The 6-Step Blueprint to Go From Zero to "Many" LinkedIn Followers
This complete blueprint for rapidly building a powerful presence on LinkedIn is based on the proven strategy developed by Tommy Clark. Even if you are starting from zero, this 6-step framework, which helped founders like Austin Hughes grow their accounts past 22,000 followers, provides the foundation you need. Learn the secrets to account positioning, strategic content funnels, and credibility jacking to build your audience quickly and sustainably.
This complete blueprint for rapidly building a powerful presence on LinkedIn is based on the framework developed by Tommy Clark. This isn't theoretical advice; it's the exact strategy that has helped founders, like Austin Hughes, grow from a minimal following to over 22,000 followers, establishing them as an authority in their space.
If you’re serious about leveraging the platform for growth, you need to implement all six steps of this strategy. Here is the foundation required to build your audience quickly and sustainably.
- Get Your Account Positioning Right
This is the most critical step. If you get this wrong, all the consistent posting in the world won't matter.
Answer the Golden Question: What is the one reason your target audience would follow you on social media? Your answer must be clear, simple, and direct. Avoid convoluted descriptions or trying to serve too many audiences at once (e.g., trying to cover both "email marketing" and "B2B sales" will confuse followers). Pick one answer and own it.
Define Your Core Beliefs: Identify one to three core beliefs about your industry that others might disagree with you on. To break through the noise, you can't have an average take. The people worth following throughout history were often polarizing—you must stand for something to build an above-average audience.
Optimize Your Profile: Ensure your profile clearly communicates this positioning. Your headline should include your role/company and a one-sentence encapsulation of your golden question answer. Use your featured links to guide a visitor to the next obvious step in your funnel, whether that's a newsletter, a demo page, or your homepage.
- Implement a Strategic Content Funnel
Organize your content topics using a simple funnel structure:
Top of Funnel (TOF): Broader, generally appealing content like founder journey insights or takes on work-life balance. These perform well for reach but shouldn't be your only focus, as they can build a "fluffy" audience.
Middle of Funnel (MOF): This is your thought leadership. It's industry-specific content that establishes you as a go-to resource for your ideal customer profile (ICP). Spend most of your time here.
Bottom of Funnel (BOF): Your product and sales content—demos, testimonials, case studies, and feature launches. Only posting BOF content will not build an audience; you must give people a reason to consume your content by becoming their favorite content creator.
Format Selection: Use a mix of formats (video, text, carousels, graphics). The most important thing is to pick a medium you can stay consistent with for the long term. Posts with relevant media tend to perform better, even if it’s a text-heavy post.
- Set a Consistent Posting Cadence
Winning on LinkedIn requires commitment. You must commit 6 to 12 months of consistent posting.
Level 1 (Starting Out): Post about three times a week.
Level 2 (The Sweet Spot): Post five times per week. This is where most founders should aim to hang out. It ensures consistent presence without leading to burnout or a drop in quality.
Level 3 (Obsessed): Seven or more times per week.
Quality vs. Quantity: Create as much content as you can, as long as the quality bar stays high. Content production is a skill that speeds up with practice, so don't let the initial time investment discourage you.
- Engage Proactively
To solve the "cold start problem" of low initial engagement, you need to manually build your initial audience cluster.
Outbound Connection Requests: Send 20 connection requests every single day to accounts that are in your ICP. This directly fills your flywheel with people who are likely to engage.
Thoughtful Commenting: Spend 20 minutes per day leaving thoughtful comments on other accounts—both ICP accounts and relevant influencer accounts. Leaving five thoughtful comments is better than twenty AI-generated ones. This builds reciprocal relationships and gets you in front of more people, as LinkedIn has indicated that active commenters get more profile views.
- Embrace Rapid Iteration
Consistent posting from Steps 1–4 will get you to growth, but iteration is how you accelerate it.
The Feedback Loop: As Elon Musk once noted, it’s vital to have a feedback loop where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.
The 1% Improvement: Before creating your next post, ask: What’s one specific thing I can do to make this post better than the last five? These small 1% improvements can lead to asymmetric results, turning a 500-view post into a 500,000-view post.
Focus Areas: Prioritize iterating on these micro-skills:
The Hook: Are you packaging your ideas for maximum viral potential?
Storytelling Ability: Can you share narratives and relevant personal experiences, moving beyond basic how-to content?
Weaving in Relevant Examples: Use examples from your own career or other relevant figures to make your content more relatable and trustworthy.
- Use Credibility Jacking
Credibility is a multiplier for performance. If you are starting from zero with no established network, you can borrow credibility.
The Strategy: Use the names of prominent companies, figures, and events in your content's ideas and hooks. This gets people who might not know who you are to stop scrolling because they recognize the name you're referencing.
Pay Back the Loan: This is crucial: You are taking a loan on their credibility, and you must pay it back by inserting your own unique take and expert opinion. You cannot simply be a news channel reporting on others.
Amplification Tactic: When using this strategy, consider tagging the person or company you are doing a content breakdown on. If they engage or reply, the post gets amplified to their audience, which can send your post "to the moon."
These six steps create a powerful system for rapidly building an audience. But remember, an audience is only as valuable as its ability to generate business. After you've mastered these steps, the next crucial step is converting those followers into paying customers.
This framework is based on the video, How to Grow From 0 to 10,000 Followers on LinkedIn FAST, by Tommy Clark. You can watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YPmpy4fVGw.
How Contentide Can Help
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