Rebuilding a LinkedIn Profile in Public: The 30-Day Plan, Week by Week

Digital Panda sells founder-led brand growth. On 8 September I measured my own LinkedIn profile and found it arguing against the service.

This article is the plan I am running to fix it, published while it is still in progress, with the starting numbers and the targets I will be judged against. Nothing here is a result yet. The report lands on 8 October, and it goes out whatever it says.

I am writing it up for two reasons. The first is that a founder brand agency asking you to trust it with your profile ought to show you its own. The second is that the plan is generic enough to run on any founder-led account, and specific enough to be worth copying in order.

The baseline, 8 September 2026

The window was 11 June to 8 September, 90 days, from LinkedIn's Aggregate Analytics export plus a post-by-post read of the last ten live posts.

| Measure | Value |

|---|---|

| Followers | 12,493 |

| Impressions, 90 days | 30,786 |

| Unique members reached | 16,334 |

| Engagements | 305, a 0.99% rate |

| Reach by 30-day block | 12,759, then 11,871, then 6,156. Down 52% |

| Engagement rate by block | 1.18%, then 0.96%, then 0.67% |

| Last ten posts | mean 103 impressions, median 63 |

| Days with zero engagement | 27 of 90 |

| Profile views, 90 days | 788, producing zero inbound conversations |

Underneath the totals, one finding explained most of it. My followers and my readers were different people. Founders, CEOs and MDs were 22% of followers and 5% of reach. CXO-level readers were 15% of followers and 4% of reach. Entry-level readers were 15% of followers and 18% of reach. I had been writing for one audience and being delivered to another.

Five mechanics, ranked, sat behind that: posting up to three times a day so my own posts competed with each other; serialised content with no cold entry point; two newsletters published from one profile under one headline; wide-reaching posts that engaged nobody; and content aimed at founders while the largest follower segment was recruiting professionals.

Why the plan is sequenced, not parallel

The temptation with a list of five problems is to fix all five on Monday. That produces a lot of activity and no idea what worked.

The plan runs one theme a week, in an order where each week's change is cheap to keep while the next one starts. Week one stops the bleeding. Week two rebuilds the signal in the posts themselves. Week three retrains the audience. Week four builds the path from attention to conversation. Each is judged on its own line of the scoreboard.

Week one: stop the losses

Four changes, all subtraction.

One post a day, hard cap. If posts compete with each other for the same readers, cutting volume raises reach per post. This is arithmetic rather than retraining, and it is the one change I expected to show inside a fortnight.

Move the second newsletter off the profile. Quiet Authority, the Digital Panda letter, moved to the company page. The profile keeps one topic. The page carries the other.

Links out of the body, into the first comment. Standard practice that I had drifted away from.

End the serial format. No more "filter three" or "week six of eight." Every post has to work for someone who has never read me, because on a feed, every post is somebody's first.

None of this was new thinking. All of it was already in a playbook I had written and stopped following. [Inbound dries up the week you stop](/blog/why-your-inbound-dries-up-the-week-you-stop-posting), and it also dries up the week you start doing it wrong.

Week two: rebuild the signal

The best post of the quarter, on 11 June, reached 1,795 people at a 2.34% engagement rate. It opened on a founder who had just lost a strong candidate. Concrete scene, plain words, short lines, nothing to catch up on. The typical recent post opened on an abstraction and finished at 0.00%.

Week two returns every post to the 11 June shape. A named situation in the first two lines. One idea. Short paragraphs. And an ending that a reader can actually answer, rather than a summary that closes the door.

The second change is in the replies. My comment threads, read back, were a series of complete, polished paragraphs that ended every conversation. From week two, a reply ends with a question, because the thread is what keeps a post alive in the feed, and a thread I keep closing cannot do that.

Week three: retrain the audience

This is the week I am in as this publishes, and it is the only week that involves no posting at all.

Five substantive comments a morning on posts by founders, CXOs and firm owners, before anything of mine goes out. The feed learns who you belong near from where you spend your attention. If the only place I appear is under my own posts, it has little to go on.

Split the two offers explicitly. The recruitment business and the brand-growth business get named as two things, so a reader knows which one they have found.

Name the buyer in the first two lines. Not as a label. As a situation only they are in. It filters the room before anyone decides anything, and a filtered room is what the audience numbers are really measuring.

About one post in three for the recruiting audience. Staffing and recruiting is 25% of my following, roughly 3,100 people. They are both the warmest audience I have and a named segment of the brand-growth ICP. Writing past them was the fifth mechanic on the list.

Week four: build the inbound path

Reach that produces no conversation is a cost. Week four is about the path from one to the other.

An ask in one post of three. Not a pitch. A specific offer to look at something, a question, an invitation. If every post is generous and none are actionable, readers learn that nothing is ever being asked of them.

Rewrite the profile headline to one buyer and one outcome. 788 profile views in 90 days produced zero conversations. Some of that is the wrong people arriving. Some of it is the right people arriving at a headline that did not tell them they were in the right place.

Message everyone who engages. A comment is a raised hand. Leaving it unanswered in private is leaving demand on the table.

Stop counting impressions. By week four the number that matters is conversations started, and looking at impressions makes you optimize for the wrong reader. [A predictable pipeline is built one conversation at a time](/blog/how-to-use-linkedin-client-acquisition-to-build-a-predictable-pipeline), and the count of those is the only line on the scoreboard that pays.

The scoreboard, due 8 October

Published on 16 September so it could not be quietly moved. Where each line started, and where it has to get to.

| Line | 8 September | 8 October target |

|---|---|---|

| Posts per day | 3 | 1 |

| Average impressions per post | 103 | 400 |

| Engagement rate | 0.99% | 2.0% |

| Comments per post | about 0 | 3 |

| CXO share of reach | 4% | 10% |

| Inbound conversations started | 0 | 4 |

Two of those I expect to miss. Four times the impressions per post inside a month is aggressive. CXO share of reach depends on the platform relearning who I am, and four weeks may not be long enough for that. I am publishing them anyway, because a target in public is a different kind of commitment than one in a spreadsheet, and because the misses will be as informative as the hits.

What this is and is not

It is not a case study. There is no result yet. It is a documented method, running on a real account, with a baseline you can check and a date on which the numbers arrive.

If you are a founder whose reach has fallen while the follower count kept rising, the plan above will transfer. Run it in order. Measure from the live feed and not from the export's flattering top-posts sheet. Give each week its own line on the scoreboard. And set the report date before you start, so you cannot decide later that it did not count.

Mine is 8 October.

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Want your own baseline before you start? The free Growth Audit reads your last 90 days from the live feed, splits your followers from your readers, and shows you which of the five mechanics is doing the damage. No call required.

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