focus on commenting on big creators accounts. And then I'm going to connect with a minimum of 20 people, sending them a personalized connection request. The more you comment, the more accounts you'll see over time. Now, let me handle your objection here because I know exactly what you're going to ask. I know that right now you're probably going to struggle finding the right accounts because you haven't tailored your LinkedIn to show you what you want. And the only way to train it is to find the accounts and like it so it can start showing you more of them. So, to save you time, I'm dropping a list of multiple accounts in different niches you can add to your strategy to get some fast momentum coming your way. And while you're down there, don't forget to subscribe because I literally just spent 30 days compiling accounts that are fresh and new just for you. I know I haven't been as active as possible, but I've been busy. Okay, back to usual now.

12:29 So, make sure you subscribe and drop me a comment for encouragement, please. I need dopamine. Now, once you've done this, you've got a head start with visibility. See, something people don't realize is that your comments act as a mini post. You can only comment once a day, but you can comment hundreds of times a day. And often those comments drive a lot of traffic to you. Often my comments get more likes than many posts, and they are what builds the brand awareness content sometimes can. Just look at this comment I left the other day and the response I got. By doing this, you're leveraging someone else's audience for your own gain. Now, phase number two is the warm-up stage. Back when I was a baby LinkedIn, me and some friends like Jake Wood, Jasmine Alec, Luke Matthews, and so on had this underground competition to see who would do this best. Before posting time, let's say around 12:30, we'd spend 30 minutes warming up, commenting on different posts, leaving jokes, value, or even just a meme in different posts to then create reciprocity for these accounts to come to our profile and return the comment. This in a way can be seen as engagement farming, but realistically, no one was forced to return the favor.

13:32 And because of that very thing, our incentive to leave great comments that resonated or made someone laugh was key. The art in this is to build true connection, not just some shallow AI comment that can be generated 10 times faster. And you can tell straight away that is AI. Now phase number three then comes in when it's game time. You post and now in order to guarantee the post getting the most success, you don't just leave it. You don't just post and ghost.

13:58 You need to become your biggest fan. Like your own post, then comment three times underneath. I still do this to this day and it works like a charm. One comment could be adding context on what you just said. One comment could be an update about what you're doing that day. And then one comment can be you copying your past post and posting it as a comment, making it seem like a massive value drop, but it's just literally your past post that no one else read. So I do this often because it creates the illusion of me overd delivering and also overconnecting with my ideal audience and also my community. The key here is giving people multiple ways to engage with the post, not just one. Now phase number four is what is going to get your post from 10 likes to 50 to 100 likes and even thousands. Replying to every single comment. Sounds lame and long and boring. Yeah, sure. But it works because people don't like leaving comments and them not getting replied to. It's kind of like rude, especially if you're trying so hard to get them to comment on your post and then you're not really replying back to them. It doesn't really make sense. It's like going to a networking event, being all excited about it that no one talking to you and then obviously you won't go back to it.

15:07 This is what would happen if you don't engage back with people that are commenting on your content. You need to get the people to come back every single time to your post by replying to their comment and then also commenting in their content. So, it creates this like reciprocity bias. And this is all for you to make them feel seen and like their comment really mattered to you because it really does, especially if you're trying to get out of the 50 like jail that you probably are in right now.

15:31 So, for the next 30 or 60 days, I want you to lock in an hour to reply comments into your calendar right now. Listen, this is a game of both quality and quantity. Quality in your content and quantity in your comments. And if you don't want to pay with your time, then pay an intent to do it for you. You need to be treating LinkedIn like a game. The more comments you get, the more points you can gain, the closer you can get to your goal. So, by now we've gotten the fundamentals in. Profile is set, content is nailed, and engagement is good to go.

15:59 But there's one key thing missing, and that, my friend, is hyperrowth. The type of growth that's not just earned, but it's engineered, and it happens when you stop building alone. See, most creators focus on audience building. They watch videos like these and they call it a day. But the smartest ones focus on doubling down on leverage. Because while your content might reach 10,000 people, a single collaboration can put you in front of a 100,000 overnight. This is why you need to use strategic partnerships. This is the most slept on hack in the game. Let me show you exactly how I use them to blow up and how you can do it, too. The first type is a carousel collaboration where you partner with someone with a similar audience size to yours or a similar following to then share in-depth knowledge on. I've done this multiple times with some of the top creators right now. You both decide the topic.

16:47 You then create the content and use the same piece or a slightly different one and post it on the same day. Here, you're exposing yourself to their audience while they do the same with yours. It's a double win. If you want to give this a go, here's the exact criteria I would use to ask someone to do the carousel with me. You need to ask yourself a few questions. First question, am I already connected with this person? And are we at least friendly? Can I give value in a way it doesn't compete with their offer? and can this help me build a relationship with them? If the answers to these three questions are yes, then bring the idea up and collaborate. Then agree on a time and a date so you can both use the engagement strategy I outlined above and win. But please only do this with people that you have already gotten in contact with, otherwise it's going to look weird and it's going to make you look bad. I promise I get these all the time. Now the second type is one of my favorite and is the halo effect piece of content where you meet someone with a large audience and post about them in your content. This gives you borrowed status, which personally works so well on LinkedIn because entrepreneurs love credibility signals. And when they see your name next to someone they already respect, it creates instant trust without you having to prove anything. On LinkedIn, who you reference often matters just as much as what you say. So when you share a post like what I learned from working with insert name so something like Alex Ramosi or something like this conversation with Steven Bartlett shifted my entire perspective or even like I've worked with Lara Costa and this is what I noticed. You're signaling two things that you are in the right rooms and that you are someone worth listening to. And here's the best part. You don't even need to know them personally. You could reference a webinar, a podcast, or a post that they wrote. And as long as you genuinely learn something and add your own insight, you're building a bridge between their audience and yours. It's like tapping into someone else's brand equity, but doing it respectfully and with purpose. Cringe, maybe, but I think I'd rather cringe for 5 seconds than regret not building a personal brand, knowing exactly what it takes and not doing it. Listen, you need to be putting yourself out there the most, especially when no one else is watching because that's when the reps matter the most.

18:58 The uncomfortable posts, the name drops that feel a little bit too bold, the stories that make you feel exposed, that's the stuff that actually moves the needle. The reason why these work is because not only you're posting about these people, you're gaining their influence equity by them commenting on your post and bringing in even more eyeballs. I've seen this far too many times. People have done this with Alex Hermosi, Steven Ballet and now people are even playing me at my own game and using me and I guess it works. This game is made for those who want to play it and you have all of the cheat codes. Use them. Now earlier I mentioned monetization and it's actually incredibly simple when you've built the way I just taught you because you've got the traffic content and now you just need to know how to convert it. And there are three key steps to achieve it.

19:48 LinkedIn is actually tailored to get you more clients without even leaving the LinkedIn platform. And it all starts with your profile. On LinkedIn, there are two things you need to optimize to get people buying from you. One of them being the featured link and the other one being your feature section. The LinkedIn feature section is a gold mine. And you can divide it into three things. One main offer and two other ones that best suit your brands. And here's one thing I've noticed. The best feature sections I've seen this year have either one or three, not two. So for the people that do one offer, they want to maximize traffic to drive them to that one single offer that may be launched at that time.

20:24 So for example, let's take this person Matt. He has one key thing that he wants to drive traffic to. Super smart. It drives everyone to that single offer and then he can converts it on the back end. So now for someone like Chris, he's driving people to his free newsletter because he knows that off the back of that he can then convert people into paying clients from his emails. And for me, even though I change it all the time and probably by the time someone sees this in 3 months, it probably changed again. So I usually have one or three, one main offer that I'm driving traffic to. So sometimes it's literally academy, my basel branding course. And when I decide to have three, I usually have one high ticket offer, one mid ticket offer, and one free lead magnet or getting people to subscribe to my newsletter. Or sometimes when I feel a little bit adventurous, I add my speaking kind of like file so people can book me for speaking. But right now, I'm taking a break and I'm going mode because I want to come back to YouTube and spend time with you guys. But anyways, this not only converts but also makes customers aware of your offers and how they can then buy from you. Let's look at some of my favorite ones that I pulled for you right here. So, we've got Jake Wards, which is just one thing. We've got mine, which is three things. We've got Matts, that's just one thing. We've got Justin Welsh's new one, that's al also one thing. And then we've got someone like this person who's got three main offers, which I really like the layout of. I used to have something similar to that, but I don't have it anymore. So, that's what I would copy actually. It's super specific. It's clear. Every single offer is tailored. And if you can see the patterns in all of these feature sections, they all have thumbnails, right? So, just like you do here, thumbnails are super important because they package the offer. It makes people want to actually click on it and then find out more. It's the same psychology you guys are using to click on this video. The packaging matters. So, you need to create customized thumbnails for your feature section. Otherwise, no one's going to click on them. And please don't make them fluffy or too broad.

22:18 make them clear and applicable. This is literally how people are making thousands, if not millions of dollars on LinkedIn and off LinkedIn, too. Because it really isn't about having the most complicated, lengthy strategy. It's about having the most focused and frictionless plan, content, attention, and then monetization. Now, if you want more help on how to exactly implement this for your niche and personal brand, I built LinkedIn's number one inner circle infused with every single lesson you'll ever need to grow, scale, and monetize your personal brand. I go live in it every single month, and there is an active community of over a thousand members. It's got the formulas, content cheat codes, and frameworks that I've never publicly talked about. So, if you want to check it out, go to literallyacademy.com, and I can't wait to see you in there. I'll also leave the link down below. And ladies and gentlemen, kings and queens, that's exactly how I'd grow to 250,000 followers on LinkedIn if I had to start from zero. If you want to learn more about turning these followers into actual clients and revenue, then check out this video right here where I break down my three-step system to generating leads on LinkedIn without sending a single cold DM. See you the