Tom Doherty

• 2nd

I have about 31,000 carefully cultivated followers on LinkedIn. My articles used to reach around 3,000 people apiece, and these days I'm lucky to see 300. Meanwhile, a Boost button sits under every article I publish, offering to fix that for $50. I read LinkedIn's recent Boosting Best Practices Guide, and the most revealing line in it isn't a tip at all. It's the admission that "making the audience too small is the most common mistake we see." In plain English, most people boost the wrong thing to the wrong people and then wonder where the money went. The short version is that boosting is an amplifier, not a rescue boat. If your article didn't land with the people who already follow you, paying strangers to ignore it too isn't much of a strategy. This week's Monday Morning Marketer is about when that button is worth pressing, and when it's just LinkedIn selling you back the reach it took away.