I have a friend; let's call her Melissa. (Not her real name. She knows who she is.)

Melissa got laid off from her full-time marketing job and decided to get into freelancing.

She landed a pretty cushy contract with a nonprofit pretty quickly. Things were looking up!

About a month in, she wanted more clients…So she started posting on LinkedIn. Talking about her services, sharing wins, showing up at events, and posting about them.

And slowly, she started noticing something: people from the nonprofit were creeping her profile. And her main point of contact there started making weird little comments.

They thought she was looking for an exit.

They were so scared that her LinkedIn activity meant she was unhappy and planning to leave them that they started acting... strange.

The point is: this is why people don't post.

Not because they don't have anything to say, but because they're scared of how their boss, their clients, their coworkers, and their peers are going to read into it.

Guess what happened to Melissa?

She was let go due to budget cuts after her contract was up.

And you know what…?

She was ultimately fine, because she kept posting even when they got mad at her.

LinkedIn is no longer just a "looking for work" platform, even if it is still, at its core, career-oriented. I like to think of it as Job Facebook rather than a fancier Indeed.

And the benefits of actually posting on LinkedIn? Genuinely hard to overstate. Some solid examples I’ve seen just recently:

Okay, let’s say you’re sold, and you aren’t worried about getting in “trouble.”

There's still that second layer of fear: What if I post something that makes me look bad? What if I waste a post on something that's not even "work-related"?

These are both genuinely fair concerns. But here's why I think they're wrong.

The job market right now is, to put it gently, absolutely feral. Both for freelancers chasing contracts and for people looking for full-time work. It is cutthroat out there.

And the counterintuitive truth is that the best way to stand out in this market is to not make your LinkedIn all about your job.

Let me put it this way: imagine you're a recruiter. You've got two candidates. Both qualified. Both capable. But one of them posted a meme that made the recruiter actually laugh out loud.

When you get down to the nitty-gritty of a hiring decision, when skills are a wash and experience is comparable, people pick the person they actually want to work with.

And that person is almost always the funnier, more interesting, more human one.

Companies talk a big game about culture fit, and that's partly because they can afford to. They've already got the baseline covered.

Thinking back to my own clients, almost ALL of them directly call out my personality when they explain their desire to work with me. One recent ghostwriting client said, simply, that I “seem very grounded.” (Thanks!)

Hear me out: You ever hear someone describe another person as magnetic?

To be magnetic is to attract, yes. But it's also to repel. And I think that's the part people forget.

Everyone is so worried about being palatable. About never saying anything that could possibly alienate anyone. And while it feels safe, it's actually killing your chances of being memorable.

Even if you hold polarizing views, people generally respect someone who has views.

If you're not speaking authentically, if you're so worried about appealing to everyone that you end up appealing to no one… how are you supposed to stand out?

(It’s giving Aaron Burr.)

People are not looking for generalists right now. They want someone who can solve a specific problem for a specific type of person.

And if your content is so deliberately inoffensive that you attract people who are completely wrong for you… Who really wins there?

Being yourself on LinkedIn is not just about authenticity for its own sake. It's a genuinely smarter business strategy.

A few things go without saying: don't be discriminatory, don't bully people, don't use LinkedIn as a dating app (please, I am begging you). Keep it out of your content and everyone will be better off.

But for everything else? Here's a mental framework that I actually find helpful:

Imagine you're talking to your favorite coworker. Not your best friend since sixth grade that you're out at a bar with, because not EVERYTHING belongs online, but that one person at work who you genuinely look forward to seeing. The one you feel comfortable around.

That's the version of yourself that should be showing up on LinkedIn every day.

I show up as the same person whether I'm on a discovery call with a new prospect or closing a deal with someone I've been nervous about all week.

I show up the same whether I'm posting something casual on a Tuesday morning or writing what feels like a high-stakes piece of content.

And I think my clients deserve that; to actually know who they're dealing with before they hand me a contract.

Your audience deserves the same from you.

We get so lost in strategy. In making sure every post serves a goal. In optimizing and scheduling and perfecting. And all of that stuff matters! But none of it means anything if you're so in your head about it that you're not actually posting.

You can have the perfect strategy and zero execution, and I promise you that's worse than imperfect content that actually exists in the world.

So the next time you write something and then hover over the "post" button, wondering if it's too much… tone it back 10% and POST ANYWAY!

Cheers. 🥂

P.S. If you're struggling with what to post or how to make your content strategy actually work without selling your soul, reply to this email. I read every single one.