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Build a personal brand with these LinkedIn growth hacks

Build a personal brand with these LinkedIn growth hacks

Sheldon Bishop
March 05, 2024

Good morning! This is The Zero to One. Here are the best tools, resources, and actionable tactics to get to the moon! 🚀

Here’s what’s in store for you today:

Practical tips to grow a newsletter with LinkedIn
Videos and articles to take your business to the moon.
Opportunities for you and your business to take advantage of.
Top tools for your business.
Cool jobs currently open in the startup world.

How to grow a newsletter with LinkedIn 🗞️

Friday Feature: Strategy Breakdowns

How Tom Alder launched Strategy Breakdowns to 5k subscribers—and grew it to 35k—with LinkedIn.

Something I learnt researching Thursday’s upcoming edition deep diving Lemlist, is that the best way to build trust with potential customers is through your personal brand.

And the best platform to do that on is LinkedIn (and X). But going one layer further, to truly build a deep connection and deep level of trust, you need to provide more in-depth content.

Step in the newsletter.

Here is my summary of a practical guide from SparkLoop on how to achieve growth on both (LinkedIn and Newsletter) from Strategy Breakdowns’s author, Tom Alder:

Launching to thousands of subscribers 🔊

Before launching Strategy Breakdowns, Tom had grown his LinkedIn to over 20k followers interested in tech companies’ strategy.

This helped him grow his newsletter to 5k subscribers before launch.

How he did it:

Tom started creating LinkedIn content by taking a 30-day challenge - writing one post daily for 30 days in a row.
Continued for 9 months - gained 10k followers.
Took a break - came back with niched-down newsletter subscribe CTA (Call to Action) in each post. One post even gained him 2,200+ subscribers 😳

Develop a daily writing habit and make sure to post content every day.

Tom’s total impressions from his first 38 posts: 140k
Tom’s total impressions from post 39: 4.1M

LinkedIn Growth Hacks ⚒️

Consistency is vital - but here’s how he consistently went viral:

Outbound engagement: 30min before posting, he comments and likes big creators’ posts.
Reply to comments: Engage with all comments for the first hour after posting content to spark conversation and more engagement.
Smart CTAs: LinkedIn penalizes posts with links. So Tom shares the initial post without the CTA and then 1 hour later edits the post - adding the CTA. Then he adds 3-4 comments on his posts after 10 minutes (more insights + newsletter link, sponsors, or CTA to follow or repost him).

Videos or articles to help your startup go from Zero to One 📽️

ClickUp founder discusses how he built the company to a $4B valuation (link)
YC discuss how to build confidence in yourself and your ideas (link)
Tim Ferriss interviews Noah Kagan (App Sumo) on how to launch a million dollar business in a weekend (link)
Lemlist Founder, Guillaume Moubeche, discusses the value of Co-Founders vs Solopreneurship (link)

Founder Opportunities 🛎️

Y Combinator (YC) S24: Taking place from Jul-Sept 2024 in San Francisco, the world’s preeminent startup accelerator, YC, is now accepting applications to their Summer 2024 batch. Some of their past investments include Stripe, Twitch, Airbnb, Reddit, and Zapier. The deadline to apply is 22 Apr. Link to apply.
Techstars Tokyo Accelerator: A sector-agnostic program committed to advancing world-class startups focused on emerging technologies across industries including Deeptech, Fintech, Cleantech, and Climatetech. The program runs from Jul-Oct 2024 and has partnered with the Mitsui Foundation and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The deadline to apply is 27 Mar. Link to apply.
Norrsken Accelerator 2024: Norrsken is now accepting applications for early stage founders with a vision for a better future to join their 2024 cohort, taking place in Stockholm, Sweden from Jul-Sept 2024. Norrsken prioritises investing in companies with the potential to grow into impact unicorns, positively impacting 1 billion lives across the globe. Link to apply.
Techstars Atlanta Accelerator: The program located in the epicenter of startups in the Southeast, US. This sector-agnostic program is powered by Cox Enterprises and runs from Jul-Oct 2024. The deadline to apply is 10 Apr. Link to apply.