People ask me what my LinkedIn lead generation process is, and they expect something elaborate.
Three posts a week. About half a dozen comments a day. Posts on the shorter side.
That is it. I have been asked often enough to know the answer is disappointing.
Why does something this small work?
Because it is small enough that I keep doing it.
Nearly every LinkedIn strategy fails on sustainability instead of on design. Somebody reads a guide, commits to daily long-form posts, a content calendar and a distribution plan, runs it enthusiastically for five weeks, and stops. What they have at the end is five weeks of visibility, which is worth nothing, because the platform rewards being there in month nine.
Three posts a week is roughly twenty minutes of writing, twice or three times, in a week. Six comments a day is a few minutes. It survives busy weeks, bad weeks and holidays, and surviving is the entire trick.
A modest process you run for a year beats an impressive one you abandon in March, and it is not close.
The book on this: Focus on LinkedIn is 276 pages on the platform in three parts, from profile through to lead generation, written after building profiles for C-suite executives and ambassadors.
Why do the comments do so much?
Because they put you in front of somebody else’s audience without requiring anything of yours to travel.
A post depends on distribution. You write it, and then whether anybody sees it is largely out of your hands. A thoughtful comment on somebody else’s post is read by the people already gathered there, and it costs a fraction of the effort.
The word doing the work is thoughtful. Agreement adds nothing. What gets noticed is a comment that adds something the post did not say, disagrees with a reason attached, or answers a question in the thread properly. Six of those a day is a small amount of writing and it compounds, because the same people keep seeing you being useful.
Most people have this backwards. They spend their effort on posts and treat commenting as an afterthought.
Why shorter posts?
Because they get read, and being read is the job.
The long post has a place and I write them occasionally. But length is not a proxy for value, and on a platform people check between meetings, a shorter piece with one clear idea does better than a longer one containing three.
I have never once had somebody complain that a useful post ended too early.
How long does it take to work?
Longer than anybody selling a course will tell you, and the honest example I use is a client of mine who was 65 and using LinkedIn as his primary job search tool.
He worked it seriously. He stayed active, posted consistently, reached out to his connections, and kept himself visible. It took over eight months.
He did not get the job he originally wanted. He did find a job, and LinkedIn is where it happened.
I include that example because it is the shape of a real result instead of a marketing one. Eight months, consistent effort, an outcome that was good but not the one he had pictured. Anybody promising you faster than that is describing a different thing from what I have watched happen.
What do you not use?
Sales Navigator. I will be honest about that one: I never could use the thing.
The interfaces are cluttered, the setup requires sustained focus I do not have, and the whole product assumes a sales workflow that does not match how I operate. That is not a criticism of the tool. Plenty of people get value from it.
I mention it because advice writers rarely admit which of the recommended tools they personally bounced off, and that omission makes readers feel like the failure is theirs. Three posts a week and six comments a day is what I run because it is what I can keep running.
What does the profile need to do?
Answer the question the reader arrived with, which is usually whether you can help them.
I have written profiles for C-suite executives and ambassadors, and the common failure is identical at every level. The profile describes the person’s history instead of their usefulness. It is accurate, complete, and answers a question nobody asked.
A related thing worth mentioning, because it changed how I read profiles. I was once interviewing a database administrator who had both Oracle and Windows certifications. During the conversation he explained how understanding the operating system helped him troubleshoot database performance and work around system limits. Those extra certifications, which looked like clutter, made him a stronger candidate, because they showed he understood the whole picture instead of one narrow specialism.
The lesson I took was that the apparently irrelevant part of your background is often the part that makes you distinctive, and most people edit it out in the name of focus.
What would I tell somebody starting?
Pick a rate you can hold for a year. If in doubt, halve it. The number matters far less than whether you are still doing it at month nine.
Comment more than you post. It is cheaper, it reaches further, and almost nobody does it properly.
Keep it short. One idea per post.
Expect months instead of weeks. Eight months for a serious, consistent effort is a realistic figure.
Leave the odd parts of your background in. The Oracle and Windows combination is the sort of thing that makes somebody memorable, and the instinct to tidy it away is wrong.
The disappointing thing about the answer is also why it works. There is no system to fail at. There is a small amount of writing, done regularly, for longer than feels reasonable.
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