How to build a personal brand on LinkedIn

The short answer

Pick one thing you want to be known for. Write about it, in your own words, a few times a week. Keep doing that for six months.

That is the whole method. Everything else — the profile photo, the headline, the banner — is packaging. Packaging matters a little. Showing up matters a lot.

Choose one thing, not five

People remember a person for one thing. The accountant who explains cash flow to café owners. The recruiter who tells the truth about salaries. The consultant who keeps saying the strategy deck is the problem.

If you write about five things you are a generalist, and nobody remembers a generalist. Pick the thing you would happily talk about for an hour, and that the people you want to work with actually care about.

Write like you talk

The posts that build a brand sound like a person. Short sentences. A real opinion. A story from last week, not a lesson from a textbook.

You do not need to be clever. You need to be recognisable. If a client could read a post without your name on it and know it was you, it is working.

Tidy the profile, once

Your headline should say what you do and for whom, in plain words — Bookkeeping for independent restaurants beats Passionate finance professional. Your About section should read like an introduction at a dinner, not a CV.

Do this once, then stop fiddling with it. A finished profile with no posts is a shop with the lights off.