On July 9th, Linkedin posted on their blog that there are now 1 million users publishing on Linkedin. That’s a lot of people.

These people have good reason to post to Linkedin, In a study by Econsultancy, Linkedin is responsible for 64% of referrals to corporate home pages. Facebook is 17% and Twitter 14%.

But to get results from Linkedin, you have to know how to publish the right way.

I would like to give you what you need to know to publish content to Linkedin in the most effective way possible.

You may have noticed that there are multiple ways to show off your writing on your Linkedin profile: #1 adding media to your work experience, #2 adding publications to your profile, or #3 publishing directly to Linkedin. If you are trying to expand your audience, posting directly to Linkedin in is by far your best option.

1) Adding media to your work experience

You can add “media” to one of your positions. This can include links, pictures, documents, video, and presentations. This is one way of sharing your articles/blog posts with your community. It pretty much just gives people who view your Linkedin resume a link to see the work you’ve done.

Discoverability: The only way someone is going to read a blog that is posted here is if they are so interested in your work experience that they click on the link to read your list of “10 Ways To Be A Better B2B Marketer.” There is no way to measure people’s interaction with this content.

I would only recommend sharing blog posts and articles here only if you don’t want anyone to read it. Ahem… Don’t share them here.

2) Adding publications to your profile

Publications are a great place to add longer written content like: books, (long) ebooks, reports, academic papers, etc. Content that you don’t want to give away to the random gazer. It’s a place to say, “Yep. I have written a book. Aren’t you impressed?” It is not a great place to try and promote your blog posts.

Discoverability: Adding publications to your profile probably isn’t going to get a million people to go out and buy your book, and it probably won’t get your blog posts many views either. Just like the above option, there is no way to measure interaction with this content.

3) Publishing directly to Linkedin

Linkedin’s publishing platform is essentially a blog platform integrated right into Linkedin.

If you haven’t already, start publishing directly to Linkedin.

Discoverability: This is the only option that broadcasts your content beyond your network. It is also the only option where you can measure people’s engagement with your content. You and everybody else can see how many views, likes, and comments your post has. This makes it easy for you to analyze your efforts, and for your articles to garner social proof when they do well.

Here’s some stats on this kind of Linkedin publishing:

1) Linkedin posts have an organic reach of about 20%. This is the percentage of your followers that will be reached by a post without you paying any money. Twitter is around 10% and Facebook around 2%.

2) In a study by Econsultancy, Linkedin is responsible for 64% of referrals to corporate homepages. Facebook is 17% and Twitter 14%.

3) 60% of Linkedin users are interested in industry insights.

Get more statistics here.

There are three kinds of content that you can publish to Linkedin:

#1 Original content

You can write posts on Linkedin that don’t appear anywhere else. This kind of content will create the biggest splash as far as engagement on Linkedin.

But not everyone has the time to pump out content exclusively for Linkedin, especially if you are in charge of keeping your company blog pumping with great new content. Also, as Mark Schaefer points out in this blog post, the whole point of inbound marketing is to use social networks to broadcast your website’s content to funnel traffic to your site to get visitors to become leads and hopefully one day: customers. If you put all your great content on Linkedin, it is no longer fuel in your inbound marketing engine, but in Linkedin’s inbound marketing engine. There may be a solution to this problem.

Many marketers prefer to publish directly to Linkedin over publishing to thier own website. To learn how to do this well check out Linkedin expert Viveka Von Rosen’s post: How To Use Linkedin Publisher To Get More Visibility.

#2 Duplicate content

You could just take old blogs on your website and copy and paste them into Linkedin’s publisher! Not so fast. Duplicate content could come back to bite you, especially if you duplicate a large number of your blogs into Linkedin posts. It can eventually hurt the ranking of your website.

The only way to make sure you don’t get penalized for duplicate content is to put the tag “rel=canonical” into the code of the duplicate article. This tag will redirect search engines to the original article and keep you from getting penalized.

Sites like Linkedin don’t give you the ability to customize the code on their website, so there is no way to use a “rel=canonical” tag. Even though you may initially get more traffic from duplicate content on Linkedin, you stand a pretty good risk of getting penalized. If you get penalized your traffic will go down drastically and it could take you a long time to recover.

In this article Should You Repost Your Blog Content on Other Websites? A Data-Driven Answer, Neil Patel warns people against publishing duplicate content.

You might also what to check out this post from HubSpot about the dangers of duplicate Linkedin posts.

With that said, there are a ton of very credible people who do post duplicate content to Linkedin and don’t experience any backlash from search engines.

While you can’t ensure that you won’t get penalized in search without the “rel=canonical” tag, there are some ways to significantly reduce the risk:

Post duplicate content slowly – People who have something valuable to say on Linkedin don’t fire off 5 posts in one day. If you want to publish duplicate content do it naturally and space out your posts to once a week at the most.
Link back to the original article – If you provide a link back to the original it’s pointing viewers and search engines a clue where this content is coming from. While this isn’t a “rel=canonical” tag, it can still help.
Make sure your website is established – It’s safer for an established (and larger) website to repost duplicate content to Linkedin than a newer (and smaller) website. If your website already has a good reputation with search engines, you’re less likely to get penalized.
Mix it up – Don’t just post duplicate content. Throw in an original post here and there. This tip is more for your readership than to calm SEO fears. If you throw in original content it will give your Linkedin audience something special.

#3 Repurposed content

Awhile ago, I tried an experiment to see if I could use Linkedin to push people back to my company blog.

I wanted to see if I could avoid the dangers of duplicate content, save time by repurposing old content, promote one of my blogs, and turn my Linkedin profile into a content marketing machine.

Here’s what I did:

1. Took blog posts that already lived on my website and slightly reworked the titles.

2. Uploaded the blog image as the header image for the Linkedin post

3. Grabbed the intro to the blogs and reworked them. Took out any context that wasn’t absolutely necessary. If I had any shocking statistics later on in the article, I brought them up to the front to increase the hookiness.

4. Added a call-to-action at the end of the intro that brings them back to the full original article on my website.

Here’s an example of a blog post I repurposed for Linkedin:

While this is the safest and most time efficient option, it won’t get you tons of views. In the end, I think it might be more worth while to simply republish full blogs with a few original posts thrown in.

When should I post to Linkedin?

The experts recommend that you avoid posting in the evening, late afternoon, or on the weekends Make sure to post during work hours, when people are likely to consume industry related content.

How often should I post?

Every time you publish a post on Linkedin, all your connections get a notification. If you post more than once or twice a week, you can run the risk of wearing out your audience.

So what do you think? Will Linkedin publishing become a priority for you?

Need help optimizing your profile? Get some tips Here: B2B Inbound State of Mind: Leverage Your Linkedin Profile.