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5 Ways to Grow on LinkedIn in 2026
From a LinkedIn Top Voice with 46K+ followers. The growth playbook that actually works in the AI era — and the funnel strategy that turns followers into $20K–$50K consulting bags.
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LinkedIn in 2026 looks nothing like the LinkedIn I joined in 2008.
Back then it was a place for community, networking, and learning from peers. Today it's a noisy AI-generated soup of "5 ways to do X" posts and ghostwritten thought leadership. The platform changed. The algorithm changed. The people changed.
What hasn't changed: the principles for growing on LinkedIn still come back to being a real human in a feed full of robots. Here are the 5 tactics that work — and the funnel strategy that turns your LinkedIn presence into actual revenue.
Tactic 1
Write Like a Human, Not Like an AI Chatbot
You can spot an AI-written LinkedIn post in three seconds. Too many emojis. Too many one-sentence line breaks. The same "Here's what I learned" hook recycled across 10,000 profiles. The same "Let me know your thoughts in the comments 👇" sign-off.
People are tuning it out.
In The End of Marketing, I wrote that people relate to people and buy from people. That was true in 2019. It's table stakes in 2026 — because AI has made everything else sound the same.
Writing like a human means three things:
- Have personality. People will call this "rage bait." It's not. It's personality. The brands and creators that have a perspective grow. The ones that hedge everything to avoid offending anyone get ignored.
- Go against the grain. Challenge the popular take. Say the things people are too afraid to say. Disagreement is engagement.
- Share human stories. The struggles. The failures. The wins. The randomness. The Tuesday-night observations that don't fit anywhere else.
Gone are the days of "5 ways to create a personal brand" thought leadership. We're in the era of AI competing against humanity. Win by being more human, not by being more polished.
Tactic 2
Your Opening Hook Is Everything
Look at the LinkedIn posts that go viral in 2026. They almost all start the same way: an all-caps pattern interrupt followed by an ellipsis.
- "UNPOPULAR OPINION: …"
- "RIDDLE ME THIS: …"
- "RANDOM OBSERVATION: …"
- "I'M SORRY IF I OFFEND ANYONE WITH THIS POST: …"
The pattern interrupt buys you a half-second. That half-second is the difference between a 300-impression post and a 100,000-impression post.
But the hook only works if the rest of the post pays it off. That's where most creators fail — the hook is good, but the content underneath is "5 ways to…" or a sales pitch dressed up as advice.
The growth hack: say things out loud that everyone else is too scared to post. Religion. Politics. Race. Layoffs. Personal stories. The topics that get scrolled past on LinkedIn are the ones everyone covers. The topics that get shared are the ones nobody touches.
I ask audiences on stage all the time: "Who in this room likes to be sold to? Raise your hand." Nobody ever raises their hand. So why is your LinkedIn feed full of people trying to sell to you? Because they don't know better.
Be the person who doesn't sell. Be the person who tells a story. The leads come second.
Tools mentioned in this video · SPONSOR
Adobe Express — The Consistency Unlock
Consistency on LinkedIn is hard when you're busy running a business. Imagine clients, creating content, and trying to stay active across multiple platforms — every single day. That's why I'm always looking for tools that reduce friction in my workflow.
Adobe Express is my go-to. Quick graphic design without a designer, video editing without an editor, slide decks without spending an afternoon on PowerPoint, and brand-kit templates that keep every post visually consistent.
The unlock isn't AI replacing your creativity — it's removing the friction that stops you from publishing in the first place.
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Try Adobe ExpressTactic 3
Stop With the Corporate Theater
Every brand on LinkedIn in 2026 is posting the same thing:
- Photos from the company retreat
- The sales kickoff awards ceremony in Vegas
- "Congratulations to [employee] on [generic milestone]"
- The CEO holding up a trophy at the all-hands
Nobody cares.
Want to know what actually performs? Show the executive popping bottles at the VIP section at the SKO. Show the engineer who debugged production at 3 AM the night before launch. Show the person on your team going through a divorce who's still showing up every day. Show the messy, real, human stuff your curated "feel good" social calendar is trying so hard to hide.
Better yet: give your employees access to run your LinkedIn. Let the people closest to the work tell the stories. The brands that humanize win.
My single best-performing LinkedIn post in the last 12 months wasn't a marketing thought leadership essay. It was a photo I took at midnight at a Buc-ee's gas station in Brunswick, Georgia — a $15/hour worker chopping brisket with passion, putting sauce on the board, with an audience of customers watching him work. I posted it with one line:
"Every company executive should take notes from this $15/hour worker at a Buc-ee's and operate with the same passion."
Nearly a million LinkedIn views from a gas station photo. Why? Because it was real. Because it told a story. Because it didn't try to sell anything.
All you need is one post like that to generate one lead. And one lead, in the right place, is enough to change your year.
Here's how I apply this in practice. In this short Adobe Express tutorial, I walk through the exact workflow I use to turn LinkedIn ideas into branded visual content — quote graphics, carousels, and on-brand assets — without needing complex design software.
Templates. Carousels. Brand Kit. That's the workflow. The easier it is to turn ideas into visual assets, the easier it is to stay consistent — and consistency is still the #1 LinkedIn growth lever in 2026.
Tactic 4
Start a LinkedIn Newsletter (or Two)
The single best LinkedIn distribution hack in 2026 isn't a post. It's a newsletter.
Here's why: when you publish a regular LinkedIn post, the algorithm shows it to a fraction of your followers — usually 5–15%. When you publish a LinkedIn newsletter, LinkedIn sends a notification to every single subscriber and follower. That's net new reach you can't get any other way.
I run two LinkedIn newsletters:
- Bad Marketing — a forum where I demystify viral content and the "rage bait" that performs, teaching people what actually made a post go viral
- Inbox Gold — a more conservative read focused on email marketing tactics for B2B teams
Both drive net new reach every time I publish. With 46,000+ followers, that's a much bigger ceiling than a single post on the feed.
Don't ditch your email newsletter. The play is to run both:
- Publish a preview on your LinkedIn newsletter (drives LinkedIn reach)
- Drive readers who want the full story to your Beehiiv or Kit email newsletter (captures owned audience)
- Sell from email, not from LinkedIn (higher conversion, owned distribution)
Two newsletters, two channels, one funnel. That's the unlock.
Tactic 5
Use LinkedIn as a Marketing Funnel — Not as the Business
Most LinkedIn creators in 2026 are making the wrong goal. They want to be "LinkedIn influencers" or "LinkedIn creators." That's not a business. That's a hobby with brand deals.
The real game is using your LinkedIn presence to sell consulting and implementation. That's where the bags are. $20K. $30K. $40K. $50K engagements. Not $2,500 brand deals.
Here's how to build the funnel:
Step 1: Audit your profile. Drop your LinkedIn URL into Claude Code or Cursor. Ask it to audit and rewrite your profile to position you as an expert authority in your field. Not "B2B influencer." Not "LinkedIn creator." Authority. Consultant. Operator. Implementation expert.
Step 2: Create content from the lens of a consultant. Stop posting "5 ways to grow on LinkedIn." Start posting case studies, frameworks, results, and lessons from client work. Speak from authority, not aspiration.
Step 3: Drive every interaction to email. Every post, every comment, every DM should funnel toward your email newsletter. That's the owned channel where the conversion happens.
Step 4: Sell from email. Pitch your fractional consulting from the newsletter, not from LinkedIn. Higher trust. Higher conversion. Less competition.
Step 5: Rinse and repeat.
Do this and your LinkedIn becomes a real sales and marketing funnel — not just a vanity metric or a place to post motivational quotes. The followers don't matter. The conversations and the consulting contracts do.
The takeaway
LinkedIn in 2026 rewards humanity, hook craft, vulnerability, owned distribution, and strategic positioning. Most creators are doing the opposite — sounding like AI, leading with weak hooks, posting corporate theater, ignoring the newsletter feature, and chasing influencer status instead of business outcomes.
Do the opposite of what most creators are doing. That's the entire growth playbook.
From the author of The End of Marketing
The book behind this playbook
Carlos's bestselling book — subtitled Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI — is where every one of these LinkedIn tactics started. Be human. Tell stories. Sound real. The principles haven't changed. The platforms have.
Get The End of Marketing on Amazon →
About the author
Carlos Gil
Marketing thought leader, LinkedIn Top Voice, bestselling author of The End of Marketing, and Editor-in-Chief of BestStacked.com (AI tools) and BestSends.com (email infrastructure).
More from Carlos →Article #5 — the finale
The complete Adobe Express social media series
This is article #5 — the final piece in the Adobe Express social media series. Articles #1 and #2 covered what to do. Article #3 covered what to avoid. Article #4 was the toolkit. This one is the LinkedIn-specific growth playbook.