I post. I generate roughly 84,000 impressions a year. The replies are kind: “Great post!”, “Interesting!”, “Thanks for sharing!” And then I count the new customers that stream produced. Zero.
That is the paradox this series opens with. The more visible you are online, the more invisible you become to the people who actually matter. Reach is not a conversation. And a conversation is not a customer.
The visibility illusion
LinkedIn promises visibility and delivers it. You reach people. But which ones? Say you have a thousand connections. A post reaches sixty of them. Three react. One might become a lead. That is a tenth of a percent of your network.
Now the honest question: how many of those thousand are truly your ideal customers? Maybe ten. And of those ten, a post reaches one, or none. You feel visible, but you are mostly visible to people who already know you or do not need what you offer. Why the algorithm plays that game is covered in “Beyond the algorithm”.
Where your customers really are
Your ideal customers live around the corner. They are friends with your current clients. They sit in the same ecosystem as you. And they scroll past your post among hundreds of others, while what they really want is to talk to someone.
Want the CEO of company X to know you and call? Then the question is not how to reach him through the algorithm. It is who already stands close to him: his accountant, his lawyer, the entrepreneur he lunched with last week, the client who just closed a great case. His warm network. And you probably know someone in it. More on that in “Proximity over LinkedIn”.
Fewer people, more customers
A thousand random impressions yield two to five leads and at best one customer. Ten hand-picked people, approached personally on the basis of fit and shared connections, yield three to five conversations and one or two customers. Less reach. More result.
That is not theory, it is what every founder does in the early days: pick up the phone. Twenty good conversations beat twenty thousand impressions. It feels illogical, but random reach is exactly that: random.
Reaching fewer people with more attention beats reaching more people with less attention.
Five cards every morning
Picture this: every morning you write five handwritten cards. To friends of your best clients. To people who fit who you are. No pitch, no “Book your free audit here!”, no link in the comments. Just a person inviting another person for a coffee.
A handwritten card gets opened almost every time and cuts through the digital noise. Five a day is a hundred a month. If one in ten replies, that is ten conversations. If a fifth convert, that is two customers a month. Cost: a few euros and fifteen minutes before you open your inbox.
And if someone does not reply? On LinkedIn your post is gone. A card stays on the desk. Every time they see it, they think: this person made an effort. That is proximity. That is the difference.
In practice: Stop counting what does not count: impressions, likes, friendly emoji. Count what does: cards sent, real conversations, new customers. Make those five cards a daily ritual, not a one-quarter campaign. It is sustainable, it is human, and honestly it is more fun than hoping an algorithm shows you.
Series · Beyond Visibility · Add Business