“Should you publish LinkedIn articles or should you stick to a traditional self hosted blog? Learn why you should start publishing LinkedIn articles.“

Today, content marketing is a powerful marketing channel and most businesses and companies are harnessing this medium to grow their brands and improve their reach. As a channel of content marketing, I believe we’re all familiar with blogging as one of the most powerful marketing mediums we have today.

Both huge and small brands now leverage blogging as a content marketing medium to grow and promote their businesses digitally. When done properly, blogging can bring in thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of monthly visitors to your business website.

In fact, research by hubspot reveals that agencies who blog acquire more customers than businesses who don’t. The same research also reveals, companies who blog receive 97% more backlinks than businesses who don’t – this shows how powerful this content marketing channel is and why your business should invest some time and money into it.

Now, if your company already harnesses this powerful content marketing channel, the question that pops up to your head may be; “should I post on linkedin or on my blog?”

You probably always see the “Write an article on LinkedIn” link which lets you publish LinkedIn articles but have never clicked the link.

You wonder if you should ever write and publish on LinkedIn blog page or is it just a waste of time?

The question basically remains, should you publish LinkedIn articles or should you stick to a traditional self hosted blog?

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons you should start publishing LinkedIn articles and why you shouldn’t.

LinkedIn Articles: Should You Publish on LinkedIn or Stick to Your Blog?

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First of all, before we go into why you should or shouldn’t publish LinkedIn articles, let’s first explain what a LinkedIn article is – is it the usual status updates we know, does it just allow users post longer status or is it another blogging platform?

Question: What is a LinkedIn article?

LinkedIn article publishing platform is a uniques social media feature that allows users, members and Influencers to publish articles about their expertise and/or interests. LinkedIn went further to explain that publishing an article on LinkedIn doesn’t mean you’re a LinkedIn Influencer though it does allow you to further establish your professional identity by expressing your views around a subject consistently.

Note: Not every LinkedIn user can publish articles on the platform but every user can still publish status updates that’s not more than 1300 characters.

Once you’ve been given the ability to post LinkedIn articles, you can easily navigate to your LinkedIn blog page from your homepage. In fact, LinkedIn makes it super simple to publish articles on the platform by adding a “Write an article on LinkedIn” link below the status update bar.

Just like I’ve mentioned, publishing on LinkedIn does not mean you’re a LinkedIn influencer but allows you publish content that will showcase your expertise and boost your reach.

Having publishing access also doesn’t depend on your account type – both free and premium LinkedIn members can have access to publish articles.

How to Write an Article on Linkedin?

Now that we’ve discussed what a LinkedIn article is, let’s quickly show you, step by step, how to publish articles on LinkedIn.

To create a LinkedIn article, here’s what to do;

Step 1: Click the “Write an article” below the “Start a post” link at the top of your LinkedIn homepage or LinkedIn feed. This takes you to the publishing tool or what I call the LinkedIn blogging page. 

Alternatively, you can scroll down the page as you read an article on LinkedIn, below this, you’ll see a “Write an article” link in the top bar, below the LinkedIn navigation bar.

Step 2: Insert a headline in the “Headline” and an image in the large image section above the headline field. The headline field is super important and makes your content engaging and can slightly increase shares and interactions per article.

Step 3: Click on the “Write here” field, below the headline, to begin writing your LinkedIn article. This aspect contains the main content of the post and can range anywhere from 500 to as much as you may want.

Please note that there’s no restriction by LinkedIn as to how long or short your LinkedIn content must be. But to put out the best content that adds value to your LinkedIn community, you should keep your content around 500 to 1500 words per article.

Step 4: Click the Publish button at the top right corner of the publishing page to make your article live and available for your community. Initially, LinkedIn alerts all your connections and followers whenever you publish new LinkedIn articles but due to some spam usage, LinkedIn have since stopped this feature.

Linkedin Articles Vs Blog Posts

Going back to today’s content, we get asked a lot by social media users whether they should use LinkedIn publishing instead of the traditional blog posts we’re used to. For this, here are a few pros and cons to LinkedIn publishing or better known as LinkedIn articles.

Pros and Cons of Publishing LinkedIn Articles

Pro: LinkedIn publishing is way easier than publishing blog posts.

LinkedIn offers a pretty easy to use platform where its members and users can publish articles without having to go through long processes and several dashboards and tools.

As a matter of fact, you can publish and article on LinkedIn with just 2 to 3 clicks, unlike publishing on a website. LinkedIn publishing is a unique, clean interface that allows members post content easily without requiring deep knowledge of certain tools, dashboards and functionalities.

The LinkedIn publishing interface looks so much like Medium – it is really simple to use, publish and navigate.

Con: LinkedIn publishing offers way lesser features than traditional blog sites.

Just as we’ve mentioned, LinkedIn offers a simple and easy to use interface for its members but what about the availability of vast features to improve your articles, its performance and reach?

For instance, the traditional blogging platforms that we use offer several features like;

• Search engine optimization tools (e.g. Yoast),
• Different, customizable social share buttons,
• Detailed insights and stats (Google analytics) and many more.

With LinkedIn articles, members are restricted to just simple features that allow publishing, editing, formatting and simple analytics.

Pro: Posting on LinkedIn is free

It may cost you a few bucks to get a domain, host your website and get it running effectively with some tools and plugins. This can go as low as $10 and as high as $1000 (yes, there are plugins and tools as expensive as $1000).

With LinkedIn publishing, you don’t have to worry about extra charges and product costs because publishing LinkedIn articles is completely free and doesn’t require third party tools or plugins to run.

Though these third party tools and plugins can be really effective and help grow your blogs but LinkedIn focuses on offering a simple to use interface where user basically put out great content that adds value to people and grows your influence.

Con: LinkedIn initially shares your content with all your connections and followers, but no more!

When LinkedIn initially rolled out this amazing publishing platform, it came with a notification feature where all your connections and followers would be notified whenever you publish a new LinkedIn article.

This was a very useful feature because you wouldn’t have to manually notify people whenever you publish new content on your blog(s) – LinkedIn literally offered an ‘email list’ for you for free – with just a single click, all your users would be notified whenever you publish an article.

Today, this feature is no longer available as some members abused it by publishing spam content (or articles) which were equally sent to 1000s of LinkedIn users. This caused the platform to stop notifying users about new articles from their connections.

Personally, I would be all in on LinkedIn if this feature was still available!

Pro: LinkedIn articles are easy to share across different platforms

One thing I love about the LinkedIn publishing platform is how easy it allows readers or viewers to share your LinkedIn articles on different social platforms (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn itself).

Users can easily share out your content either with their connections (and followers) or on other social media channels like Facebook. This makes the articles super shareable and more engaging.

Con: LinkedIn articles do not support lead generation!

Lead generation is one of the major reasons companies and businesses blog today but what then do you do when your blogging platform isn’t designed for lead generation?

Here’s the thing…

LinkedIn basically focuses on getting users to share their expertise on certain subjects to help other members on the platform. As a result, this shouldn’t be a platform your business should go all in and expect to grow your business on it.

With the traditional blogging sites we’re used to, we can use certain optin forms to get users to join our email lists, contact us, read our about pages and simply generate leads that eventually turn into customers or clients – we don’t get this on LinkedIn.

What we personally do here at Uniclix is we publish mainly on our blog then repurpose the content on LinkedIn. This way, we can generate leads and still reach the audience on LinkedIn.

What’s Our Verdict?

LinkedIn is a social media platform that supports publishing articles just like our traditional blogging sites but should not in any way replace your company or business blog; rather, they should work hand-in-hand.

Here’s what I mean…

As a business, you should take your content marketing serious and to do so, you should get a self hosted blogging site and a domain that matches your brand – this is something you can not get with LinkedIn publishing.

Your content should also be able to be optimized for search engines and should rank properly. To do this, you need to have a self hosted blog.

But what then should you do with LinkedIn Publishing?

We like to use LinkedIn publishing mainly for two things;

1. As a repurposing channel for all our content,
2. As a platform where we publish less in depth articles like testimonials, short story learnt, personal experience and many more.

If content marketing is a strong marketing channel for your business, then sticking to a more traditional blog website is the best but if written content marketing isn’t really a thing for you, and is more of a secondary marketing channel, then you can go with LinkedIn publishing and post articles to build your influence.

LinkedIn Articles – Best Practices

Publishing on LinkedIn? Here are a few tips to get you started (and winning).

Publish on weekdays: generally, I’ve found that LinkedIn users are more active on weekdays and tend to ‘go off’ on weekends – for this reason, your articles should go live mostly on Mondays to Thursdays. Also, you may want to test and find out what works best for you.

Post articles around 500 to 1500 words: On LinkedIn, shorter, concise articles tend to do better as opposed to long, detailed content that go as long as 2500 words.

Optimize for search engines: Though LinkedIn doesn’t allow tools and plugins to help with SEO, you can still get your LinkedIn articles to rank on Google. Here’s an example;

Insert relevant keywords within your articles and make use of great headlines that have your target keyword(s) and with a bit of promotion, you can get your LinkedIn article on Google’s page one.

Always use images (and videos): Images make your LinkedIn article shareable and more fun to read and engage with – always use them.

Always drop a link back to your blog (or website): You just don’t want people reading your articles and leaving; always include a link back to your website or blog at the end of your articles where people can easily click to check you out.

Optimize for lead generation: Yes, I know LinkedIn publishing generally is not built for lead generation but with third party tools, you can start generation leads from your LinkedIn articles. You can use Landing page builders and offer lead bribes or opt-in bribes to readers and provide a link after your articles to get the bribe (or to subscribe to your mailing list). This way, you’re not just attracting readers and letting them waste away.

How do you use LinkedIn publishing? Do you publishing LinkedIn articles or plan to begin publishing?

Let us know in the comments section!

Today, content marketing is a powerful marketing channel and most businesses and companies are harnessing this medium to grow their brands and improve their reach. As a channel of content marketing, I believe we’re all familiar with blogging as one of the most powerful marketing mediums we have today.

Both huge and small brands now leverage blogging as a content marketing medium to grow and promote their businesses digitally. When done properly, blogging can bring in thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of monthly visitors to your business website.

In fact, research by hubspot reveals that agencies who blog acquire more customers than businesses who don’t. The same research also reveals, companies who blog receive 97% more backlinks than businesses who don’t – this shows how powerful this content marketing channel is and why your business should invest some time and money into it.

Now, if your company already harnesses this powerful content marketing channel, the question that pops up to your head may be; “should I post on linkedin or on my blog?”

You probably always see the “Write an article on LinkedIn” link which lets you publish LinkedIn articles but have never clicked the link.

You wonder if you should ever write and publish on LinkedIn blog page or is it just a waste of time?

The question basically remains, should you publish LinkedIn articles or should you stick to a traditional self hosted blog?

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons you should start publishing LinkedIn articles and why you shouldn’t.

LinkedIn Articles: Should You Publish on LinkedIn or Stick to Your Blog?

First of all, before we go into why you should or shouldn’t publish LinkedIn articles, let’s first explain what a LinkedIn article is – is it the usual status updates we know, does it just allow users post longer status or is it another blogging platform?

Question: What is a LinkedIn article?

LinkedIn article publishing platform is a uniques social media feature that allows users, members and Influencers to publish articles about their expertise and/or interests. LinkedIn went further to explain that publishing an article on LinkedIn doesn’t mean you’re a LinkedIn Influencer though it does allow you to further establish your professional identity by expressing your views around a subject consistently.

Note: Not every LinkedIn user can publish articles on the platform but every user can still publish status updates that’s not more than 1300 characters.

Once you’ve been given the ability to post LinkedIn articles, you can easily navigate to your LinkedIn blog page from your homepage. In fact, LinkedIn makes it super simple to publish articles on the platform by adding a “Write an article on LinkedIn” link below the status update bar.

Just like I’ve mentioned, publishing on LinkedIn does not mean you’re a LinkedIn influencer but allows you publish content that will showcase your expertise and boost your reach.

Having publishing access also doesn’t depend on your account type – both free and premium LinkedIn members can have access to publish articles.

How to Write an Article on Linkedin?

Now that we’ve discussed what a LinkedIn article is, let’s quickly show you, step by step, how to publish articles on LinkedIn.

To create a LinkedIn article, here’s what to do;

Step 1: Click the “Write an article” below the “Start a post” link at the top of your LinkedIn homepage or LinkedIn feed. This takes you to the publishing tool or what I call the LinkedIn blogging page. 

Alternatively, you can scroll down the page as you read an article on LinkedIn, below this, you’ll see a “Write an article” link in the top bar, below the LinkedIn navigation bar.

Step 2: Insert a headline in the “Headline” and an image in the large image section above the headline field. The headline field is super important and makes your content engaging and can slightly increase shares and interactions per article.

Step 3: Click on the “Write here” field, below the headline, to begin writing your LinkedIn article. This aspect contains the main content of the post and can range anywhere from 500 to as much as you may want.

Please note that there’s no restriction by LinkedIn as to how long or short your LinkedIn content must be. But to put out the best content that adds value to your LinkedIn community, you should keep your content around 500 to 1500 words per article.

Step 4: Click the Publish button at the top right corner of the publishing page to make your article live and available for your community. Initially, LinkedIn alerts all your connections and followers whenever you publish new LinkedIn articles but due to some spam usage, LinkedIn have since stopped this feature.

Linkedin Articles Vs Blog Posts

Going back to today’s content, we get asked a lot by social media users whether they should use LinkedIn publishing instead of the traditional blog posts we’re used to. For this, here are a few pros and cons to LinkedIn publishing or better known as LinkedIn articles.

Pros and Cons of Publishing LinkedIn Articles

Pro: LinkedIn publishing is way easier than publishing blog posts.

LinkedIn offers a pretty easy to use platform where its members and users can publish articles without having to go through long processes and several dashboards and tools.

As a matter of fact, you can publish and article on LinkedIn with just 2 to 3 clicks, unlike publishing on a website. LinkedIn publishing is a unique, clean interface that allows members post content easily without requiring deep knowledge of certain tools, dashboards and functionalities.

The LinkedIn publishing interface looks so much like Medium – it is really simple to use, publish and navigate.

Con: LinkedIn publishing offers way lesser features than traditional blog sites.

Just as we’ve mentioned, LinkedIn offers a simple and easy to use interface for its members but what about the availability of vast features to improve your articles, its performance and reach?

For instance, the traditional blogging platforms that we use offer several features like;

• Search engine optimization tools (e.g. Yoast),
• Different, customizable social share buttons,
• Detailed insights and stats (Google analytics) and many more.

With LinkedIn articles, members are restricted to just simple features that allow publishing, editing, formatting and simple analytics.

Pro: Posting on LinkedIn is free

It may cost you a few bucks to get a domain, host your website and get it running effectively with some tools and plugins. This can go as low as $10 and as high as $1000 (yes, there are plugins and tools as expensive as $1000).

With LinkedIn publishing, you don’t have to worry about extra charges and product costs because publishing LinkedIn articles is completely free and doesn’t require third party tools or plugins to run.

Though these third party tools and plugins can be really effective and help grow your blogs but LinkedIn focuses on offering a simple to use interface where user basically put out great content that adds value to people and grows your influence.

Con: LinkedIn initially shares your content with all your connections and followers, but no more!

When LinkedIn initially rolled out this amazing publishing platform, it came with a notification feature where all your connections and followers would be notified whenever you publish a new LinkedIn article.

This was a very useful feature because you wouldn’t have to manually notify people whenever you publish new content on your blog(s) – LinkedIn literally offered an ‘email list’ for you for free – with just a single click, all your users would be notified whenever you publish an article.

Today, this feature is no longer available as some members abused it by publishing spam content (or articles) which were equally sent to 1000s of LinkedIn users. This caused the platform to stop notifying users about new articles from their connections.

Personally, I would be all in on LinkedIn if this feature was still available!

Pro: LinkedIn articles are easy to share across different platforms

One thing I love about the LinkedIn publishing platform is how easy it allows readers or viewers to share your LinkedIn articles on different social platforms (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn itself).

Users can easily share out your content either with their connections (and followers) or on other social media channels like Facebook. This makes the articles super shareable and more engaging.

Con: LinkedIn articles do not support lead generation!

Lead generation is one of the major reasons companies and businesses blog today but what then do you do when your blogging platform isn’t designed for lead generation?

Here’s the thing…

LinkedIn basically focuses on getting users to share their expertise on certain subjects to help other members on the platform. As a result, this shouldn’t be a platform your business should go all in and expect to grow your business on it.

With the traditional blogging sites we’re used to, we can use certain optin forms to get users to join our email lists, contact us, read our about pages and simply generate leads that eventually turn into customers or clients – we don’t get this on LinkedIn.

What we personally do here at Uniclix is we publish mainly on our blog then repurpose the content on LinkedIn. This way, we can generate leads and still reach the audience on LinkedIn.

What’s Our Verdict?

LinkedIn is a social media platform that supports publishing articles just like our traditional blogging sites but should not in any way replace your company or business blog; rather, they should work hand-in-hand.

Here’s what I mean…

As a business, you should take your content marketing serious and to do so, you should get a self hosted blogging site and a domain that matches your brand – this is something you can not get with LinkedIn publishing.

Your content should also be able to be optimized for search engines and should rank properly. To do this, you need to have a self hosted blog.

But what then should you do with LinkedIn Publishing?

We like to use LinkedIn publishing mainly for two things;

1. As a repurposing channel for all our content,
2. As a platform where we publish less in depth articles like testimonials, short story learnt, personal experience and many more.

If content marketing is a strong marketing channel for your business, then sticking to a more traditional blog website is the best but if written content marketing isn’t really a thing for you, and is more of a secondary marketing channel, then you can go with LinkedIn publishing and post articles to build your influence.

LinkedIn Articles – Best Practices

Publishing on LinkedIn? Here are a few tips to get you started (and winning).

Publish on weekdays: generally, I’ve found that LinkedIn users are more active on weekdays and tend to ‘go off’ on weekends – for this reason, your articles should go live mostly on Mondays to Thursdays. Also, you may want to test and find out what works best for you.

Post articles around 500 to 1500 words: On LinkedIn, shorter, concise articles tend to do better as opposed to long, detailed content that go as long as 2500 words.

Optimize for search engines: Though LinkedIn doesn’t allow tools and plugins to help with SEO, you can still get your LinkedIn articles to rank on Google. Here’s an example;

Insert relevant keywords within your articles and make use of great headlines that have your target keyword(s) and with a bit of promotion, you can get your LinkedIn article on Google’s page one.

Always use images (and videos): Images make your LinkedIn article shareable and more fun to read and engage with – always use them.

Always drop a link back to your blog (or website): You just don’t want people reading your articles and leaving; always include a link back to your website or blog at the end of your articles where people can easily click to check you out.

Optimize for lead generation: Yes, I know LinkedIn publishing generally is not built for lead generation but with third party tools, you can start generation leads from your LinkedIn articles. You can use Landing page builders and offer lead bribes or opt-in bribes to readers and provide a link after your articles to get the bribe (or to subscribe to your mailing list). This way, you’re not just attracting readers and letting them waste away.

How do you use LinkedIn publishing? Do you publishing LinkedIn articles or plan to begin publishing?

Let us know in the comments section!