LinkedIn launched its publishing platform in 2015, which essentially works like a large business blogging community, and any LinkedIn user can contribute.
Contributors include some big names like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, alongside influential authors and speakers like Gretchen Rubin and Gary Vaynerchuk. You can locate these posts from your LinkedIn home page.
Why Should You Contribute?
1. Contributing content to the LinkedIn community provides more visibility and can help you reach a much bigger audience, allowing you to further establish authority in your field. LinkedIn tracks the number of views on each post, and also allows for comments and social sharing. Some posts can go viral, reaching thousands of readers.
2. Readers can choose to follow your posts, which means they will see your new content in their news feeds and network updates, even if they aren’t connected with you the traditional way on LinkedIn.
3. Your Pulse posts will show on your LinkedIn profile, which also allows your existing audience and new potential connections to learn what you’re all about.
How to Contribute to Pulse
There are no parameters regarding what kind of content you can share here, which means that you can re-publish content from your blog or other sources. Though Google doesn’t like duplicate content when it comes to search, if the post has already been on your site for 30+ days, it should be safe to publish it elsewhere because it’s already indexed by Google.
This means that there’s no need to write fresh content for LinkedIn; simply re-purpose your past blog content. You can mix it up a bit by changing the title and refreshing the first couple of paragraphs (which could help with better Google search visibility).
To get started, simply go to your LinkedIn home page and click on the pencil icon in the “Write an Article” field. You will fill out a title/headline and can paste in the content of your post.
Be sure to include a photo with each post since that will help it stand out and make it more visually appealing. You can also insert a brief bio at the end of each Pulse post, along with a link back to your website. While readers can click on your name and learn more about you, they may not take the time so make it easy for them to get familiar with you.
As for frequency, that’s up to you. You might start with monthly or weekly posts and see what kind of response you get. You should watch for comments and reply to those whenever possible.
Sometimes a post can go viral, reach tens of thousands of readers. You never know what opportunities your posts might create for you.
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