The Value of Blogging with LinkedIn Publishing (or Pulse)

Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to communicate your personal brand. But setting up and maintaining your own blog may not be realistic for you. Luckily, there is a LinkedIn publishing (or blogging) platform, sometimes called Pulse.

A news aggregation feed, LinkedIn Pulse rolled out in 2010 but publishing on it was reserved for high-profile influencers. In 2014, LinkedIn pushed the long-form self-publishing platform out to all members. At that point, Pulse was housed on a separate platform, but in 2017, it began filtering into members’ homepage news feed. Now we all see these long-form articles when we first log onto LinkedIn.

LinkedIn no longer calls it “Pulse”, referring to it instead as their “publishing platform”. But since it’s so widely known as Pulse, that’s what I’ll call it here.

There’s a second LinkedIn publishing option – posting updates to your stream. But this is a short-form publishing opportunity. Updates you post also appear in your homepage news feeds.

Using LinkedIn’s Pulse, you’ll reap many of the benefits of having your own blog, with almost none of the headaches. All you’ll have to do is:

• Write interesting new content or re-purpose existing content
• Add a compelling title
• Proofread your article well, several times
• Copy and paste the content into a Pulse article and save it
• Add images, video and/or other rich media
• Add hashtags
• Hit “Publish” when you’re ready
• Share the article on your other social media outlets.

What’s so great about the Pulse platform?

Just like running your own blogsite, you’ll be building your personal brand . . . demonstrating your subject matter expertise and thought leadership, and communicating your personality and good-fit qualities for the employers you’re targeting.

But also, because they’re on LinkedIn, your Pulse articles will draw people to your LinkedIn profile and keep you top-of-mind with your LinkedIn network.

Here are some of the benefits of Pulse according to LinkedIn:

• Published articles are shared with your connections and followers in their news feeds, and sometimes through notifications.
• Members that aren’t in your network can follow you from your article, so that your next article will be surfaced in their feeds.
• Your article may be searchable both on and off LinkedIn, depending on your profile settings. Having your public profile visibility set to everyone will distribute your articles publicly.

Plus:

• People don’t have to be connected to you to follow your article posts.
• LinkedIn provides analytics on your articles, so you can see the industries and positions of your readers.

Your most recent articles will show up near the top of your profile, which immediately:

• Supports the claims you’ve made in your profile about your expertise.
• Shows you have something to say about your industry and vocation.
• Demonstrates that you’re up-to-date with social media, and know how to leverage LinkedIn.

Before you move forward with publishing your article, take a look at all the LinkedIn Publishing Platform Guidelines.

Where to find the Pulse platform on your LinkedIn profile.

I’ve found that most people on LinkedIn are not aware that they can make use of the Pulse platform, and don’t know how to access it.

Go to your “Home” page and look for “Write an article” at the top of the center column. This takes you to a blank page on Pulse, where you can start writing.

I suggest that you compose the content in a Word or other word processing document, so that you’re sure to thoroughly proofread it before hitting “Publish”. Don’t rely entirely on the Spell Check feature. Manually proofread the content several times, too.

Tips for writing articles on LinkedIn’s Pulse

🎯 The biggest stumbling block for most people, aside from finding the time to write, is coming up with things to write about. Here’s a good place to start:

Your LinkedIn profile should include plenty of keywords and phrases relevant to the kinds of jobs you’re seeking. These typically represent your hard skills or areas of expertise. These keywords should be in your Profile Headline, About section, Skills & Endorsements section, Experience section and throughout the content in your profile.

🎯 Before posting your first article on Pulse, make sure you have a photo and an optimized profile headline with relevant keywords for SEO. People will see these associated with your Pulse articles and be encouraged to jump over to view your profile.

🎯 Use relevant images, branding videos or slides in your articles. Pixabay is a good, free resource for images, but there are many others. And add an eye-catching cover image. The cover image stays with your article, when it shows up in the news feed and in your profile’s Activity section.

🎯 Include links to other Pulse posts or other online sources in your posts.

🎯 Write a short personal biography of a paragraph or two to go at the end of each of your posts.

Hashtags are important

🎯 Use relevant keywords throughout your article. Add hashtags to the commentary of your article. They typically represent the main topics of your article, which will be the relevant keywords that help boost SEO for your article.

About hashtags, LinkedIn says:

• Adding hashtags helps surface your article to members who may find it relevant. Hashtags act as keywords that help people understand what type of article you’ve written.
• Once your article is published, you cannot edit, remove or add the hashtags you included. However, you can make edits to your article.

🎯 Try to publish a new post on Pulse once or twice a month, or more frequently when you can. The debate about Pulse article length continues. Some say very long articles are best. Others say shorter, more frequent ones are best. If all you can reasonably do is write shorter articles, and publish them a few times a month, you’ll be way ahead of people who don’t even do that.

🎯 Respond to everyone who leaves a comment on your post, with this caveat. Do NOT respond to snarky or negative comments that add nothing to the conversation. It’s been my experience that this only encourages such people to continue their mean-spirited rants.