One thing people don’t always realize about ghostwriting is that you’re not always starting from zero.
Sometimes, a client already has an audience.
This particular client came to me with around 8,000 LinkedIn followers.
On paper, it may sound like she already had an established personal brand.
But when I dug deeper, I realized many of those people weren’t necessarily following her because of her…
As part of my onboarding process, I audit a client’s LinkedIn presence before we start creating content.
One thing I review is their existing messages (with their consent, of course).
I want to understand:
Why are people reaching out?
What do they associate this person with?
What are they asking them for?
Why are they connecting in the first place?
When I looked through hers, I noticed a pattern…
A lot of people wanted jobs.
Which made complete sense.
My client had spent more than a decade working in senior roles across some of the biggest technology companies in the world.
And when we started working together, she held a senior position at another massive technology company.
Being attached to companies like that naturally attracts attention.
People wanted to connect with her because they wanted:
A referral.
An introduction.
Career advice.
Or potentially access to an opportunity inside the company.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean they cared about her (or what she had to say).
They cared about what she represents: an opportunity to access what they want.
In other words, if she left the company tomorrow, a lot of the attention would likely disappear with it.
That was the problem we needed to solve.
She had a big brand behind her.
My job was to build a big brand around her.
Over the following 13 months, we grew her LinkedIn audience from roughly 8,000 to 24,000 followers.
And here’s what makes that result particularly interesting…
She left the company just two months into our engagement.
So the vast majority of that growth happened without the big corporate brand sitting behind her.
In the remainder of this article, I’ll show you what drove it instead.
The client and where we started
Expertise certainly wasn’t a problem for this client.
She had spent more than a decade working in AI and had extensive experience shipping AI products at some of the biggest technology companies in the world.
She had also started mentoring and had several success stories from students who went on to achieve great things.
But during one of our initial calls, she admitted to me that writing wasn’t one of her strong points.
Despite knowing her subject area inside out, she didn’t feel confident taking what she knew and writing about it in a way that excited or interested people.
This is one of the main reasons she didn’t share content.
The other was that she lacked the time to get good.
She was already balancing a senior role, running her own business, and mentoring people on the side.
Could she have learned how to write compelling LinkedIn content herself?
Of course.
But becoming good at writing takes reps.
You have to:
Write.
Publish.
See what resonates.
Figure out what doesn’t.
Learn how to structure ideas.
Understand what makes somebody stop scrolling.
Then do it all over again.
She simply didn’t have the time or desire to go through that process.
And you could see this reflected in her LinkedIn activity.
Before we started working together, she posted sporadically.
Most of what she shared was announcements:
A new role
A presentation
An event she was speaking at
Something she or her company had launched
A professional milestone
There’s nothing wrong with this kind of content…
But it meant very little of the expertise she’d accumulated over more than a decade was visible.
People could see where she worked.
They couldn’t necessarily see what she knew.
As I mentioned earlier, much of the attention she already had was tied to her corporate identity.
Her employer was effectively doing some of the branding for her.
And there’s nothing wrong with using that credibility to your advantage.
If you work at a highly respected company, you’d be stupid not to.
But it’s still borrowed credibility.
You don’t own the company you work for.
You don’t own your job title.
You don’t own the status other people attach to either.
So use it as an unfair advantage.
Just don’t let it become your identity.
Because once it’s gone, you may quickly find out how much of your audience was following you for the logo next to your name.
That being said, our job wasn’t simply to grow her from 8,000 followers to some arbitrary bigger number…
We needed to change the reason people followed her.
Instead of being known primarily for where she worked, we wanted her to become known for what she knew and how she could help people.
So we needed to take more than a decade of expertise sitting inside her head and package it into content people felt compelled to follow.
Here’s how we did it…
The strategy behind 16,000 new followers
Before I explain how we grew the account, there’s something important to understand:
Growing her following was never the primary goal.
My client had a business behind her personal brand.
She ran paid mentorship cohorts, and ultimately, we wanted LinkedIn to become an organic acquisition channel for those programs.
Followers were useful because they increased the number of relevant people we could reach repeatedly.
But I never wanted us optimizing purely for how to get more followers.
Here’s what we cared about:
“How do we attract the right people, build trust with them, and eventually direct some of that attention toward the business?”
The 16,000 additional followers were largely a by-product of doing that successfully.
Here’s how we approached it.
1/ We clarified the objective
It’s incredibly difficult to build a content strategy without a north star.
Because without one, you never know what’s working?
Just imagine a post generates 500 new followers but zero qualified leads.
Another generates 20 followers but three people interested in your offer.
Which one performed better?
The answer depends entirely on what you’re trying to achieve.
A clear objective gives you something to interpret feedback against and allows you to calibrate the strategy as you learn.
2/ We defined her content pillars
Once we knew what we were trying to achieve, we needed to decide what she should talk about.
This is where content pillars become useful.
Think of content pillars as the handful of subjects you want somebody to associate with you after repeatedly encountering your content.
You don’t want someone to read one post about AI product management, another about productivity, another about investing, another about leadership, and another about whatever happened to be trending that morning.
They might enjoy the individual posts.
But what are they supposed to remember you for?
We wanted someone to encounter my client three, four, or five times and gradually think:
“This is who I follow for AI product management.”
So we built recurring themes around her expertise, the problems her audience cared about, and the subjects that naturally connected to her mentorship.
This gave us boundaries without forcing us to write the same thing every week.
Note…
Repetition isn’t necessarily repetitive.
You can discuss the same subject through:
Stories.
Frameworks.
Opinions.
Mistakes.
Tutorials.
Observations.
Case studies.
News.
The subject remains consistent while the expression changes.
And that repetition gradually creates association.
3/ We updated her branding
Content could bring people to my client’s profile.
But once they arrived, the profile needed to finish the job.
Remember, she had already helped more than 1,000 students.
But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from looking at her LinkedIn profile.
Someone could enjoy a post, click her name, and still not immediately understand:
Who she helps?
What she helps them achieve?
Why should I trust her?
What should I do next?
So we cleaned everything up.
The new banner communicated who she helped and what she helped them with.
We updated the profile picture to fit the visual identity we were building around her brand.
The About section told her story, established her credibility, explained how she helped people, and gave interested prospects a next step.
The Featured section became valuable real estate for our CTAs and resources.
I wanted the profile to work almost like a landing page.
Content generated curiosity.
The profile converted some of that curiosity into follows, subscribers, and eventually potential customers.
