My 6-Step Process to Create a LinkedIn Post.

Hey friend,

Hope you're doing well :)

Another question my audience asks me a lot:

“How do you create content?”

Where I got into detail about my ideation process here, I’d like to share an in-depth breakdown of the actual content creation process.

Buckle up, take notes, and implement.

Step 1: The main problem

You hear me talking about this a lot.

And, that’s because it’s so fricking important.

Knowing and truly understanding which problem you solve acts as the true North Start for your brand.

Everything from ideation to content creation to adding the right people to your network, all becomes easier when you have clarity on your direction.

You can find “your problem” by asking yourself:

“WHAT must-solve problem do I solve for WHO?"

I call this your brand statement:

Examples are:

• Helping online coaches with a service offer in the 4-figure range who are unable to generate inbound leads through LinkedIn.
• Helping e-com business owners currently doing 6 figures in rev. using offline channels who are unable to increase revenue using digital channels.
• Helping high-performing (6+ figure) entrepreneurs with a service-oriented business who are unable to lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Write this brand statement out for yourself, and keep it in mind while creating.

Onto the next step.

Step 2: Your content buckets

Only having your brand statement won’t help you with getting all the clarity you need.

That’s why you want to divide your brand statement in 2-3 digestible content buckets.

Ask yourself:

“What are the 2-3 content buckets you write about (to solve this problem)?”

An example:

​
The beauty of this approach is that once you’re “done” with a content bucket or you notice that it’s not working for your particular audience, you can easily swap them for another, relevant topic.

Without having to change your complete brand strategy.

Lovely, right?

Step 3: The goal of the post

Where the first two steps were more from a brand perspective, we now dive into the specific content creation process.

Every piece of content serves one primary purpose, which is often neglected or forgotten.

In their pursuit of providing as much value as possible, content creators tend to ‘overshare’, resulting in an unstructured, unclear, and thus less valuable piece of content.

That’s why you want to define the primary purpose of the post at the start.

Generally speaking, we can have the following 5 goals:

• Educate → Teach your audience something new or unique
• Inspire → Give your audience a new perspective
• Motivate → Move your audience into taking action
• Make think → Change the beliefs or philosophies of your audience
• Perform action → Make your audience take action at the moment

As you can see, there’s definitely overlap between them.

Just make sure to have a good understanding of where you wanna go with this piece of content.

Step 4: Choose the right emotional hook

Now we get tactical:

Picking the right hook.

Yes, even before we start writing.

Because by now, we know that a great hook makes up for 95% of your posts’ success on LinkedIn.

That’s why we wanna tap into emotions, and to be exact, one out of 8 universal emotions:

To know which hook is “best”, you first need to understand the emotion you write for:

1. NSFW: that's crazy!
2. LOL: that's so funny
3. OHHH: now I get it!
4. WOW: That's amazing!
5. AWW: that's sooo cute
6. YAY: That's great news!
7. WTF: that pisses me off
8. FINALLY: someone said it!

Pick one that best fits your idea, and then head over to the big hooks database I’ve compiled over here.

In full transparency: Sorry for staying vague here, but as I don’t know your idea and topic, I can’t be more specific. I hope explaining the thought process and rationale behind this approach helps.

Step 5: Pick the right format

Here you want to pick the format that conveys your message in the best way possible.

Again, I can’t be extremely specific about this, but I’d suggest you take a look at my best-performing and favorite formats here.

Step 6: End your post the right way.

Finally, the call-to-action.

Misunderstood by many.

They either overuse them, or don’t use them at all.

My general rule of thumb is: only use one call-to-action per post.

​Here’s an overview of my 6 favorite call-to-actions to use.