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- MY 2026 LINKEDIN STRATEGY
MY 2026 LINKEDIN STRATEGY
How I plan to double my followers, get 10M impressions, and make £1.7M on LinkedIn in 2026...
Niall Ratcliffe
December 14, 2025
In partnership with
Morning!
This is the 230th newsletter I’ve sent. That’s 230 Sundays in a row of writing and sending this newsletter. Nearly 4.5 years and I’ve never missed a Sunday. It may be the thing I’m most proud of over the last few years.
When I started this newsletter, it was a commitment to myself to spend time learning about marketing every week. At the time, I was 20, I had just landed my first job in marketing and I was a marketing novice. Since then, I feel like my whole life has changed…
I started a business
Scaled it to 20 staff and 7-figures in revenue
Opened our first in-person office
Became friends with people I used to idolise
Built a 70,000+ follower audience
Worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet
Everything I dreamed of when I started this newsletter is how my life looks today. Pretty crazy. Yet it still feels like we’re just getting started, especially when it comes to this newsletter. Next year I’m taking it up a whole other level.
Here’s the plan ⤵️
1 essay every Sunday (as usual)
1-2 shorter emails throughout the week sharing stories, insights, and things I’m learning throughout the year
My goal: Make this newsletter the most valuable marketing newsletter you can subscribe to in 2026.
How do I do that:
Give away everything I learn
Explain it in the simplest way possible
Then obsess over learning more
Right, I’ve done enough waffling about me and next year now. I just wanted to give you an insight into what I’ve got cooking for 2026. Let’s get into this week’s essay.
This week I’m going to show the entire strategy I’ve mapped out (including the tips & tricks) to hit 3 massive goals next year:
Hit 115,000 LinkedIn followers (Double my current following)
Drive £1,728,000 in new revenue from LinkedIn
And rack up 10+ million views
I’m revealing it all. Just don’t share this with my competitors pls :)
Let’s get into it!
THE ESSAY
4 years ago, I shared my first-ever post on LinkedIn. It was a link with a short sentence and a screenshot of one of my first newsletters. I had this silly idea that if I made the newsletter good enough and just posted it on LinkedIn that it would blow up and I’d be the next Harry Dry.
Surprise surprise… it didn’t quite work out like that.
But what started as a stupid newsletter promotion post ended up being the start of something I never could have imagined. 1 post turned into 2. Then 10. A couple of posts went viral, then I gained some followers. Then I was hooked.
4 years on from that silly little post, I’ve racked up 60,000 followers on LinkedIn and driven well over £2 million in revenue from signing clients on the platform. Wild. Truly wild. But next year I am taking it up a few notches. I’ve got some big goals and a clear plan to hit them.
Here’s my strategy to double my followers and make £1.7M+ from LinkedIn in 2026 ⤵️
1) Narrow Down My Messaging
In 2025, I talked about so many different things.
B2B marketing (as a broad topic)
B2B content marketing
B2B marketing on LinkedIn
B2B ads
B2B Outbound
My transformation story
Growing the agency
Entrepreneurship lessons
While I wasn’t as broad as some people, I wasn’t narrow enough for people to remember me for one thing. When you’re building your brand, especially from 50k-200k, it’s so important that you pass what I call the ‘Association Test’ - when someone can reference you for something without remembering your name.
Just take a look at some of the people who’ve become famous over the last few years…
Andrew Huberman - “That health guy who has the podcast”
Hailey Welch - “The Hawk Tuah girl”
Speed - “The streamer who barks and loves Ronaldo”
I don’t follow or consume the content of any of those 3 people, yet I’m able to give a description of them and talk about them without even using their name - and this is one of the many reasons they’ve become so famous.
Processing new information takes cognitive load (mental effort). When someone is scrolling, their working memory is overloaded. If they have to spend unnecessary effort trying to categorise you, they simply move on. You’re forgotten.
So in 2026, I’ve defined one ‘big message’ for all of my content to centre around: LinkedIn is the biggest opportunity in B2B
It’s simple, something I deeply believe in and now, the core of my content.
2/ More Growth-Led Formats
People love to pretend that a certain format is the silver bullet that will send you to the moon. Unfortunately, that is never the case. But they do matter.
If you share content in formats that are more shareable or saveable there is a good chance you can increase certain metrics like impressions and new followers. So, to hit my big goals of doubling my following and hitting 10M impressions, I’m going to lean into more shareable & saveable formats.
On LinkedIn that means…
Carousels - These get dramatically more saves than other pieces of content. People see the front cover, don’t have time to swipe and read through the entire thing so save it for later. You’re also able to go into much more depth which again increases the chance someone will save it.
Infographics - These are the most reshared posts on the platform right now. People love to reshare cheatsheets and in-depth infographics.
In 2025, 80% of my content was text + image.
In 2026, 80% will be infographics & carousels.
3/ Full-Scale Outbound Approach
I used to hate outreach on LinkedIn, but this year some of our most successful client campaigns have included LinkedIn outreach.
And it makes sense why…
→ Decision-makers hang out on LinkedIn
→ You can build lead lists in Sales Nav
→ It’s easy to start conversations with them
I’ve always done bits and bats of LinkedIn outreach over the years, but never at scale and we never had the technical skillset to do it effectively. This year, we’ve started building an in-house GTM team and we’re going to be firing on all cylinders with our own outreach next year. We’ll be reaching out to 2000-3000 prospects per month and I’m expecting it to drive 30-40% of our leads.
(Right now it only drives 15-20% of new leads.)
This will be a key part of driving that £1,728,000 in new revenue from LinkedIn next year.
4/ More In-Depth Breakdowns (Like this)
LinkedIn will be flooded with AI “educational” garbage next year.
My plan to stand out amongst that is to give real breakdowns of things we’re seeing behind the scenes at noticed.
AI can give generic info, but it can’t give you real-life experience. So I’m going to be doing more in-depth breakdowns outlining entire strategies that I’ve seen work behind the scenes of working with some of the fastest-growing B2B brands in Europe.
Example:
Next Wednesday, I have a carousel going out that is a step-by-step breakdown that showcases our highest-performing LinkedIn outreach campaign for a VC firm.
33% reply rate. 100s of leads. And I included everything we learned from it in the carousel.
AI can tell you a lot, but it can’t give you behind-the-scenes insights like this.
5/ Video Deep Dives + Short Form
I’ve ebbed and flowed with video content. It’s always tough to keep consistent when our video team gets slammed with client shoots at times, but next year we’ve got a process mapped out to produce more videos than ever.
My commitment for next year:
2 short-form videos per week
1 long-form deep dive
I’m excited to get the deep dives out there. They’re going to be 5-15 minute breakdowns and they’ll all go on LinkedIn. They won’t be my highest performing pieces of content, but my plan is to make them the most valuable.
Simon Squibb’s YouTube is my inspiration for these and I think those will be the pieces of content people truly appreciate.
People are still seeing LinkedIn as a boring social media platform. I see it as a massive marketing opportunity and I don’t plan on letting it slip through my fingers in 2026.
Hopefully, this essay gives you a clearer sense of how I’m thinking about this, and a nudge to take it more seriously yourself as we head into next year.
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
P.S. Remember to rate the essay below. Takes 1 second but helps me know what to write :)
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