3 November 2025
Too many people are trying to work out how to use LinkedIn for their marketing – basically, to win new business – and it’s costing them big time.
They’re getting nowhere, but they are spending valuable hours diligently creating posts that get hardly any views and absolutely no traction.
Not only is it wasting their time, it’s having a bit of an impact on their mental health (as we say these days). In this case we mean self-esteem and, let’s not play it down, it does have a negative effect on people.
It isn’t making them feel good.
If they put that energy and wasted time to better use, they’d benefit themselves and their businesses.
But there are also thousands of voices on LinkedIn telling us that we have to be on the platform, creating and posting every day. But we have to do it the right way, so “please buy my course and I’ll show you how to do it.”
The issue is, will it really work? Is there a special way of posting that guarantees success? For anything and everything?
Ask yourself this: “Do you think that the great and the good of LinkedIn turn up every day scanning their feeds for products and services they might want to buy?”
I thought not.
So how can you come up with an angle or quirky post that grabs people by the lapels and impels them to call you up to place an order?
Sign up for a guru course and find out. I dare you.
Deep down we all know there won’t be that person, who just happens to see your post and is immediately hooked. And also has a big budget that’s burning a hole in their pocket.
If you’re very, very lucky, you might get a lukewarm enquiry from some budget-deprived business owner, who wants your knowledge or product, but doesn’t really want to spend any money on it.
LinkedIn is not a good place to market your business – unless, that is, you are happy to fork out for promoted posts and have a cheap and simple offer with which to lure in your victims… I mean future valued customers.
Have you noticed how little exposure your organic posts get? – maybe that algorithm has something to do with it.
Now, you might say, well it works for Stephen Bartlett. It works for Mark Ritson. It works for Gary Neville.
It does. And it works for a lot of other people who are already rich and/or famous. They already have an audience that is eager to hear what they have to say.
You haven’t, at least not on LinkedIn.
Yes, you will be speaking to some people you know (your followers and contacts). That’s fine. You should carry on. You are famous to these people.
But for opening up new avenues, getting access to new people, it’s the wrong channel.
There are better ones you should be using. Channels that are made for your audience and where your audience will be delighted to hear from you.
Don’t get sucked into the black hole of social media. Go where the ground is already fertile.
