Why your LinkedIn posts get no views

You wrote something good. You hit post. An hour later it's got eleven views and one of them is your mum. It feels personal, and it isn't.

The first line did the damage

Most people only ever see your first line, because that's all that shows before the fold. If that line is a warm-up sentence, a greeting, or a bit of throat clearing, almost nobody taps to read the rest.

Cut your first two sentences and read what's left. Nine times out of ten the post got better. The strong line was always sitting underneath the introduction.

You wrote about your thing instead of their problem

A post that opens with what you do is a post about you. A post that opens with the thing your reader is stuck on is a post about them, and they'll read that one.

Same information either way. The order is what changes whether it gets read.

Nobody could tell what it was for

If a post tries to be a story, a lesson, an announcement and a question at once, it lands as none of them. Pick one job per post. A story that just tells the story is stronger than a story with a moral stapled on.

You're writing for everyone

Broad posts feel safer and perform worse. "How to be productive" is for nobody. "What I do on the day after a bad client call" is for a specific person, and that specific person actually stops.

The narrower it is, the more the right people feel like you're talking to them, which is the whole point.

You're guessing at what your audience wants

This is the big one. Most people write what they feel like writing and then find out afterwards whether anyone cared. That's an expensive way to learn, because each lesson costs you a week.

The people a step ahead of you have already run that experiment, hundreds of times, in front of the same audience you want. Their posts that beat their own average are a map of what that audience shows up for. Reading that map before you write is the difference between guessing and knowing.

The fix order

Fix the first line first, because it's free and it moves the number most. Then fix who you're talking to. Then stop guessing about topics. Do those in that order and the eleven becomes something else.