How Kale Is Beating LinkedIn’s Algorithm

Impressions are too easily written off as vanity metrics - we've done that ourselves.

The thinking is that if your content views and consumptions don't lead to a sale, there's no point chasing the views in the first place.

But it takes time for impressions and so on to lead to a result. Some marketing publications estimate the average consumer needs 13 interactions with a brand before they'll act - that's a long lag.

In between time, impressions are about as good a metric as we have to understand if our marketing efforts are any good.

At Rugby Bricks and this newsletter, for example, our revenue and subscribers growth correlate tightly with the number of impressions our content gets.

That's why showing how Kale (newsletter co-editor) is getting between 20,000 and 50,000 free impressions on LinkedIn weekly is worth sharing. FYI - getting the same reach with ads would cost about $2,000.

1. Content Selection

LinkedIn and its users love celebrating achievements and breaking news, so Kale frequently interjects these topics into his posts.

- Breaking News: I often write about A.I. because it's the shiny new thing, and I love the tech. The product cycle pace is weekly, and I love testing the tools, allowing me to create lots of newsworthy content. Here is an example post with 17 K+ impressions - it's a wrap of A.I. news from the week that was.

- Achievement: I spent time in Europe for the last three weeks, so I wrote about how we're expanding rugby bricks into new markets (another 50,000 views). You can create the same content for career highlights or new business products & services. The key here is it has to be new.

2. Content Hooks

Kale starts every post with an engaging hook, and with each hook, his goal is to get people to click "....show more".

The LinkedIn character limit for headlines is 220 for desktop and 240 for mobile. You've got roughly 30 - 50 words to capture someone's attention and make them want to do that.

He likes to use the show-and-tell format to do this:

- Show: "The paid version of ChatGPT got plug-ins almost a week ago." (This sentence previews the post topic).

- Tell: "After testing 30 of them, here are the top 5 and examples of how to use them in your business today." (This sentence previews what he'll share about that topic)

And his audience is lapping it up.

3. Engagement Groups

The content LinkedIn promotes in its algorithm is heavily influenced by first-hour engagement. So Kale shares his posts in a WhatsApp engagement group as soon as he posts to push early engagement.

I'm in a WhatsApp group with three others. We drop the link in the group chat as soon as we post. People react with a 1️⃣if they like and engage in the first hour and 👍 if later than an hour.

We just started testing this last week, and the results so far are impressive.

Ideally, you want your engagement groups full of people in your target market. For example, if you like to post about health and well-being - you don't want to be in an engagement group with a bunch of mortgage advisors.

If you want to be in an engagement group with Kale - please reply to this email and let us know.

Notes:

Yes, Kale has an audience of almost 12,000 people on LinkedIn - which makes getting this level of reach far easier. But he started at 0 like everyone else. Consistently showing up week after week is how he arrived here.

And the more you post, the more you learn about what works for your audience. Achievements and breaking news might not be right for you, but the only way to figure that out is by posting about it.

The Framework Behind Frameworks

Kale, building his audience on LinkedIn from 5,000 to 50,000 impressions a week over the past 24 months, is Naval Ravikant's "Solve via iteration, then get paid via repetition" framework in action.

Naval says that once you've figured out how to write a program (software) to perform or create a piece of media to explain, you don't have to show up physically anymore — as this is distributable for free (no incremental cost) to anyone on the internet, anywhere, at any time.

So all you have to do is do something many, many times and slowly figure out the right and repeatable way to do it to deliver the result you want. A close neighbour to Malcolm Gladwell's theory of 10,000 hours, except more replicable.

The magic is Kale didn't know before he started creating content that his proven method shared above is where he would end up. He wasn't purposely walking there - but that's where he ended up.

By creating hundreds of pieces of content on LinkedIn, Kale slowly learned what does and doesn't work for him.

In this case, the product isn't a single piece of content that conveys an idea; it's a method for creating and distributing a particular type of content on a specific platform (LinkedIn).

Case and point: What Kale shared above for free, a guy named Justin Welsh sells for $200 as a PDF packaged as his 'LinkedIn Operating System' and makes millions per year from it.

While at least not for now, Kale has no intention to package this method into a buyable course like Justin - he is getting paid by networking opportunities with the likes of Chris (The co-founder of Click Up that we talked about last week) and this fellow Kiwi becoming a master of public health at Columbia University or Ollie Crow, founder of a game-changing tool for video creators.

Notes:

Knowing that you don't need to get things right the first go or even the 100th time around should reassure those of us who are cautious about taking that first step.

In the words of Thomas Edison - "I have not failed 10,000 times—I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work."

Working Through Fog

When we first took over World Fitness - the gym was failing badly - losing something near $100,000 annually and worsening every month.

We had to figure out how to turn that thing around and fast.

But with no previous experience in the fitness industry, the proper steps to take were entirely unobvious to us. So we just started trying anything we thought might work or help. Whether that was in marketing, sales, product or elsewhere - we gave it a shot.

Via many iterations - we slowly improved each area of the business. Marketing started to generate more leads, sales started converting more members, and we kept people around longer as our product improved.

It took us from July 2017 to March 2020 (one month before the lockdowns) to finally get our heads above water.

In that time, we made two changes that accounted for at least 50% of that growth.

Shifting to a 24-hour model (we used to only be open from 6am till 9pm daily) and getting some lifting rigs in the gym (for squats, deadlifts etc..). After making those two changes, growing the gym became significantly easier.

The point is - While you're iterating, it doesn't feel like you're making much progress, and then all of a sudden, you take a giant leap forward.

We had no idea those two changes would make all the difference. We thought they were, at best, two more incremental improvements, like everything else we'd done.

As much as we like to pretend we know what we're doing, for the most part, we're stumbling around in the dark, in a room with no walls.