Why I spent a decade on LinkedIn when nobody was looking.

I joined LinkedIn in 2007. For about seven of the seventeen years since then, I was posting into what felt like a library after closing time. Five likes, two comments, one reshare, most of them from the same four people.

It is tempting, now, to tell the story as if I always knew where it was going. I did not. For long stretches I genuinely believed I was wasting my evenings. I kept going because of a stubborn instinct rather than a strategy.

That instinct is what I want to write about.

The instinct

The instinct was this. I did not trust anything that required a paid megaphone to be heard. If the only way I could reach people was by renting attention from a platform, then the moment the rent went up, I was out of business. I wanted to own the relationship, not the ad unit.

LinkedIn, in 2007, was the only place where a serious business audience would actually stop and read. Twitter was too fast. Facebook was too social. LinkedIn felt like a long corridor of professional people who would at least hear you out.

So I decided, somewhere around year two, that I would keep posting every week, for ten years, even if nobody read it, on the theory that if I could not build an audience with a decade of free consistent effort, I probably could not build an audience at all.

What the decade cost

Let me name the cost honestly.

• Hundreds of evenings where I wrote a post instead of watching something.
• Genuine stretches of doubt, usually around years three and four, when the numbers refused to move and I could not justify the time to my family.
• Watching people with louder, shorter tempers go viral with content I thought was thin, and not being able to tell if I was jealous or right.
• The discipline of not deleting a post that had flopped, because the archive mattered more than any single week's metric.

I want to be clear. It was not a fun decade of posting. It was a long, quiet, occasionally humiliating decade of posting. The gratification was not regular. Most weeks it was not there at all.

What I would not have predicted

What I did not predict was how compounded the relationships would be by year eleven. Not the reach. The relationships.

By the time my fifth book came out, I realised that many of the people who bought it, shared it, and invited me to speak about it had been quietly reading me on LinkedIn for seven years. They had never liked a post. They had never commented. I would not have known they existed if I had only looked at the metrics.

That is the thing LinkedIn does not advertise. The audience that moves you forward is usually the audience that never clicks a button. The likers are loud. The readers are quiet. The readers are the ones who buy.

If you are year one

If you are in year one of showing up anywhere, on LinkedIn or elsewhere, and the silence is rattling you, I want to tell you the one thing that I wish someone had told me. The silence is not a verdict. The silence is the normal sound of the first three years. It is how the room sounds while people are deciding whether to trust you.

Keep posting. Keep writing. Keep being slightly more generous than feels sensible. Do it for three years before you ask whether it worked.

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For the practical version of how to turn a LinkedIn presence into book sales and authority, see How to promote your book on LinkedIn on Global.Media.