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Last time we spoke about the power of Claude models in helping craft communications.

This week, I wanted to dive into the ten stages of posting on LinkedIn.

Trying to post content online is tough. It’s kind of like shouting into the abyss, while hoping that people will hear. 

You get momentary highs where posts you never thought pop off to the moon. 

You get momentary lows where posts you put hours of effort into. Bomb hard. 

In this week’s post, I want to share the ten common stages of posting on LinkedIn and the four potential remedies to overcome them

Here they are:

These common stages are a kind of grief, I guess. There are definitely psychological. 

What is actually happening is that you are using your output as evidence about your worth. 

You publish, you wait for the dopamine rush of a ping or a red badge telling you that you won. You watch the numbers come back and they disappoint.

So you stop. Then you start again at an event because I have something worthy right, its cool. Then you stop again because “nothing is working.” These are tough stages and they often loop.

Here are the four ideas that can help break this line of thinking, informed by my Sisyphean experience:

The algorithm doesn't show your post to all your followers. Posting to four thousand followers does not mean four thousand people see it. LinkedIn is interest-based now — the same way TikTok is. It is looking for who finds this specific post compelling, not who already follows you. Which means a post can underperform with your existing audience and still be the right post. It just hasn't found the people it was built for yet.

You can't overpost. This is the one nearly everyone gets wrong. The fear of being “too much” is doing more damage to your growth than any individual bad post ever could. The algorithm is not penalizing you for posting twice in a week. Your followers are not rolling their eyes. They are scrolling past nine out of ten posts they see anyway. You are not a feature of their feed. You are a guest.

Consistency beats brilliance. One decent post a week for a year will out-pace one perfect post a quarter. The decent posts aren't better. Compounding only works on things you actually do. The post you didn't write because you were waiting for the right idea contributes nothing.

Focus on action, not judgment. If you have to choose between editing one piece for a fourth hour and writing a second piece, write the second piece. The fourth hour is almost always you protecting yourself from feedback. Two okay posts teach you more than one polished one. You learn what lands by publishing and watching, not by sitting with a draft.

The freeing thought underneath all four of these is the same: the only way to find your voice is to use it.

The people whose feeds you admire didn't skip these stages. They just kept posting. 

They got low numbers and posted again on Tuesday. They watched one post outperform another they thought was stronger and updated their thinking. The work was the practice.

So if you are stuck somewhere between step 7 and step 10 — sitting on a draft, watching your last post's numbers not meet expectations — the answer is not to wait. It is to write the next one.

Then the one after that.

Mischievously, 

Connor

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Communicating Mischief is the weekly newsletter for people trying to build a real LinkedIn presence and the craft of executive voice in the era of AI.