Last month, I came across a post on Reddit with this title: "You have 0 followers. How do you start building your personal brand?"

I answered with 9 simple steps that I use with my clients. But before we get into the steps, I want to manage expectations and clarify what LinkedIn can and cannot do for your personal brand and your business.

LinkedIn can:

All of this is possible. But you need to be patient, and you need a really killer brand and incredible positioning. Generic content doesn't get you close to any of the above.

Now let's look at what isn't possible with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn cannot:

I would like to add a disclaimer here, cold invites (sending connection invites to people you don’t know) are fine, but the intention is never to slide into someone's messages on Day 1, or even Week 1. The intention is to keep posting, continuously, so you stay on their feed. Then one day they publish something interesting and you finally have a real reason to reply. Until then, you remain mum.

Let’s cut to the chase, here are the 9 steps, I use with my clients: 

Step 1: Identify your skills, knowledge, and expertise

Look at your resume. What skills, knowledge, and expertise do you possess? Evaluate your experience so far. What have you worked on? Can you publicly talk about this without being preachy? Then do it.

Step 2: Define your ocean

Whom can your skills, knowledge, and experience benefit? Marketing managers, startup founders, C-level executives? What ocean will you swim in? This defines who you want to attract and have a conversation with.

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Step 3: How will you swim in that ocean

This is identifying your positioning, or what I like to call your aura. Your positioning defines how people will recognize you in a crowded marketplace and how you will establish your identity.

The brand is the part that makes someone stop on your post specifically. Your POV on an industry challenge, what annoys you about your industry, how you solve problems. I call it aura, and aura is the one thing a numbered list structurally cannot hand you. So you don't manufacture it. You identify it, then you build on it.

Step 4: Add friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances to your LinkedIn network

So that it doesn't look like a spam account when you start networking. It is important for your account to look legit. This step is non-negotiable.

Step 5: Post actively

This is the part most people dread. It is intimidating to get the ball rolling. But if you defined your positioning in Step 3, you should have a starting point for the angle you want to take. I usually segment it into three parts:

Step 6: Follow and comment on people in your niche and target audience

LinkedIn rewards conversation that stays within the platform. Posting is one part of the conversation, engaging via comments is the other. There are two things you accomplish by commenting: you gain trust from others in your industry, and your profile gets noticed by other commenters or by people who liked that creator's post.

Step 7: Begin expanding your network with your target audience (cold invites)

Add people in the target audience you identified in Step 2. No need to add a message. I find an invite without a message does just fine.

Step 8: Track your post performance

Evaluate what works, kill what doesn’t and never stop testing. You can track your post performance manually by noting down all the stats. I use Magic Post to do this now. 

You can use my affiliate link to get a 15% discount for life - https://go.magicpost.in/shreya-vaidya. Full disclosure - I get a kickback on this as well. :)

Step 9: Be consistent

This is probably the hardest part of the equation. Posting, commenting, engaging, adding people, consistently, takes commitment. It is a muscle you need to build to achieve your goal.

One of my clients is a senior consultant for a very large ERP software. When he came to me, his content was, in his words then mine, ChatGPT-coded. Everything generated from an LLM, technically fine, no personality. Which is understandable. His focus was being an expert in his domain, not a content creator. He had done the list. Profile, posts, consistency. And it landed with the emotional resonance of a terms-and-conditions page.

A few meetings in, I realized he had a fierce POV about his domain and spoke about specific topics with real authority. None of it was in his posts.

Finding the aura is not a content calendar. It is an intro call where I do most of the listening. I walk him through what actually works on LinkedIn, the hooks, the formats, the engagement patterns, and the real point is to watch his reaction. His discomfort. Then we define his positioning and pillars together. But the quieter thing I am doing the whole time is clocking how he speaks, what irritates him, what excites him, how he structures a sentence, how he exclaims when something surprises him. That syntax becomes his voice.

What changed: his follower count went up one percent. One. The number nobody screenshots. His inbound, though, moved to roughly one inquiry every two days, and the quality of who was finding him improved sharply. The metric everyone chases barely twitched. The metric that pays the bills did.

Profile optimized, network seeded, content shipping on schedule. Everything functions. The trouble is everything is also interchangeable. A thousand people can run the same nine steps and produce a thousand profiles that are technically correct and indistinguishable from each other.

Hence, having your own POV, your own personality, your own aura is a non-negotiable.

What about follower counts I hear you ask? How much is enough? 1k, 3k, 10k, 100k?

People arrive wanting ten thousand followers in a month and never stop to ask whether ten thousand is even available to them. Follower counts are fickle. They depend on your industry, the strength of the network you already have, your content, and whether it actually resonates with the people you want it to reach. If your audience is niche and your content is niche, expecting ten thousand followers is a faux pas. Sometimes the honest answer to "how big can this get" is, it depends. Which is the one answer a LinkedIn expert is not supposed to give.

So I handed over the nine steps. I know what they leave out. I send them anyway.