How To Grow From 0 to 10K Followers On LinkedIn (As Fast As Possible)

Welcome back to the Eden channel where we talk about social media growth strategies, how to brand yourself in an irreplaceable way, and just how to stand out in general from the sea of the same. Because there are a lot of creators, but it's never been easier to stand out. And today, I want to go over how to grow on LinkedIn because I feel like it is an underrated platform similar to Substack, which we went over in another video and we're going to go over in yet another. But people sleep on LinkedIn because it's the corporate platform. It's the business platform and frankly it's pretty cringe and corny when you go on to LinkedIn and I don't really know who actually scrolls on LinkedIn but maybe it's the people who are in the jobs where all they can do is scroll LinkedIn but if you ask any of the large creators on LinkedIn and I've talked to quite a few of them they all say that LinkedIn is where the money is because on something like Instagram or even Twitter there are just a lot of people who are there to consume and take free information which there is nothing wrong with but the people on LinkedIn in are looking to improve themselves and grow their businesses and they're willing to pay for something that gives them an ROI.

So, for those who want to make a decent amount of money in a short amount of time, not like a get-rich quick scheme, just in terms of platform choice, I would probably go with LinkedIn.

And the interesting thing about LinkedIn is that there's like only one style of post that goes viral time and time again. So, it's a lot easier than other platforms to create content for because you know what you're showing up to create every single day. And the post formats that tend to go viral look exactly like this. And you can see how well these have done, right? 25,000 likes, 48,000 likes. And what's funny here is that this is a screenshot of a tweet that got 3,000 likes, but on LinkedIn, the the screenshot of the tweet got 25,000 likes. So that's a lot of people's growth strategy is to quite literally just repost their tweets and they tend well not all the time but they tend to get a good amount of engagement and sometimes they just do absurdly well and the reason this type of post works I've done this on in this is actually how I grew initially on Instagram and on LinkedIn is I had already grown on Twitter meaning that I had quite a few posts with a decent amount of engagement and likes and retweets and so I just put that into a post template like this to show that the social proof is already here.

So even if I have zero followers, I still have a lot of engagement on the post technically and that makes people pay attention and think that the idea is good. And so they're more likely to see me as an authority on LinkedIn even if I have a very low follower account. And you can see that like this is all Alex Hormosi posts. And I'm pretty sure he cross-osts these to both LinkedIn and the YouTube community post, not videos on YouTube, but on the actual post tab that those tend to get a lot of engagement on YouTube as well. So if you're on YouTube, why not post on LinkedIn and then just crossost it to your YouTube posts.

Now when I say that these type of posts go viral, it's not only the posts with like tweets inside of them. It's really just any kind of attention grabbing image. So, if I go to the discover tab and I just filter by LinkedIn here. So, turn all of these off. You can see exactly what I'm talking about, right? You've got the tweet style post, you've got an image here, Gary Vee, you've got Grant Cardone doing the same thing. Uh, this one went viral. This one went viral. Like, I would just encourage you to come and look through these because you can see exactly what I'm getting at.

And if you don't want to do the tweet style post, then what you really need to do, and I'll show you this in a second after I show you how to create the tweet style post, is save a bunch of the formats that you like to a LinkedIn swipe file board inside of here so that you create somewhat of an inspiration board for when you actually go to create the images. Now, of course, I have the productivity and self-improvement categories checked on, but you can check on any category or niche that you're trying to go into. And you can always just ask the AI chat or connect Claude to Eden via the MCP and ask it to give you top performing LinkedIn posts.

So, how do we actually create these types of posts if you're starting from nothing? If you have no idea what to do, well, I actually did this today. I've been testing it so I know it works. And this one went today, so it doesn't have that much, but I've been doing exactly this for about a week. and my posts have been doing pretty freaking well compared to my previous ones, right? I'm on and off with LinkedIn. If I actually was consistent on it, I'd have a lot more followers than 180,000. But my average post was probably between like 200 and 400 likes.

So 715, 1,200, there was a 1,600 one, 600. Like that's a notable boost in engagement just by including these types of images. So, I think that's a a great and kind of easy way to start because another thing here is you don't have to use a a picture of your own tweet or idea. You can use a picture of someone else's. I know that Tim Denning does this quite a bit. So, if we look up Tim Denning and we go to his LinkedIn, I can assume that his top liked are going to look almost exactly like this. Is this one his own?

No. See, it's a a screenshot or a post of someone else's idea. And this is a great way for beginners to grow. I'll tell you why towards the end, cuz we're going to kind of talk about growth strategies, but just know that you don't have to have your own LinkedIn post image. And one thing worth mentioning here is that there is a free post image generator. So, you can paste an X, threads, or Substack post link here. Doesn't have to be your own. And it will turn that into an actual post. a post image that is. And you can find this at eden.so/tools.

There's also reals transcript generators, YouTube transcript generators, etc. They're all right here. So, I'm going to show you exactly what I did today to create this type of post. And it's posted right here. So, I'm going to take this text and just paste it in here. And so, this is where I schedule content. So, what I tend to do when I'm actually writing posts is I'll open the discover feed or I'll open one of my boards or I'll open my library to see all of the ideas that I've saved or the highlights that I have from books or my bookmarks from Twitter or any link that I've saved so on and so forth.

We actually released the Android app today if you're interested in that. And in theuler, I have these platforms turned on. So, X, LinkedIn, Substack, and threads because when I'm writing something like a tweet, it can just go out to all of those platforms. there's no need for me to write something different. But for LinkedIn, like obviously just having this as the post wouldn't do too well. So what I can do instead is click on the LinkedIn specific post here and then I can make edits to this one specifically. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to use these two icons.

This image icon first will allow me to turn my idea into an image post like this. So works just like that. I can change the settings if I want to. I can change the text if I want to. So on and so forth. I can change my name. I like mine in all caps. So I'm going to change that. And then I can turn on or off the verified badge. So on and so forth. And you can see here it's only adding it to LinkedIn. So I hit add to post. And now the LinkedIn one is the only one with the image.

So X has it turned off. So does Substack. So does threads. But on the LinkedIn one specifically, what I want to do is I want to hit this chat button and it's going to help me turn this idea into a LinkedIn style caption that is longer and fits the LinkedIn platform more. And I'll show you how we can actually learn how to write those, but I'm just showing you how I create my own posts right now. So, I can click this. It's going to open up an AI chat and it's going to use the LinkedIn post skill that we have inside of here.

And then it's going to ask me what angle I want to use because obviously I don't just want it to rewrite what I said in the post. I want it to be something additional to it. So it's giving me a few. So the three angles that it sees are the market reset, the uncomfortable mirror, or the optimistic pivot. So it just gives me different angles on the ideas that I can run with. And so for this, I'm just going to say do number one. Just you can read through it on your own idea and do that. But you will see that it will output a caption that works very specifically for LinkedIn.

So it gave us this and I can just copy paste this into here or I can tell the chat, hey, add it to the LinkedIn version of this post and it will populate it for the LinkedIn version only. But I'm just going to copy it because I'm old school. Copy. Boom. Pop it in here. Paste.

Now what I like to do is I just treat this as inspiration, right? I I hate AI speak. I don't want people to see AI speak in my content. And when I read something like this, I just want to rewrite it all anyways. So, I just use this as a starting point because frankly, one, I don't really care about LinkedIn if I'm being honest. And my actual idea that I wrote is right here. So, the caption is more of just an addition to that. So, what I would do, and I'm not going to do it in in this video, but I would read through this, and I would essentially delete half of this, rewrite most of it, and just make sure it gets across my actual beliefs.

I do not like writing with AI, but I do understand it, and my opinion has kind of changed. I do think it is going to be very much a thing in the future because people will come around to understanding that it's never really been about the writing, the thing that you like. It's been about what you choose to post. If you choose to post slop, then you're just showing that you have low taste and standards. But if the ideas are actually good and they represent what you believe and what you would say and what you would write anyway, then the person choosing to post that is just putting a stake in the ground and saying, "Hey, this is what I believe." Because that's what you're doing with the writing anyways.

So, we'll see where that actually goes in the future because the debate right now is very heated. But that is essentially how I create and schedule the LinkedIn posts, right? Then I can hit schedule up here. I can choose the time slot. I can choose which platform it goes to. So on and so forth and then hit schedule. So now the question is how do you actually write these posts as a beginner or how do you learn to write posts as a beginner on any platform not just LinkedIn but LinkedIn rewards a very specific style of obviously image and caption.

So, what I want you to do is I want you to create what's called a swipe file or inspiration board of five posts that you really like and you could see yourself emulating. We talked about this in the Substack video, but creativity or originality or building an irreplaceable brand is essentially taking a bunch of different pieces from the brands or posts or ideas that you like because that's what shaped you as a person anyways and then mashing them together until your own unique voice emerges from that. Right? I don't think I'm this super original person. Most of my ideas and beliefs and everything else came from my parents, my teachers, the books that I really like, the conversations that I've had that have actually changed my mind on things.

Like I don't understand the whole originality argument because if someone else presents an idea or I read a book and I see a really good idea and I believe in that idea, why would I not immediately adopt that as a part of my head if it helps me make better decisions and live a better life? Why would I not replace an outdated or non-advantageous idea that's already in my head with a better idea that eventually crafts a very unique identity over time as I do that over and over and pull inspiration from so many different people. So, enough of that.

Back to the point. What you're going to do here is just scroll either through discover or on social media. And these don't have to be only LinkedIn posts. But then what you're going to do is save some of these to a board. So you're going to click the plus button here or you use the Chrome extension and save it inside of here to the board that you're going to create. Or on mobile you can be scrolling something like LinkedIn. Just hit the share button and then find Eden in the share to list and then it'll open up a board picker and you can save it to the board from there.

But what we're going to do is just click this, click save to board. We're going to create a new board. We're going to call it LinkedIn swipe file. And now that's saved. It's inside of here. And now I want you to do that five more times with five different ideas. And I just want you to make this a habit over time because this is a habit of top creators. You research what's working. You save inspiration. It's just what you do. It's essentially notetaking and idea capture for the creator rather than just trying to save ideas or highlights that you found in a book, which can be done perfectly fine inside of the library.

So, I'm going to save a few more and then I'll show you what we're going to do. And actually, one tip here, since you are a beginner, it may be worth clicking the breakouts uh category here or filter because what this does is it shows you creators with under 50,000 followers whose recent post were a 5x outlier. And an outlier essentially means how much better did it do than your typical post. So if a beginner is breaking out so to say, you know that they're doing something right when you don't know that with a celebrity or someone with a lot of followers because they could just be getting a lot of engagement simply because they have a lot of followers.

All right, so I didn't save five, but I ended up saving four LinkedIn posts to my LinkedIn swipe file. And now we're going to do something that I I love doing this because it's just so cool and not a lot of people use AI this way, even though it's a kind of obvious way of using AI. But what we're going to do here is click the chat button in the board so that the board is pulled into the chat so that it understands what's in the board and can take all of these into context. And now here's what we're going to say.

And this is what I really like doing. So what I said here is I want you to look through all the LinkedIn posts on this board and do a comprehensive breakdown of them. The hook, the structure, the psychological tactics, why they work. Think of it as if you were teaching me how to write viral LinkedIn posts from scratch. And that is a very important line because the best way to use AI in my opinion is to just treat it as if it is so stupid. Because most of the time it is. If I come in here and I say, "Hey, write me a viral LinkedIn post." It's just going to pull from its training data, which is from all over the internet and from all sorts of opinions when that's not how content works.

Like Justin Welsh, Chase Diamond, the people on this board, myself, we all have our own frameworks and strategies that we use and there isn't really a way to just mash those all together into a general guess of what works well on LinkedIn and claw, chat, GPT, etc. can't access social media posts. So, they can't look at the structure and see what works. So, I would assume that most of the time they're just looking at blog posts or YouTube videos or other things on how to write LinkedIn posts to string together just a pretty bad way of writing a post and it just sounds like super AI.

And so, the reason I like treating AI as just like this stupid person or like a base level employee is because I have to train it. I have to tell it exactly what to do. When I first had AI, this was a few years ago, try to replicate how I write tweets, it just couldn't do it. But then I wrote like a 2,000word prompt on exactly how I think about writing tweets. And then it got super close. It was very close to being able to write my tweets. And while I didn't use that to write my tweets, it was incredible at me being able to give it my newsletter and then it would pull out the big ideas and draft those as tweets.

And then I could see my own ideas then in the tweet form rather than trying to look through my newsletter and pull ideas out of it. I could already see them as like a prototype or a first draft. And so that's what we're trying to do here with these LinkedIn posts is we're trying to create a guide that we can then give the AI so that it knows exactly how to create a viral LinkedIn post. And that's why it's so important to choose the post that you would want to emulate personally. So, I'm going to hit enter on this. All right.

So, what it is doing is it opened the board and then it opened the post to get everything inside of the post. And now it's creating the breakdown for us as a document inside of our library that we can then add or organize into a board that we're going to call our breakdowns board because it's useful to save these things because if it works really well, why wouldn't you save it? And another fun thing that you could do is just hit slash and then tab and then you can turn it into a skill so that you have your own like LinkedIn writer in the AI chat.

So whenever you go to write a LinkedIn post, it understands exactly how to write the LinkedIn post. So, what I would do is after this is done generating is hit enter on the skill creator skill because that helps you create a skill and then say turn this breakdown into a skill and then that will add the skill to your Eden so that you can access it in a chat later and this is still going. Yeah, this is definitely a comprehensive breakdown but that's exactly what we want. All right, this is actually getting extremely big and I'm kind of worried at this point so maybe don't say comprehensive.

All right, so it finally finished and here's the full breakdown. We can open this up and then we can look through this. And what I would personally recommend is actually reading through this, right? Because this is essentially like you just created your own guide on how to create LinkedIn posts. And so whenever you're stuck writing a LinkedIn post, you can reference this document in a chat and just ask it, hey, help me to finish this LinkedIn post. Or you can just ask the chat questions about it. So we have all of this broken down. the psychological tactics for this post, authority borrowing, complexity reduction, the iterative reframe, the openloop CTA, why it worked, post two, Justin Welsh, so on and so forth.

This was a very long document, so we're not going to read all of this, but it is here.

So now we can go back to the old chat here and do what we want to do next, or let's just create a new chat to save context and have everything cleared out. And then we're going to type this out. So at viral LinkedIn postb breakdown because that's what we just created. So what I said is I want you to interview me to pull content ideas out of me. Get the necessary information you need like what I talk about or parts of my story. Then help me generate different angles on those ideas. After that, we're going to use the LinkedIn post breakdown to turn those ideas into structured LinkedIn posts that have high potential of going viral.

So you can hit enter on this. I'll hit enter on this just so you can see what it says. But we're not going to go through this entire process because you can just chat with it, right? And it works pretty well and it's based off of data. And the other thing you can do here at at the end once you've actually created the post is again you can type slash and then go to skills and then hit skill creator and then say I want to turn this entire process into a skill that I can replicate. And then do you see how powerful that is?

Because once you've gone through this process once, essentially a skill is like procedural knowledge. It's kind of like a prompt in a sense. But then if you have this entire process saved as a skill, then when you need to create a LinkedIn post, you just go to the chat or you go to Claude if it's connected to the Eden MCP and then you type slash LinkedIn writer skill, the one that you create, and then say, "Help me write LinkedIn posts." And then it does the exact same thing just faster. So you can just repeat that over and over again. So as you can see it said this what's your domain what's your story what's your audience what's your goal etc the other helpful thing here and the way I want you to think about using AI is like how can I turn these into documents that I can reference easily the next time right because I have a brand strategy document I have documents of my past newsletters I have documents about my story my information etc it's all inside of my library but if you don't have that then it would be wise as you're doing this to answer all the questions and then say at the end, hey, create a document in in my library with all the information I just gave you about me so I can reference it in another chat when I need to.

And there's also another video on this channel called my entire social media strategy for the next 90 days, something like that. Now, I talk about my entire strategy, but one thing that I recommend doing that I recommend inside of there, too, is go to the custom AI tab, click explore, and the very first one, personal brand strategist. Add this to your workspace, and then it's going to open up a chat with all of the information in here. So, it has a six-hour video from Caleb Rston on building a personal brand. It has other personal branding videos inside of there. It has playbooks and documents.

And so you're essentially chatting with all of these things, but what this strategist does is it gives you a document with your entire personal brand strategy, right? And then you can reference that document over and over again. It gives you your content pillars, your audience, your mission, your vision, your anti-vision, an entire brand that is much better than really any brand strategy that you'll come up with. I recommend this for people who have been creating for a while as well. Because even when I went through this, I was like, "Wow, this is a great refresher." And now I have something I can come back to when I need to realign with what it is that I talk about.

So I would highly highly recommend going through this before or after you actually do what I just showed you. Now, one other thing with this chat is that you don't always have to ask it to interview you to pull content ideas out of you. If you already have an idea that you want to write about, you can simply use this breakdown that we created to help turn that idea into a structured post. And remember, you could do this for any content on any platform, not just LinkedIn. That's just what we're going over in this video. And so the question then is like, okay, well, how do I come up with my own ideas?

Well, you read a book or you have a conversation or anything like that. And then you can use the mobile app or you can just come in here into the library and then you hit new and you hit card because that's for a quick idea. And then you just jot it down really quick inside of here. And one other thing that I want to show you is I just filtered this by Substack to give you an idea, but there is a reader mode inside of Eden. So Eden isn't only just for like creating content because in order to create good unique content that most other apps I guess just don't get is that you need to read, you need to fill your mind with ideas like Eden is both a second brain for ideas, but then the other side of that is it's for creators to actually turn those ideas into good content.

So, I can paste a link to any Substack article or I can upload a PDF or an EPUB or paste a link to an X article and then I can just go into these like this one and then I can set it in my settings to open the reader view by default if you don't care about any of this. But then I can just hit the reader mode and now I can read the entire article here or on my phone and then I can highlight ideas and then once these are highlighted those will save to my library as well as individual highlights.

And in the library, we autotag and categorize everything. So when you search the library either via the chat or inside of library itself, it can find anything. So if you say, "Hey, I want to create a piece of content around learning and then I want to structure it into a LinkedIn post. Can you help me with that?" It will probably find your highlights on this on learning and this Substack article and anything else that you've saved related to learning and be able to use those ideas as the ideas for your LinkedIn post.

So now to pivot into more of the growth side of things like growth on LinkedIn. Growth on any social media platform is not only about posting. That's what a lot of maybe beginners get wrong is they think that they just post and then the algorithm just potentially blesses them and makes them go viral and then they gain a ton of followers. But that's that's just not how it works. But it's understandable because as a beginner, you don't really treat this as a business. you treat it as like a hobby or something that you're going to try and and see if it works out when that's a failing strategy.

That's not a strategy. What you have to understand is that every big creator or every creator that succeeds has some form of business sense to them. And they understand that social media is a traffic mechanism for their business. And so they have to treat it as a business. But the creators who love the artistic and creative side have to balance that out with the art and the creative side of it. So, we're going to go over a few little tips, but the next creator boot camp for Eden starts on September 9th, and that's where we go over everything. We go over branding, short form content, long- form content, and then social media growth and like the depths of social media growth that most people don't talk about.

And so, you can join the boot camp with the link in the description, and that is included on an Eden Pro annual plan. Or, if you just buy the boot camp, you can use that as credit towards an Eden Pro plan as well. if you don't want to sign up now but want to sign up later and you get 60 days of Eden Pro included with the price of the boot camp. So whether you want the boot camp standalone, you can do that or if you want it included with Eden Pro, then you can do that as well. It's not going to show that on the landing page, but just know that what you pay will be a credit towards your plan if you want it to be.

So if I were to start over and just go about LinkedIn growth, what I would do is three things. The first is just what you do on social media that everyone is going to tell you you have to do is you have to reply. Let's say 10 replies a day because social media growth is less about hoping the algorithm saves you and is more about finding unique ways to get your content in front of other people. And there's really only one way to get your content in front of other people without the algorithm, and that's to put your ideas in front of other people's audiences because that's where the followers are, right?

Justin Welsh, myself, other people have hundreds of thousands of followers. Those followers might like your content. And so what you do is you just time block it. You put it on your calendar for 30 minutes to go into LinkedIn to scroll to find a post and then comment on it. And the way that you leave a comment really matters because everyone on LinkedIn and really every social media platform is just flooding the replies with very terrible comments that nobody cares about. Nobody wants to click on it and follow because like if you just say, "Oh, this was a great insight.

This was a great post." Who in their right mind is going to see that and be like, "Oh, that's someone worth following. I'm going to click on their profile and follow them because that was just super valuable." So, what I would do is leave a comment worth following. And what that tends to mean is giving a tangential idea to the post that you're commenting on. So you give another insight. You give value. You give some actionable steps. You give what worked for you. Or my favorite is to just say how the post relates to your life or a part of your story.

So, if someone like Justin Welsh created a post on work life balance and how you shouldn't how you should be slowing down, then I would think about a time in my life where I was going too fast and I would write a paragraph reply on that. And that is so much more worth following than just leaving, oh, this was a great post because you're being lazy and just know that you have to leave 10 comments today and treat it as a chore. So, just don't do that. Leave a quality reply. The next thing that I would do is what I showed you earlier with on the image inside of the post, right?

There's the caption and then there's the image. And for the image, I would use someone else's idea that has already gone viral because that is a proven idea. That means it's much more likely to get engagement because it's already gotten engagement before. So, I would put that in a post style image with their profile picture, their name, and then the tweet, the thread, the Substack note, the LinkedIn post, whatever it may be. I put it inside of there. And then I write my own point of view as the caption, and I tag the person that I'm including the idea for in the caption so that they are more likely to see it.

So, let's say Sahil Bloom as an example. I find one of his viral posts. I go to Eden. I go to the creators tab. I filter by top liked. I find one of his posts that I can give my own ideas on. I turn that into a post style image. I put it in theuler or just upload it to LinkedIn. And then I write my own caption with a hook, a body, value. And then I say, "This was an incredible idea from Sahil Bloom." Sahil Bloom has like 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. And the reason this works is because the creators aren't stupid.

Sahil Bloom knows that if he likes or comments or shares that post that people are going to see his idea and follow him as well. So, it's mutually beneficial. And what that also means is if I do that time and time again, I make posting other people's ideas with my own point of view as a consistent part of my content strategy, then I'm increasing my chances for them to share the actual post. So, Sahil Bloom, 800,000 followers, he shares the post. That's way better than getting picked up by the algorithm. So, that's step two. I would reply 10 times a day with a good reply because that's just basic social media advice and you need to make yourself known in the community.

You just need to get more eyes on you so people get used to you. And then two is I would use other people's ideas with my own point of view and post that two to three times a week. And then the third thing that I would do is just get really good at writing good content, good ideas. If you watched the how to grow on Instagram from zero followers video, you know that that is what I was harping on over and over again. The formats, the viral hooks, the whatever the templates, the things that you can download, those are okay, but they don't matter.

You have to focus on the quality of ideas and what you're putting out every single day. You just have to get good at the main job of being a content creator is creating good content. And so, we went over that throughout this entire video. So, with those three things, you're off to an incredible start with growing on LinkedIn. So, I will leave it at that. Again, there is the creator boot camp link in the description. There's the LinkedIn post studio link in the description and a few other things down there that you can take a look at. But, I will leave it at that.

Thank you for watching. I hope it was valuable.