One of my LinkedIn posts recently went viral with 120,000 impressions - an equivalent ad value of nearly $4,000 USD or MORE if you consider organic content is more trusted - and I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it. 

But first, let me tell you what I gained from this post:

🔹 121,450 impressions

🔹 209 profile views

🔹 60 new followers

🔹 1,111 clicks to my website (CTA)

Secondary stats from my website indicates:

🔹 43 new free subscribers 

🔹 3 paid subscribers 

Warning: There was no trick, secret or hack. I spent upwards of 20 hours in total to achieve this, but the good news is that anyone can do this as long as you’re willing to put in the work.

Preparation List - 13.5 hours

10 hours writing and 3 hours creating images for a high quality thought leadership article on a topic that I knew my audiences would care about, which I would post to my website.

10 minutes writing the LinkedIn post version of the article which followed my best practices for writing LinkedIn hooks to draw engagement and interest.

20 minutes scheduling the article and LinkedIn post to publish on Christmas Eve which is contrarian advice from most experts, but I have my reasons and apparently it worked. 

Publication and Promotion - 6.5 hours

Immediately after the LinkedIn post dropped, I went into promotion mode, directly DM’ing and even whatsapping about 20 other industry influencers asking them to please like and engage with my content (1.5 hours)

Within an hour I hand messaged a second group of up to 100 direct connections to ask for their opinion of my article (2 hours)

After about half a day, I saw that the article was able to maintain about 1K impressions per hour and I had seen that several times before - that means it has viral momentum - so I doubled down and started telling every inbound connection request to engage with the article, and I continued pushing my DM’s so long as the post was maintaining 1K impressions per hour or more and I probably sent another 100-150 DMs during that period (3 hours)

Post Trending 

After the impressions flatlined, I put a small daily ad budget of $13 USD on the post to see if it’s possible to breathe a second life into a post, but it doesn’t seem to be working, so I pulled the add after a few days.

Ads are freakin expensive.

I created about 15 new conversations on various topics and opportunities from this post alone. 

To pay for this kind of exposure would have cost about $4,000 USD in ad spend and the conversions would have been much lower since organic posts have a far higher conversion rate compared to paid ads - organic is far more trustworthy to readers than paid ads.

I hope you learned something from this post. If you did, please sign up for our newsletter from our website, follow our LinkedIn, or tag a friend who is running digital marketing for their company so that they too can crush it online.