Taylor Borden, an editor at LinkedIn, emailed me last week with a question she’s putting to a handful of writers for a special edition of her newsletter, The Work Shift. The premise was backed by data that shows entrepreneurship on LinkedIn is up nearly 70% year over year, more than six in 10 of those entrepreneurs also identify as content creators, and people who post weekly see up to 4x more profile views, with commenting driving 2.5x more.
Her question was simple: What’s one lesson that changed how you approach content creation? And if you were starting your LinkedIn journey from scratch, how would you approach your first 10 posts?
I almost answered with a framework. Then I remembered why frameworks are the problem.
4 Categories Felt Complete. The Data Disagreed
Back around 2009, Guy Kawasaki asked me for a few pages for his book “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.” I outlined four ways brands could create YouTube videos that truly enchant an audience: inspire viewers with emotional stories, educate them with useful information, enlighten them with documentaries, or entertain them by making them laugh.
Four felt complete. It was clean, teachable, and easy to remember. I used it. Other people used it. I even built it into a piece for Search Engine Journal years later, “What Is a Content Marketing Matrix & Do We Need One?”
Then the data kept arriving. By 2023, I was writing a different SEJ article with not four, but 39 emotions – count ’em.
I had never connected those two pieces until Borden’s email forced me to. The gap between them, 14 years and 35 emotions, is the most useful thing I have learned in 24 years of writing about this industry. The four-category framework wasn’t wrong when I wrote it. It was just the size of the dataset I had access to at the time. The mistake would have been treating it as finished.
The Practitioners Who Get Stuck Are The Ones Who Fall In Love With Their Framework
This is the part of my answer to Borden that applies directly to anyone doing SEO, content marketing, or social media marketing work right now, not just LinkedIn posting.
Every framework you build, every category system, every “the four types of X” or “the five stages of Y,” is a snapshot of what the evidence showed you on the day you built it. AI Overviews didn’t exist when most of our content frameworks were written. Neither did AI Mode, Gemini-embedded search, or AI Overviews appearing in 2.5 billion users’ results. The frameworks built for a 10-blue-links world were not wrong for that world. They are simply the size of the dataset that existed then.
The practitioners who get stuck are the ones who keep applying 2019’s framework to 2026’s data because the framework is familiar and the new data is inconvenient. The ones who keep growing are the ones who stay curious enough to ask, “What would this framework look like if I rebuilt it today, with…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
