This Week I Hit 50,000 Followers on LinkedIn.
I didn't plan to become a LinkedIn creator or make money from this platform. But this happened. And this week I want to talk about it.
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On 31st of July 2024 I set myself a challenge — post every single day for a month and see what happens. I wasn't thinking about brand deals or followers or becoming anyone's "go-to person" for anything. I wanted to see if I could find job opportunities, maybe a speaking gig, and honestly — whether it would feel less cringe over time.
I started with 7,986 followers. Already a good number, as I had many connections because of running a consulting business. All these connections were made over time simply by sending connection requests.
My very first post was about data portfolio dos and don'ts. It got 150,000 impressions. I thought I had cracked the code.
Then my next posts got almost nothing. A few hundred impressions. Turns out the algorithm gives new creators a boost and then pulls the rug. I kept going anyway, that was the point of the challenge.
I posted consistently until mid-December, then hit a wall. Burnout, I got sick, took Christmas holidays, and suddenly I couldn't bring myself to open the app. I stepped away completely.
I also need to point that mid December I found a new job, via Linkedin Easy Apply. I still don’t know if my posts helped me or not. I always thought that Easy Apply was a scam, but I am a living evidence that sometimes it works.
So I moved the countries, started a new role and completely stopped posting.
I came back in September 2025. I decided to give it a crack again, but with no expectations and no pressure. I stopped obsessing over metrics, stopped trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, and just started writing about things I actually found interesting. The growth started compounding. And this week I crossed 50,000 followers.
I'm also consistently making several thousand dollars a month from brand deals. From a platform I didn't even think of as social media a year ago.
That’s why I wanted to talk about LinkedIn content creation — not as a guaranteed path to income, but as something worth trying. Because even if you never land a single brand deal, the side effects are genuinely valuable.
What nobody tells you about starting
The first few posts will feel deeply uncomfortable. You will re-read them twelve times before hitting publish. You will check for likes every five minutes. You will get three impressions and feel like deleting your account.
This is normal. Push through it.
The cringe fades. Your voice sharpens. And the people who stick with it past the first awkward month are the ones who eventually have something to show for it.
If you are interested you can scroll down to my first posts (Linkedin) and see how I tried various things - screenshots, videos, tutorials, resources, personal stories. I look at some of them and understand how I can improve them, it is so obvious now, but you have to gain experience by trial and error to understand what works and what doesn’t.
What you actually build by creating content
Even if you never monetise, here is what consistent LinkedIn posting gives you:
Writing and storytelling skills. Explaining a technical concept clearly to a non-technical audience is one of the most valuable skills in data. Every post is practice.
A public portfolio. Your content becomes evidence of what you know. Recruiters and hiring managers look at LinkedIn profiles. A feed full of thoughtful data posts tells a story your CV can't.
An analytical habit. You will find yourself A/B testing your own headlines, analysing which posts perform and why, checking and tracking analytics, thinking about audience and framing. These are data analyst skills applied to your own content. It's actually fun.
Unexpected opportunities. My content has led to brand deals, coaching clients, free tickets to conferences and connections I never would have made otherwise. I didn't plan any of it. It just accumulates when you show up consistently.
How brand deals actually work
Companies reach out when your audience matches their product. For a data analytics creator, that typically means tools — analytics platforms, AI tools, productivity software, learning platforms.
Brand deals usually start coming after you cross 30-35k followers mark. With me it happened after I crossed 40k.
The deal is usually: you create a post (plain text or text+carousel or text+video) featuring their product, they pay you a flat fee. Rates vary enormously depending on your following (how many and geo location of followers), your engagement, and how well you negotiate.
But to give you some numbers, there is a type of brand deal when the company is launching a new feature/product, and all they want is for you to repost that post and comment. This usually costs $300.
I didn't know this was possible when I started. I genuinely thought LinkedIn was a job board with a social layer on top. It is not.
LinkedIn is also apparently rolling out a creator monetisation programme, which I read about from a fellow creator. I don’t know if it would be similar to X or YouTube where you are paid for impressions or it would be a revenue share. But this is something interesting.
What actually works (from my own data)
After months of posting and watching what happens:
Posts that perform well: personal stories with a specific lesson, contrarian takes on common advice (unpopular opinion), practical cheat sheets and reference posts, memes and funny posts about work pain we all experience.
Posts that underperform: generic motivational content, posts that are too technical without a human angle, anything that sounds like it was written for a press release or by AI.
Consistency matters more than any single post. One viral post means nothing. Showing up every week for a year means everything.
If you're thinking about starting
Pick one topic you know well and care about.
Consistency is key in social media, you have to stick to the schedule, but you decide what that schedule is. If you decide to post Mon, Wed, Fri - stick to it for some time. If you decide to post only on work days - also good. Don’t post every day, that's a fast track to burnout (I learned this the hard way).
Linkedin like any other social media has a scheduling option, I schedule 3-4 posts in one go, nobody can face creating posts daily.
And don't measure success by follower count in the first six months. Measure it by whether you're getting better at explaining things, making new connections, and enjoying the process.
The followers, and everything that comes with them, tend to follow that. And I hope you will enjoy the ride and make some money on the side.
Keep pushing 💪,
Karina
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