Going Viral on LinkedIn

Creating Viral Content On LinkedIn

How to get posts to go viral on LinkedIn

Any post that does over 100k views on LinkedIn is considered ‘viral’.
Last year I wrote a post that got 2m+ views in a week.

If I wanted to pay for that same reach with ads, it would have cost me ~$30,000+.

The thing is, this post was pretty basic.

No great insights.

No clickbait.

No made-up stories.

Then get traction.

LI judges your posts on how much engagement they get within the first hour. If they do well, then LI will feed them to a broader audience, which is when they get an opportunity to go viral.

If your posts' early engagement sucks, then it’ll get buried by the algorithm.

So I ask friends to comment and like my posts as soon as they go live by sending them messages like this.

Things will get interesting if you can get ~10 comments in the first hour.

That’s all it takes - easy to understand, concise writing and early engagement.

Notes: Many viral posts break through the algorithm with the help of a few mates.

How To Deal With Too Many Decisions

The best decisions you can make.

Every year 100's of authors send their books to Tim Ferriss (Author of a 4-hour work week & host of the Tim Ferriss show) and ask him for a review.

Why? Tim's word carries a lot of weight in the entrepreneurial world, so his positive review could sell 100,000+ books.

The problem is - Tim can't read hundreds of books a year - so reviewing them all is impossible. And Tim hated picking and choosing which authors to give his blessings to.

So, after struggling with this dilemma for several years, Tim decided not to review books any more.

This one decision killed hundreds more.

Steve Jobs famously wore a black turtleneck to work every day. All in the name of reducing the number of decisions he had to make in a day.

When I'm feeling overwhelmed, often it's not because of my workload but due to the number of pending decisions I need to make.

When that happens, I look for the decisions I can make that kill many more.

Too many creative decisions - hire a designer.

Too many financial decisions - ask my accountant.

Too many "what next" decisions - create a plan.

Notes: If you feel like you have to make too many decisions - look for the big ones that remove many small ones.

INSIGHTS FROM OPERATORS

“The thing that distinguished Jordan wasn't just his talent, but his discipline, his laser-like commitment to excellence.

The gift that Jordan had wasn't just that he was willing to do the work, but he loved doing it.

He came into the game as Rookie of the year and he finished off the last playoff game of his career with a shot that won the Bulls their sixth championship.

That's the kind of consistency that you can get only by adding dead serious discipline to whatever talent you have." - Jay Z

What Makes A Company Successful

A look at what makes a successful company great…

The writers of this newsletter have built three businesses valued between ~$850,000 - ~$8,000,000.

If you're from the US or some other large market you might call those numbers just a drop in the bucket. Still, for New Zealand companies with a market that's 70-100x smaller, many would consider them success stories.

And the thing is, none of those companies do anything remarkable.

The selection bias permeated through traditional and social media would make you think that to build a successful company, you have to create some world-changing idea.

That's just not even close to being true.

Even if you look at the world's most valuable companies right now - none of them did anything new

• Facebook = Social Media, Myspace, Bebo and many others proceeded them.

• Microsoft = Software - Not even close to being new.

• Apple = Computers and mobile phones, which were around for 30+ years before they came along.

• Tesla = Electric Vehicles, the first versions of these were invented around 1830.

• Visa = Credit payments and Credit cards existed long before Visa came along

My parents, for example, made a small fortune growing and selling fruit. Horticulture has been around for most of human history - nothing innovative about that. My parents played the game a little smarter than others and did disproportionately well.

The point is a lot of people think they have to come up with some crazy new idea to start a company, but 99.99% of the world's companies don't need one.

They just did things a little better.

Notes: You don't need to be innovative to build a successful company - just do it a little better.t