What to post on LinkedIn

Most advice about posting on LinkedIn is written for people whose business is LinkedIn. Grow the follower count, post daily, hook them in the first line. That works if attention is the product. If your product is bookkeeping or family law, follower count is close to irrelevant. Two hundred of the right people beats twenty thousand of the wrong ones.

So the question is not how to go viral. It is what a professional should say when the goal is one good client conversation a month.

Post about the work, not about posting

The strongest material you have is the stuff you find boring, because you have done it a hundred times and it no longer feels like knowledge. That is exactly what makes it valuable to someone doing it for the first time.

Three formats that reliably work:

The question you have answered more than once

If three clients have asked you the same thing this year, write the answer down. You already know it well enough to explain it without preparing. It is useful on its own, and anyone searching for that answer later finds you attached to it.

The decision you talk people through

Not a how-to. A judgment call. When to incorporate, when to hire, when to walk away from a client. Showing how you weigh a decision demonstrates competence in a way a checklist cannot.

The thing you changed your mind about

Rare, and disproportionately effective. Everyone in your field posts what they believe. Almost nobody posts what they used to believe and why they stopped. It reads as honest because it is.

What to leave out

• Client details, obviously. You do not need them for the writing to be good, and in most cases you should not use them.
• Anything that starts with "I am excited to announce".
• Industry news with no opinion attached. Reposting a rule change adds nothing. Explaining what it means for someone like your client does.
• Motivational content. It performs, and it attracts an audience that will never hire you.

How often

Once a week, indefinitely, beats five times a week for a month. This is the part everyone gets wrong. The people who win at this are not the most talented writers in their field, they are the ones still doing it in month nine.

A realistic cadence looks like:

1. One substantial post a week, four to six paragraphs
2. A comment or two on other people's posts, because that is where conversations actually start
3. Nothing else

If that feels thin, it is because you are comparing it to people who post for a living. You are not competing with them. You are competing with the other three bookkeepers your prospect is considering, and none of them are posting at all.

The part that actually takes the time

Ask anyone who has tried this and stopped, and they will not tell you the writing was hard. They will tell you they never knew what to write about that week, so they did nothing, and then it had been a month, and then it felt weird to start again.

Deciding is the bottleneck. Writing is the easy part once the decision is made.