Practical writing on your profile, what to post, reach, and voice. No growth-hacking noise, just what actually works and the reason it does.
Bold on LinkedIn is not a font, it is a different alphabet. That one fact explains why styled text costs double the characters and cannot be searched.
LinkedIn allows a ratio range of 3:1 to 4:5, so 1080 by 1350 is not a recommendation, it is the tallest image the platform will accept without cropping.
LinkedIn published the mechanism in 2017: classifiers label every post, and one treatment leaves it visible on your profile but out of the feed entirely.
A peer-reviewed definition from a review of 100 papers, a validated three-part measure, and why self-promotion is a different thing entirely.
LinkedIn publishes no safe daily limit for connection requests. The trigger it actually names is how many invitations get ignored, not how many you send.
There is no creator fund and no open ad revenue share. What LinkedIn does pay for, why the follower question is the wrong one, and where the money actually comes from.
The claims run from 8x to 561%. The one study that publishes its method found about 63%. That is still worth doing, and it changes how you should run it.
It is the only part of your profile a visitor can act on. What LinkedIn lets you pin there, why it is empty on most profiles, and the three things worth featuring.
I help X do Y so they can Z is on tens of thousands of profiles. What a statement is actually for, how to build one from evidence, and the test that kills the generic version.
Four pillars, 25 points each, recalculated daily. It is a Sales Navigator metric, not a ranking input, and three of the four measure how busy you are.
LinkedIn does not show you one. Two different formulas are in common use, they disagree by a factor of ten, and that is why published benchmarks are useless.
Free accounts see five viewers from the last 90 days, and only if you browse with your name showing. The reciprocity rule explains almost every complaint about it.
A post gets 3,000 characters, an article gets 125,000. The extra room is the least interesting difference, and a bare article is the weakest of the options.
The gold one you could farm was retired in October 2024. The blue one is invite-only, lasts six months at a time, and can be taken away. What that means for you.
It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and it is nothing like a paid blue tick. The three things you can verify, the partners per country, and what it changes.
One study found polls reach three times more people than any other format. The prevailing advice calls them dead. Both numbers are right, and the arithmetic explains why.
Connections cap at 30,000 and followers do not. What each one actually gives you, why the number goes backwards, and which to build for.
Your public profile shows only two of them. Who can write one, why they vanish, the request that actually gets answered, and how to write one back.
Almost every guide says the limit is 50. LinkedIn says 100. What the section is actually read for now, and how to choose what goes in it.
A study of 800 photos measured what actually moves how competent and likeable you look. The biggest effect is free, and the thing everyone worries about does nothing.
LinkedIn removed hashtag following in late 2024, which deleted the mechanism that made them work. What they do now, and what to write instead.
Most LinkedIn message advice is about how many you can send. The number that matters is the reply rate, and almost everything published about the limits is unverified.
The toggle was removed in March 2024 and every feature it gated is now on by default. Where the follow button, newsletters and Live actually sit today.
Decision-makers spend an hour a week reading it and fewer than half rate what they read as good. What the research says separates the two, and how to be in the smaller group.
Founders keep being told to build the company page. The published multipliers disagree wildly, but the mechanism does not, and it points one way.
The official size is 1584 by 396. The useful part is knowing which third of it survives the profile photo, the intro card and the mobile crop.
You get about 140 characters before the fold. What a hook actually is, why template openers now work against you, and the test that replaces them.
A newsletter is the one LinkedIn format the feed cannot throttle, because every edition sends a notification. The catch is that you never get to own the list.
Sprout says late morning, Buffer says late afternoon, Metricool says mid-morning is peak competition. Why they disagree, and how to find the time that works for you.
What impressions, members reached and video views actually count, in LinkedIn's own words. Which metrics tell you something, and what the dashboard never shows.
LinkedIn carousels are document posts wearing a different name. The real file limits, the size to design at, how to build one, and what belongs on each slide.
LinkedIn is pushing video harder than any other format, and one 670,000-post study found it performs worst on personal profiles. Both are true. What to do about it.
LinkedIn named automated comments and said what it would do about them. What the enforcement covers, why pods stopped working anyway, and where the line sits for AI tools.
LinkedIn is one of the most-cited domains in AI answers, and almost all advice about it is written for companies. What actually gets a person quoted, from the studies.
LinkedIn shipped a report button for AI-sounding posts in July 2026. A million clicks later, here is what it flags, what it does to reach, and what the data really says.
LinkedIn search now reads meaning instead of matching strings, and LinkedIn published how. What changed, what search appearances really tell you, and what to write instead.
LinkedIn replaced both halves of the feed stack and published the papers. What retrieval and ranking actually do now, and what changes for the person writing the post.
The format stats everyone quotes contradict themselves inside a single article. Here is the arithmetic, why it happens, and which numbers are worth keeping.
LinkedIn has written about dwell time twice on its own engineering blog and built it into ranking. Here is what it measures, and how to write posts people finish.
Views down about 50%, follower growth down 59%, and posts now reaching 8 to 12% of followers. Three structural causes, only one of which you control.
LinkedIn replaced dozens of ranking models with one 150-billion-parameter system that reads your posts as language. What the paper says, and what it changes for writers.
LinkedIn publishes real research on how the feed ranks. We read the papers, checked what still stands, and found one widely quoted source its own authors pulled.
Not by swapping words or running it through a humaniser. By putting back the specifics that got averaged out. Here is the edit pass that actually works.
Generated posts read as hollow because a model returns the average phrasing, and averaged writing belongs to no one. Here is the real cause and the fix.
LinkedIn does not punish you for using AI. It suppresses posts that read as generic, and in 2026 it started building models to tell the difference.
Real 2026 rates, from per-post freelancers to executive retainers, what each tier actually includes, and the cheaper options worth trying first.
It writes a competent post in ten seconds and the post reads like everyone else's. What ChatGPT is genuinely good at here, where it fails, and the fix.
Posts, headlines, About, comments and messages, plus the limit that matters far more: the fold, where LinkedIn cuts a post after 140 characters.
Your profile is not a resume, it is the landing page for everything you post. What a visitor actually looks at, and the order to fix each part in.
Most people post one kind of thing and wonder why the audience grows but nobody buys. Three posts a week, each doing a different job, and what goes in each.
A good comment borrows an audience that is already interested. Where to comment, how early, what to write, and the kind of comment that quietly costs you.
Most headlines are a list of job titles. Here is the three-slot formula, where LinkedIn truncates it, and twelve examples to shape your own against.
The About section is not a biography. A four-part structure that names your niche, shows you can do the work, and ends with a next step someone can take.
Your network decides who sees your posts first. The two groups worth connecting with, where to find them, and a connection note that does not read as a pitch.
Running out of ideas is a capture problem, not a creativity problem. The habits that turn an ordinary working week into a backlog you can write from.
The algorithm now rewards one thing: being genuinely useful to a specific group of people. Ten concrete moves for founders, and why each still works in 2026.
The seven levers that decide how far a LinkedIn post travels, why the algorithm rewards each one, and how to apply them without sounding like everyone else.