Whether you are writing B2B or B2B2C content, your LinkedIn strategy is key to finding freelance writer gigs in 2025.
You are discovered on LinkedIn by a combination of your overall network and your keywords.
In this step-by-step guide to standing out as a freelance writer on LinkedIn in 2025, I will bring these two pieces together so you are found by your target audience/s. Then I will go through how to post and engage to stay top of mind — and to still drive traffic to external sites you write for!
Optimise your profile
After your public byline and referrals, I believe LinkedIn is the most important way to generate leads as a freelance writer.
Frankly, if you are writing exclusively for other sites, I don’t believe you should waste time creating and maintaining a portfolio or website — and then trying to compete for traffic to it. Your LinkedIn is easier to update and a faster way to be found, so let it be your de facto portfolio.
But, while LinkedIn has more than a billion users worldwide, that simply isn’t your desired lead pool. Everything you do with your LinkedIn profile should be honed for your specific writing niche/s and emphasise your unique value proposition (UVP) that you bring to each project.
Start with your Headline. “Writer” and “freelancer” are vague terms that will have you competing with too many users and ranking for vagueness. Even “copywriter” or “blog writer” are too broad without clarification. Your specialization is key in how you find gigs and how you are found on LinkedIn. Include those terms in your Headline and across your profile.
Always separate keywords on LinkedIn by periods, commas or Words | More Words as LinkedIn doesn’t understand most punctuation. It also doesn’t understand most acronyms, so aim for redundancy in the terms people can find you with.
Update those keywords as your specialty evolves. Specify “freelance writer” if you wish to remain such and are looking for temporary projects or long-term partnerships, versus if you would consider longer-term roles, skip it. Just always add your niche’s context.
Repeat those keywords throughout your profile including in your About section, Job Title and description, your Services, your Skills (which are silly but influence search results.)
An important part of your profile continues to be Recommendations. The start of the year is a great time to reflect on your recent work and to ask your clients for testimonials. Feel free to offer suggestions for what you want to include and any measurable achievements that can be shared. When added on LinkedIn, these Recommendations last forever and you can pick from them to reuse, including in that About and Services section and on bios elsewhere.
Services is a new profile section to definitely fill out as it leads to people sending you projects. A Request Services button is added and so far I’ve started receiving project opportunities. It’s also another place to get Reviews and even a rating out of five stars from previous clients. Since it’s a new feature, results may vary, but you can turn this on and off as you get projects.
Don’t forget to check your Contact info. Remove the public security risk of your birthdate and be sure to add your most reachable email address — many people still don’t check their LinkedIn DMs and prefer to communicate via email.
Build compelling connections
Hot take: LinkedIn is the largest business social network. No, really, it matters who you are connected with and how many from which industry, job profile and secondary and tertiary connections.
You have 100 invites a week to use or lose. Spread it out about 20 a day and sometimes you’ll get even more. (Try to fit them all in one day, you’ll get cut off early until the following Monday.) Prioritise your connections based on your niche or even based on the specific topic/s you know you’re going to be publishing about over the next month. Due to limitations of each, this is easiest done by searching People on the app and Posts on the desktop.
Connect. Don’t just Follow. To follow is one-way. Click Connect (search results will either have a Connect button outright or it’s hidden at the top of profiles under More on the desktop or … in the app). Once connected, you will get hyper-notified of their content, especially in the first two weeks, while they will also get hyper-notified of your posts, and you will show up higher in their search results and in their connections’ search results.
Click Connect > Send without a note, unless they are a source you are looking to speak to right away. Any other notes come off spammy and litter inboxes. First connect, then foster that connection with a DM later when warranted.
How the LinkedIn algorithm likes you to post
Frequent posting is a way to build your personal brand around certain themes, while it’s also an important signal to the LinkedIn algorithm.
LinkedIn is a mix of Impressions — how many people saw at least the top two lines of your post — and Engagement — how many engaged with your posts, via likes, comments and shares, along with how long they watch Videos or scroll through Slides. The LinkedIn algorithm will increase those impressions the more engagement and time on posts you have, often exponentially.
The LinkedIn algorithm has two long-standing biases — the golden hour or first hour you publish, and the first action on any given post. The first hour you post something, be prepared to be active around it, including responding to (non-spammy, non-troll) comments. If you have something important to share, feel free to DM the post link to people, asking them to specifically Comment or Share before they React. It’s annoying because our instinct is to hit like, but that will dilute the power of comments or shares, which are indeed much more important signals to the algorithm.
Something to note is that by commenting on or sharing other people’s posts, or them on yours, you will also be hyper-notified of each other’s content. This is a double-edged sword — don’t feed the trolls lest you be inundated with their trash.
After the most recent LinkedIn update, activity on the platform is essential for post engagement. This is both interacting on the platform before and after a post is published, and specifically on your post — or anyone’s post you want to boost.
Now, annoyingly, the algorithm also wants you to be active on the site at least 10 minutes before you post. This can include comments, likes, and even DMs. When you can, engage with your target audience first.
This is also required after too. During the golden hour, you’ve always had to make sure to reply to comments right away. But in 2025, if your post is really important, stay active on LinkedIn even when the comments aren’t coming. Also don’t be the first to comment on your own post.
Comments that perform best are 12 words-long or more.
All of these changes are important to consider not just when you are promoting your own work, but when you want to do your best to support other colleagues and friends.
Other LinkedIn best practices remain pretty much the same. Post, when you can, on the weekday morning of your target timezone or the timezone of the majority of your connections. Often as a freelance writer this is outside your control, so just share as soon as your external blog et al publishes.
LinkedIn tells us that if you post at least once a week, your posts have 4x the impressions and twice the engagement. However, posting more than once a day is downgraded.
LinkedIn posts that perform better
While personality often matters more than form or templatizing your posts, there are ways to craft your LinkedIn posts for success on the platform.
Optimise for the first two to three lines of any post, as that’s what people see before they decide to click on your link or to show more.
Use relevant hashtags
This is where LinkedIn Hashtags remain interesting. It’s not a fully supported functionality in the app anymore, but hashtags are a trick to bold text within your post, especially at the start — plus you show up if folks are still tracking that hashtag. Make sure to practice #CamelHashtags which are easier to read by humans and screen readers. Also include that keyword phrase elsewhere in your post.
For example, I want to rank for “developer productivity” so every pertinent post has #DeveloperProductivity in the first two to three lines and then ends with something like: Read… and then comment how you really feel. The challenge of developer productivity continues!
Best length for LinkedIn posts
Posts between 150 and 200 words are statistically best performing, but really go for what makes the most sense for your post, especially when your objective is to mix engagement on LinkedIn and clicks on your work. Sometimes you have to just get to the point in a line or two — mix it up!
Following common SEO best practices (that really just make it easier for folks to read on mobile) is to have many sections within your content, including very readable content like bullets (you have to manually use a hyphen, checks or emojis) with key takeaways.
Ask a question for engagement and encourage clicking to read and then commenting.
Share your content and tag contributors
Don’t just share your content but make sure people know you’ve written it — “My latest from (tag medium)” or “My first byline on (tag medium)”. This is valuable both to your brand authority and also will get more clicks if your connections know it’s a You Original.
How did this piece make you feel? Show gratitude as you tag your sources and your editors. That said, don’t spam tag people. Even one person clicking Remove mention will (and should) downgrade your post significantly.
Publish natively on LinkedIn
Yes, our roles as freelance writers often rely on generating traffic. Still, when you can, it’s best to publish natively on LinkedIn. This can be a text-only post, photos, slides or newsletters. Content with images has twice the engagement on LinkedIn.
Over all, the more time LinkedIn users spend with your content, the better it will perform.
Test videos
Specifically, in an effort to compete with TikTok, LinkedIn LOVES video! (Natively uploaded of course.) And it really loves (or perhaps we as humans now respond to) short selfie videos (think portrait mode) with subtitles (how many of us are checking LinkedIn without sound on?) Don’t worry about spending too much time on them — the scrappier the better.
If you own the rights to a video, upload it to LinkedIn just like you would to YouTube. While you can post videos up to 10 minutes long, the site optimises for percentage of video viewed, so keep it under 90 seconds when you can — under 60 seconds and vertical if you want to cross-post onto YouTube Shorts.
Go live
LinkedIn Live's livestream offering that can be done as an individual or as a company page — gets more engagement than stagnant videos and can take less work, as it pings your connections when you go live and you can’t edit it later. Particularly, if you or your guest has a lot of followers, a LinkedIn Live can be a way to create enduring buzz on the site.
The effort for this comes before the event in Share > Invite your relevant connections to the event (because the LinkedIn search for this sucks, you really need two screens, one to search a job profile and the other to invite.) Try to keep your LinkedIn Live under half an hour because again LinkedIn wants people engaged not dropping off midway.
Bonus LinkedIn Live creates content that you can reuse and repurpose as writing later.
A mix of posts performs best on LinkedIn, so long as you keep to your messaging, brand and style.
Don’t just share new posts, but remember to share older posts that are still relevant and represent your best work.
You can use generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to run your article through asking for a LinkedIn post to get started but definitely rewrite, lest your post sounds robotic. Just make sure you maintain your voice and writing style!
How to be active on LinkedIn
A lot of people treat LinkedIn like a resume or CV, but first and foremost, it’s a social network.
People trust and engage with you and your personal brand over any company Page. Everything in LinkedIn prioritises Connections. It’s more important that you and any sources you include in a piece share your work before you share on a company Page — but a Page can then share your post for greater reach.
Don’t just scroll passively. Add reactions and especially comments — LinkedIn is tracking that to decide who and what shows up on the Home news feed. This is true even if you are sharing externally or in DM. (e.g. I have a friend making a transition from teacher to instructional design. I send him WhatsApps of job posts and now these top my feed.)
Even if you don’t have anything planned that week, post something, even reflecting on something you’ve learned or a tip: “How I”, other data and thought leadership and other things that align with your specialization. Personal reflections and interests perform really well and are a way to get engagement/impressions without external links. Pics with you or of pets (or office dogs) perform above and beyond!
We know that if you go more than two weeks without posting it hurts you more, and that LinkedIn itself in its new Weekly sharing tracker (in Analytics) recommends at least three actions per week among posts, comments and AI contributions. I’d argue you should aim for two posts a week, but respect your boundaries and feel free to schedule them ahead — again, natively on LinkedIn not via a third-party app. I would also argue you should be offering 15 to 20 value-added comments a week on posts of people you want to work with and who you want to support.
If there’s one action I despise on LinkedIn, it is “commenting for reach.” This is especially true when a friend is looking for a job. Use that comment to share their experience or amplify why people should hire them. And of course, make your comment at least 12 words and add it before liking the post! If you really recommend someone, share post with thoughts.
This is the same for companies or brands that are helping you do your job (ie: my coworking with its cute dogs, or Nadine’s work and community supports me so I amplify her work!)
Also don’t forget the perennial winner of event pics. With permission whether online or IRL, when you attend an event, post pics and a few key takeaways from speakers, tagging them and the event. Events often still use hashtags, too.
How to get external traffic from LinkedIn posts
LinkedIn wants you to spend more time on it (shocking), which means, in an effort to reduce bounce rate, it looks to increase time on page/in app, and downgrade external links. But we of course want to send traffic to wherever we are published.
Hot take: Link directly in your post.
I do not agree with the trend to add link in comments. LinkedIn completely controls the order your comments appear and it adds another step for your reader. Also LinkedIn doesn’t like when you are the first to comment on your posts, which this tactic kind of mandates — because no one else is going to comment if you’ve promised a link you haven’t provided yet.
I don’t even think upload a native image and then add the link in the text unless your URL is among your first two lines, making it easy for folks to click by adding the full https:// link properly.
Anything you want to drive traffic to, click … on the top right corner of your post and Feature on top of profile (which is available once you Turn on Creator Mode.) You can always remove it later from your Featured but I find it usually quadruples the Impressions to any post in the first 24 hours.
Sharing other people’s work, even their posts with external links, can increase your presence on LinkedIn, as well as support others. This also can get around the external link penalty, because you can share external links in other people’s work.
If you have a small team — or a group of rad, supportive friends — let them know ahead of time when you will post so you can coordinate these efforts during that first golden hour after posting. If you have the Engagement early on, the Impressions will follow regardless of an external link in post.
Your freelance writer LinkedIn checklist:
Post in a clear, concise and engaging way that represents your writing style.
Make your UVP clear in your Headline — to remind your audience and yourself!
Be sure your Contact Info is up to date.
Add the new Services section.
Optimise for the first two lines of any post.
Post native media or text-only whenever you can.
Comment to boost other people’s work.
Remember LinkedIn’s bias toward first action.
Be active on LinkedIn, liking and commenting, not just scrolling.
Publish a LinkedIn post at least once a week, but aim for twice.
Optimise for clicks if you want to drive traffic to your blog posts.
Jennifer Riggins is a technology journalist and event host, known for bridging the gap between business and technical leadership on The New Stack and LeadDev. She’s been a working writer since 2003. Connect with her on LinkedIn!
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