Explain why commenting is often the quickest way to get seen by the right people.
Open LinkedIn and find a popular post in your industry with plenty of comments. Next to each comment you'll see the commenter's name, a small photo and their headline, often shortened to fit. If you have commented before, find one of your own comments and read your headline in that space. If the words that say who you help and how are at the end, they may be cut off, so move them nearer the start.
This comes first because every comment you write shows your name, photo and headline to every reader who sees it. Many of the buyers you want to reach will see one of your comments before they see anything else you've written.
When you start posting, your posts typically get little reach. The likes come from colleagues, family and old classmates rather than buyers. This is normal: LinkedIn shows a new user's posts mostly to people already connected to them, and most of your connections are not buyers.
Posting rewards people who have built a following over months or years. For months, your own posts will reach fewer readers than posts by the established voices in your buyers' industry. A faster route to buyers is to go where they already are and say something useful there. This needs no audience of your own.
Buyers read posts from people in their own industry, such as a well-known doctor writing about running a practice, an association for clinic owners, a founder sharing business lessons, or a journalist covering healthcare. Those posts often have far more readers than your posts will have for months.
A thoughtful comment on a popular post can be seen by that post's readers, along with your name and headline. If the comment is good, some of those readers click through to your profile. A comment takes its reach from the post it sits under, so a newcomer's comment on a busy post can be seen as widely as anyone else's. The post brings the readers and the comment brings them to you. In your first months, a good comment on a popular post in your buyer's world can be seen by many of your target buyers, and your own posts mostly cannot. For this reason the course puts commenting ahead of posting in its daily routine.
Wei Ling (an invented example) is an account manager at a health tech company that sells booking and reminder software to clinics in Singapore. Her buyers are practice managers and clinic owners. When she comments on a popular post about clinic staffing, a practice manager scrolling through the comments sees her comment with her name and headline.
Arjun is a financial adviser representative in Singapore whose buyers include young couples. He started with about 300 connections, mostly school friends and colleagues. He commented on posts by personal finance writers and parenting pages, and within his first week he got profile views from people he had never met. That is his experience and it is no promise of yours. How many people see a comment depends on how LinkedIn ranks and displays comments. LinkedIn describes this only in broad terms, as a machine learning system that ranks comments in a personalized way, and it has not published the full details. Treat commenting as a way to be where buyers are looking. It does not guarantee any number of views.
You can start this week with zero followers and a freshly rewritten profile, because commenting does not need a following. It also suits people who don't enjoy writing long posts. A useful comment is two or three sentences and takes a few minutes. If it is good, it does some of the work a post would.
Module 1 dealt with your profile and headline before you started commenting. After your comment, your headline is the first thing a curious reader sees, and your profile is where they land if they click.
Wei Ling's old headline was "Account manager at a health tech company". A practice manager who liked her comment would see nothing linking it to their own problem. Her new headline is "I help clinics in Singapore cut no-shows with booking and reminder software". Now the comment and the headline tell the same story, and the reader sees someone who knows their world and is worth following. Before you comment, check your headline in the small space beside a comment, as you did at the start, and make sure the important words are not cut off at the end.
Your follow list has two halves: the buyers themselves, and the people buyers listen to.
Start with buyers. Depending on what you sell, they might be practice managers, clinic owners or young couples. Following them puts their posts in your feed, so you see what they talk about and can comment when you have something to add.
The second half is often more useful. Voices are the people your buyers listen to: industry voices, associations, trade magazines, respected practitioners and local groups. Their posts collect comments from many buyers at once. Wei Ling's voices are doctors who write about running a practice, healthcare associations, and a couple of journalists who cover health. Arjun's are personal finance writers popular with young Singaporeans, a few parenting communities, and property commentators who cover BTO and resale flats.
To find voices, check who your buyers already follow and engage with. Open the profiles of a few real buyers, look at their recent activity and note whose posts they comment on. The same names keep coming up, and those are the ones to add.
Start with 20 buyers and 10 voices. Save the list somewhere quick to reach, such as a note on your phone or a column in your tracker, then follow all 30. Lesson 3.3, A 15-minute daily engagement routine, starts each day from this list rather than from the general feed. From there, comment where your buyers are reading, with two or three useful sentences each time.
In the activity below, you will write the list of 30 names and follow all of them.
Write down 20 buyers and 10 people your buyers listen to, then follow all 30.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).