This is my ridiculous take on LinkedIn personal branding, content strategy, and why entertaining people might be the smartest marketing move that you’re not making.
There’s a lot of advice out there about growing a puurrrrrsonal brand on LinkedIn.
Pick a niche. Define your audience. Build content pillars. Post consistently. Provide value. Establish authority. Optimize your profile.
All in the framework of "doing it right" and still be deeply, terribly, and forgettably boooooooooring.
And boring is a bad personal brand. Maybe the worst one IMO.
So here’s my slightly irresponsible suggestion: post some nonsense.
Not actual nonsense…… I’m not telling you to post lunch pics and call it thought leadership. I mean the stuff that makes someone stop scrolling and think “okay, this person is funny,” or “I needed this today,” or “I have no idea who this is, but I’m following them now.”
Because that’s how brands actually get built. Not just through information. Through recognition and trust built over time. Personality. Repetition. Community. And, in my case, an unreasonable number of cat memes.
Stop trying to sound like a brand
This is the mistake I see constantly.
Someone decides “I need to build my personal brand,” and within a week they stop sounding like a person and start sounding like LinkedIn itself.
“5 things I learned about leadership.” “Your network is your net worth.” “Here’s what nobody tells you about B2B marketing.” I beg you. Go outside.
Your personal brand isn’t supposed to read like a content generator trained exclusively on other people’s LinkedIn posts. It’s supposed to sound like you — which, conveniently, is also what the platform itself is rewarding right now. LinkedIn has been putting real weight behind original content and firsthand expertise over generic advice-column posting.
Being an actual human isn’t a distraction from the strategy anymore. It is the strategy.
Meme break: somebody spends four hours on a 17-slide carousel titled “The 7 Pillars of Authentic Leadership.” Meanwhile some guy posts “me pretending to understand my own quarterly goals” with a photo of an extremely confused cat, and it pulls 400 comments. Marketers love blaming the algorithm for this. The algorithm isn’t the interesting part — the human reaction is. Someone saw it, laughed, tagged a coworker, and remembered who posted it. That’s brand building, whether you meant it to be or not.
Your brand is what people remember you for
Devin Reed has shaped a lot of how I think about this. His whole thing is building where your audience already spends time, playing the long game, and earning trust instead of trying to squeeze a lead out of every single post.
Because your goal was never “how do I make this go viral.” It’s “how do I become recognizable to the right people.” Those are completely different games. Viral is an event. A brand is a pattern.
If someone sees ten of your posts over six months and thinks “oh, that’s the cat marketing guy,” you’ve won something. If they see the eleventh and know it’s yours before they even check the name — even better. And if, six months after that, they think “I need help with this, I should talk to Will” — now we’re cooking. That’s how content quietly turns into a client.
The nonsense is the point, not the exception
Here’s my theory: your content doesn’t always need to teach me something. Sometimes it just needs to make me feel something — funny, curious, seen, less alone, mildly annoyed, whatever.
Ross Simmonds built a framework for this years ago that’s stuck with me: the 4 E’s of content — Educate, Engage, Entertain, Empower.
Notice Entertain is in there. Not “entertain, once your content calendar has room for it.” One of the four, full stop. And I think most marketers have quietly decided that one doesn’t count.
That’s a mistake, because entertainment isn’t fluff — it’s a delivery mechanism. Entertainment gets attention. Attention builds familiarity. Familiarity builds recognition. Recognition builds trust. Trust is what eventually turns into an opportunity. No single meme is going to close a six-figure deal. But every one of them gives someone a reason to remember you, in a feed that’s about to get flooded with content an AI could’ve spit out for anyone.
Your edge isn’t going to be volume anymore. Everyone has volume now. Your edge is sounding like you and nobody else.
Meme break: AI writes, “Here are 7 actionable strategies to maximize your professional visibility.” I write, “linkedin is basically reddit now and honestly i’m here for it.” Both are technically content. Only one of them sounds like a human being who has been staring at this platform for six years and has finally had enough.
LinkedIn is getting a little Reddit-y
I’ve spent way too much time studying Reddit — it was a big chunk of my work at Creative Shizzle, including a deep dive into using Reddit for real audience research instead of relying on polished, sanitized survey data.
Reddit taught me something that took a while to sink in: people don’t want to be marketed at. They want to participate. And LinkedIn, in its own buttoned-up way, is leaning further into that same instinct — favoring conversations and community-style engagement over broadcast posting, and actively cracking down on engagement pods and other fake activity.
I’m not saying LinkedIn is turning into Reddit. It’s not going to start letting people post under a username like u/MarketingCat69 (please, God, no). But the behavior is converging: relevance, inside jokes, shared interests, people reacting to people. That’s the lesson, and it was never really “go use Reddit.” It was “go where humans are actually talking, and talk like one.”
Your comments are part of your brand too
Building an audience isn’t just post → refresh analytics → cry. It’s also the comments you leave, the conversations you actually show up for, the people you introduce to each other, the jokes you make in someone else’s thread.
This is where Tas Bober has influenced how I think about this — her whole approach is built around giving people what they actually need instead of shoving them toward a conversion, and thinking in terms of mindshare: staying genuinely useful and present long before someone’s ready to buy anything.
Earn the attention first. Ask for the thing later.
Meme break: the internet told you to “build in public,” so you posted “Day 47 of my founder journey — here’s what I learned about resilience.” Meanwhile your actual brain was thinking “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.” That second version is the more interesting post. Post that one.
You don’t need to become a thought leader
You don’t need a leather notebook. You don’t need a framework with your initials in it. You don’t need a new acronym every Tuesday.
You need to be useful and memorable. Those aren’t the same thing.
You can teach. Tell a story. Share a mistake. Make a joke. Talk about your industry, or something completely unrelated to it. Celebrate someone else’s win. Say “I don’t know.” Say “I was wrong.” Say “that thing everyone loves is actually kind of dumb.” That’s a personal brand — no framework required.
Post your version of nonsense
The trick isn’t posting random stuff because random stuff performs. It’s posting your version of it.
For me that’s cats, marketing memes, Reddit, community, snark, the occasional genuine piece of advice, and a healthy distrust of anything that sounds like it came from a content playbook written by a robot. For somebody else it’s football, cooking, dad jokes, sourdough — whatever. The point was never to copy someone else’s personality. It’s to let your actual one show up in the work.
Jess Cook at Vector is a great example of doing this well — the content doesn’t feel like it came out of a “B2B Content Strategy” folder. It has an actual point of view, and it treats entertainment as part of the marketing instead of a distraction from it. That’s the bar: not “does this look professional,” but “does this feel like us.”
So what do you actually post?
Back to Ross’s 4 E’s, in practice:
Educate — teach me something. A lesson, a tactic, a mistake, a process worth stealing.
Engage — talk to people, not just at them. Comment on other people’s stuff. Ask questions you actually care about the answer to.
Entertain — make the meme. Tell the dumb story. Post the cat. Your VP of Marketing will survive.
Empower — share what helped you. Give someone permission to start. Show the messy middle instead of the highlight reel.
Consistency doesn’t mean daily
You don’t need to post every single day forever. You need a system you can actually keep up. LinkedIn’s own current guidance leans toward a few posts a week — nothing extreme — paired with content that’s genuinely original rather than reheated.
Consistency isn’t “I posted 19 days in a row and then vanished.” It’s “people know I’ll still be here in six months.” That’s what compounds. So build a rhythm you can actually live inside, not one that requires becoming a different person.
And most posts won’t convert today. Someone sees it, does nothing. Sees another one next week, likes it. Sees a meme two weeks later, comments. Forgets about you. Then three months later they need something and think, “oh — I know that person.” Not every post needs to close a deal. Some just need to keep you in the conversation.
The Will Novelli Nonsense Test™
Before you hit publish, ask:
Is it useful? Cool. Is it interesting? Better. Does it sound like me? Now we’re getting somewhere. Would I actually say this to another human? Important. Would I send it to a friend? Excellent. Could an AI have written this exact post for 400 other marketers? Uh oh — rewrite it.
Your personal brand doesn’t need more content. It needs more personality — more opinions, more stories, more weird little things that make people recognize you before they even see your name.
The goal was never to be the person who posts the most. It’s to be the person people remember.
And sometimes that’s a genuinely useful idea. Sometimes it’s a joke. And sometimes it’s a picture of an orange cat hanging onto a door with one paw.
That’s still marketing. It’s just better marketing.
Go post some nonsense. Not random nonsense — your nonsense.
— Will, The LinkedIn Marketing Cat