You don't need 100K followers.
Don't pretend like you need followers to grow your business.
A founder booked a call with me last year. Before we jumped on, I did what I always do and looked at who else was in his world on LinkedIn. What he did for business, how optimized his systems were, and if he needed help.
He was following 3 of the largest names in the LinkedIn coaching space. Guys with hundreds of thousands of followers and posts that regularly do 500K impressions. My numbers looked tiny to theirs.
I asked him on the call why he reached out to me instead of one of them.
He said, "Honestly? You wrote a post about six weeks ago about being tired of pretending you had it all figured out. I read it at like 11 at night. It was the first thing I'd seen on LinkedIn in months that didn't feel like a pitch."
BOOM. No funnel or crazy lead magnets. And no need for a 40-step nurture sequence.
Just a simple post at 11 PM on a Tuesday.
Founders assume the biggest accounts get the most clients (which is a reasonable assumption). Big numbers look like big businesses. But if you spend enough time in the LinkedIn world, you start to notice something else. A lot of the largest LinkedIn accounts are not actually closing that much work. Some of them are running paid ads to fill their coaching cohorts. Some of them are quietly taking speaking gigs to cover the bills. The revenue is often not what you would expect.
Meanwhile, I know accounts with 4,000 followers that are booked out for the next six months.
Reach is a distribution number. It tells you how many eyeballs saw you. That is useful, but it is not the same as anyone actually feeling anything. You can reach a million people and move zero of them. Anyone who has watched a bad World Cup (or Super Bowl if you’re an American football fan) ad understands this.
Subscribe free to unlock the rest of this edition.
You'll also get the next LinkedIn system in your inbox every week. Join 15,800+ founders.
Already subscribed?
Resonance is what happens when the right person reads the right thing at the right moment and something clicks. They think about it in the shower the next morning. And two weeks later, when they finally admit they need help, your name comes to mind.
The founders who hire me almost never do it after seeing a viral post. They do it after seeing the third or fourth post that felt like I was writing it directly to them. The specific frustration they were having about their content not landing
If your content is written to reach the widest possible audience, it will resonate with none of them.
I have a rule I follow for every post I write. Before I hit publish, I ask if there is one specific person whose day this would change if they read it. If the answer is no, the post is not ready.
Sometimes that person is a founder who just had a bad sales call and is questioning whether LinkedIn is worth it. Sometimes it is a coach who is stuck at $15K/mo and cannot figure out why. Sometimes it is a service provider who is doing all the "right things" and getting nothing back.
I am writing to that one person.
When you write to one person, you end up reaching more people. The founder who feels seen by the post shares it with three other founders who feel the same way. The coach screenshots it and sends it to two friends. The service provider comments and their network sees the comment.
They hire the one who made them feel seen + relatable.
If your content is not landing clients right now, the question is who am I actually writing to, and would that person feel like I understand them if they read what I posted this morning.
If the answer is no, you have your work for tomorrow.
If you are past the point of wanting to figure this out on your own and you would rather have my team run your LinkedIn for you, that's what Elevate is. Done for you content, DMs, and the full growth system, built around business growth.
Book a call to see if it's a fit: alexcolhoun.com/elevate
I’ll see you on LinkedIn,
