Welcome to episode 168, last week’s show seemed to go down a storm……it seems everyone is checking their influence score and comparing them which can only be a good thing in my opinion. As a followup to that and on a similar track I wanted to focus on article clicks this week, or rather the lack of article clicks many people seem to be battling with! I’m getting a lot of comments like; “I think I will move to posting rather than articles as they get better views” Or “Why doesn’t LinkedIn alert my followers when I post a new article”? So in this episode I’m going to try to fix that…but first Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week LinkedIn China president resigns New LinkedIn Features Here is the new ‘What people are talking about’ feature. This seems to be based on trending stories but when you click on it LinkedIn encourages you create a new post with a pre-written hashtag on that subject. Could this be LinkedIn trying to get # moving? Images are fixed! At last LinkedIn have fixed the issue regarding posting images. No longer do we need to worry about turning our phones horizontal to take a picture for LinkedIn we can now add images in portrait! What To Do If Nobody Is Reading Your Articles Years ago published posts (now renamed articles) would get thousands and at times tens of thousands of views. It seemed like LinkedIn was the perfect place to produce content…a ready made audience that would be alerted to your content. Many people got in early and started to get amazing results, this attracted more and more new authors and in no time at all over 1 million people had written an article on LinkedIn. This number massively increased the amount of notifications LinkedIn was sending out to people and this became a big problem….countless people objected to ‘spam’ from LinkedIn - too may notifications and too many emails. So LinkedIn changed things and rapidly reduced the amount of notifications. The net result was that article view number plummeted. What would have been 10,000 views 2 years ago became for like 200 views and this is where most people are with articles. So let’s be clear…….publishing articles on LinkedIn is not what it used to be. The article feature is no longer a distribution network for your content, it is merely a library for your content….just as other blogging platforms are such as Wordpress and Blogger. That however, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be writing articles. It simply means that you need to use posts to distribute your articles to your audience…and hopefully beyond. First let me make something clear; We do need to be careful when comparing posts to articles. They are completely different and the stats are measured in different ways (clicks vs views in the feed). A posts ‘view in the feed’ is simply a page impression ie it appeared on someones feed - it doesn’t mean they saw it. An Article click does mean they saw it - completely different things The best way to view them is that they work together. An article is long form content but just that - static content. If it gets into a pulse channel it might get clicks outside of your followers but the best way to achieve clicks is via posts which are short form, viral content - see posts as the 'vehicle' to distribute your articles. Your ability to gain high view numbers on your posts is down to a variety of factors but most important of all is to show the algorithm that you are 'interesting' through regular comments & likes. So here are the 3 key areas to focus on; Aim to get it published in a Pulse channel Make sure it is over 500 words Ensure you have the right keywords in your headline When you publish send a tweet to @LinkedInEditors 2) The Headline is Critical. Create intrigue that makes some want to click on to see more Test 5-7 headlines with friend or co-workers Try to make it personalised Lighter subjects work best - avoid serious/boring headlines If one headline is clearly not working…change it! There is a free course on Lynda from LinkedIn editor in