Growth opportunities for businesses on LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers extensive growth opportunities to businesses and right now, 58 million companies are already marketing their products and services on LinkedIn.
However, not everyone is aware that the best way to tap into the LinkedIn platform (so you stay platform-independent) is to drive traffic from LinkedIn to your website!
But before getting that traffic from LinkedIn, you've to first grab potential clients' attention.
In their struggle to figure out how to reach new customers, many business owners resolve to ineffective LinkedIn tactics such as sending out automated messages to thousands of people.
The results?
They are getting their accounts shut down and banned left and right, forever closing the door to this incredible platform.
But that doesn't have to happen.
There are so many better ways how you can promote your business on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn makes it easy to reach thousands of potential buyers worldwide by generating organic traffic using intelligent content marketing techniques.
Content Marketing on LinkedIn, and Why Every Company Needs a Blog
Content Marketing is one of the best ways to build trust with potential buyers.
By sharing valuable information with potential buyers in the form of high-quality articles, they are more likely to buy from you.
Articles allow you to educate your ideal audience and create a problem, solution, and product awareness.
They also make it possible to build trust with customers by demonstrating your knowledge and expertise, giving potential clients the confidence they need to commit to working with you or buying your products.
Since you have complete control over your website, you can easily optimize your article based on your on-site analytics data and capture your readers' contact information.
A well-written and keyword-optimized article has the potential to rank for many common keywords potential buyers might type into Google, resulting in a ton of organic traffic into your sales pipeline.
Nine Ways to Promote Articles on LinkedIn to Get More Traffic to Your Website
You can get the best of both worlds by simultaneously optimizing your articles for Google SEO and generating organic traffic by sharing your articles on LinkedIn to an audience of ideal customers.
Today, I will share 9 strategies for promoting your articles on LinkedIn by repurposing your articles with native LinkedIn content types.
I recommend experimenting with different strategies to see which ones work best for you.
The secret to successful content marketing on LinkedIn is having a great content mix and not limiting yourself to just one way of sharing valuable content on LinkedIn.
Publish native LinkedIn articles
The first option to share your article on LinkedIn is to copy and paste your entire article from your website and re-publish it again as a native LinkedIn article.
However, this is not the best strategy.
Due to LinkedIn's lack of SEO functionality, you cannot mark the re-published article as a canonical page.
Canonical what?
Let me explain.
A widespread tactic by bad actors, who are trying to rank in Google, but don't want to put in the effort or don't have the writing skills, is to steal other people's articles and then publish them under their name.
Google is actively fighting this and will prevent any duplicate content from ranking in search.
As the legitimate author, issues arise when you publish duplicate content yourself, for example, on your website and LinkedIn.
In this case, Google might be confused about which version of your article represents the original.
It could either rank the article on your website or your LinkedIn profile.
This confusion could be easily prevented by using a canonical tag in your LinkedIn article, which would tell Google to rank your original article on your website.
Unlike Medium, LinkedIn doesn't support canonical tags.
Because of this limitation, I recommend against re-publishing your article as a native LinkedIn article.
The only two exceptions are if you plan on completely rewriting your entire article specifically for LinkedIn or if you don't have your blog, in which case you might also want to think about giving Medium a try instead.
Post snippets of your articles
Instead of publishing your entire article as a native LinkedIn article, share short snippets as LinkedIn posts instead.
LinkedIn posts get a much higher organic reach than LinkedIn articles.
You can also attach photos or videos or post them as text-only posts.
The maximum character limit per post is 3000 characters or about 500 to 600 words.
That's perfect for our purposes. Just copy the first 500 words of your article and share it as a LinkedIn post.
Make sure to add a call to action at the end to check out the full article on your website.
You can include the link in your post or share it inside a comment if you don't have enough characters left in your description.
Don't forget to add appropriate hashtags at the end of your post to attract an audience of ideal clients.
Check out my LinkedIn Hashtag Guide to learn how to select the perfect hashtags on LinkedIn.
Share URLs of your blog posts
Another way of promoting your blog post on LinkedIn is to share the article URL.
LinkedIn will automatically create a link post and attach a preview of your article as a clickable link.
Since this is a LinkedIn post, you can, of course, include up to 3000 characters in your description. You might consider sharing the first 500 words of your article as a short article snippet, as outlined above.
The only downside of this strategy is that LinkedIn gives link posts a lower organic reach than text-only, photo, or video posts.
But, since it's also much more accessible for people to click on the attached article and get directed to your website, this can still work well.
Write summaries of your articles
Instead of copying words from your article, you can write a summary and share it as a LinkedIn post.
For instance, you can summarize all the main points from the article or pick one of the lessons from the blog post and rewrite it.
Toward the end of your post, include a link to the complete article.
You can even publish more than one post to promote an article, especially if it is very long.
One post can contain a picture, and another can be text-only.
Over time, you can recycle content snippets with a tool such as SocialBee.
Do you want to learn more techniques like these?
Get a head start on your LinkedIn audience development with my result-driven LinkedIn Accelerator Program.
Record a promo video for your article
Who doesn't like videos? LinkedIn videos often get more views and engagement than text-only or image posts.
When you use LinkedIn videos to promote your articles, securing clients becomes easier.
All you need is a camera or smartphone.
Record a one- or two-minute video of yourself explaining the article and why it is useful for people.
Alternatively, point your phone to your screen and give your audience a quick preview by scrolling through your article from top to bottom.
You can create multiple videos for each article and post them over time.
If an article is particularly long, film a new video for each section of your article.
For example, in this article, I could record 9 videos for each of the 9 strategies.
Since most videos autoplay muted, I recommend adding subtitles to your LinkedIn videos. I use a tool called Piktostory to transcribe videos and burn-in subtitles for social media clips.
Upload PDF-versions of your articles
Sharing documents such as PDF files will also help you boost your organic reach when you promote your articles on LinkedIn.
You can use Google Chrome to convert your article into a PDF document.
Create a document post with your PDF and include the link to the original article in the description (so LinkedIn members have the option to head to your website).
Note: The document post is also known as the carousel post. You can learn how to create LinkedIn carousel posts here.)
I recommend mentioning one or two additional relevant articles that people can only find on your blog to motivate them to visit your site.
Convert the article into an audiobook
Many people prefer listening to audio over reading, especially during mundane tasks like commuting to work or traveling.
You can convert your articles into short audiobooks or podcast episodes by recording yourself with the voice memo app on your smartphone.
Start with the title of your blog post, and then read out the article from top to bottom.
At the moment, LinkedIn doesn't support uploading audio-only content.
You can get around this by using the previously mentioned Descript app.
Not only will it transcribe your audio file, but it also allows you to turn each audio file into a beautiful video file with burned-in subtitles.
Add your LinkedIn post to your featured section
After you've produced a LinkedIn promo post from one of the above tactics, you can add the published post to the featured section on your LinkedIn profile.
This way, when someone visits your LinkedIn profile, they will be able to see a preview of your promo post at the top of your profile.
This works particularly well when you turn on the LinkedIn Creator Mode on your profile.
Pin your LinkedIn post on your business page
If you have your own LinkedIn business page, there is another tactic that you can use to boost visits to your website.
You can pin your article promo post at the top of your newsfeed.
Anyone who checks out your company page can easily locate that specific piece of content right below your page header section.
Conclusion
Content marketing on LinkedIn can be a very lucrative way to promote your products and services to a bigger audience.
Today, LinkedIn is the most important B2B platform in the world.
With over 72.3 million companies and more than 1.1 billion users, LinkedIn offers businesses of all sizes many opportunities to market their products and services to an affluent audience.
We've talked about the top nine methods of how you can get the best of both worlds in terms of simultaneously driving organic traffic from LinkedIn and Google at the same time.
I recommend experimenting with the different content strategies to see which content mix works best with your content.
To learn more about attracting new clients for your business, check out my LinkedIn Accelerator Program. It contains over 17 modules with 8+ hours of strategies, tactics, and recommendations on building a complete sales funnel on LinkedIn to grow your business.
So what are you waiting today?
Have an article to promote?
Start promoting it on LinkedIn today!
