People ask me what my LinkedIn lead generation process is, and they expect something elaborate.
I post three times a week, keep those posts on the shorter side, and leave about half a dozen comments a day.
That’s it. I’ve been asked often enough to know the answer is disappointing.
Why does a small posting habit work?
Because it’s 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.
I’ve been that person. In October 2024 I admitted that one reason I couldn’t keep a steady marketing presence was that I quit anything that hadn’t worked after a couple of weeks. So I laid a foundation of branding, the posts and the articles, that stays there for good, and I experiment on top of it. That’s how I fight the urge to keep changing things. Nobody’s responded in a whole 24 hours? It was Saturday, dork.
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’s 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’s 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. Back in 2024 I scored it on a scale of one to ten: a like is a 1 because likes do nothing, a repost is about a 5, and a comment is a 10. LinkedIn has changed since then, and now it favors a repost with your own comment added.
The key word is thoughtful. Agreement adds nothing. What gets noticed is a comment that adds something the post didn’t 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 adds up, because the same people keep seeing you being useful.
Most people write “great post” and then say something about the post. Reverse that. Lead with your own conclusion or a question, and thank the poster last, because the goal is for other readers to read your comment and maybe start talking to you. After I leave mine, I reply to everyone who already commented, then come back a day later and reply to the new ones.
Most people have this backwards. They spend their effort on posts and treat commenting as an afterthought. Reposts get neglected the same way. In 2025 I called reposting the most valuable thing of all, because a repost puts your post in the reposter’s feed, and their people engage with it because they like them. LinkedIn reach has dropped overall since then, so a repost helps without fixing that. Still, email the people you know and ask them outright to repost it.
I blame the courses for that. They sell content calendars and posting templates because those are easy to package, and nobody can package the habit of reading somebody’s post properly and saying something worth reading underneath it. So people pour an hour into a post that vanishes and skip the comment a room full of strangers would have read.
Why do shorter LinkedIn posts work better?
Because they get read, and being read is the job.
The long post has a place and I write them occasionally. But length isn’t 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’ve never once had somebody complain that a useful post ended too early.
How long does consistent posting take to work?
Longer than anybody selling a course will tell you, and the real 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 didn’t get the job he originally wanted. He did find a job, and LinkedIn is where it happened.
I include that example because it’s 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’d pictured. Anybody promising you faster than that is describing a different thing from what I’ve watched happen.
I get irritated with the LinkedIn gurus who promise results in a month. People believe them, post hard for four weeks, see nothing, and decide the platform doesn’t work for people like them, when all that failed was a timeline somebody invented to sell a course.
What LinkedIn tactics does Richard Lowe not use?
Sales Navigator. I never could use the thing.
The interfaces are cluttered, the setup requires sustained focus I don’t have, and the product assumes a sales workflow that doesn’t match how I operate. That’s 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’s what I can keep running.
What does a LinkedIn profile need to do?
Answer the question the reader arrived with. That’s usually whether you can help them. I’ve 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’s accurate, complete, and answers a question nobody asked.
A related thing 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 full 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.
How often should you post and comment on LinkedIn?
Pick a rate you can hold for a year. If in doubt, halve it. The number matters far less than whether you’re still doing it at month nine.
Comment more than you post. It’s 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 answer is the one that works, and too many people pay for the impressive one instead. There’s no system to fail at, only a small amount of writing done regularly for longer than feels reasonable. Anybody selling you something more elaborate is selling you the version you’ll abandon in March.
