Taylor Borden, an editor at LinkedIn, emailed me last week with a question she’s putting to a handful of writers for a special edition of her newsletter, The Work Shift. The premise was backed by data that shows entrepreneurship on LinkedIn is up nearly 70% year over year, more than six in 10 of those entrepreneurs also identify as content creators, and people who post weekly see up to 4x more profile views, with commenting driving 2.5x more.
Her question was simple: What’s one lesson that changed how you approach content creation? And if you were starting your LinkedIn journey from scratch, how would you approach your first 10 posts?
I almost answered with a framework. Then I remembered why frameworks are the problem.
4 Categories Felt Complete. The Data Disagreed
Back around 2009, Guy Kawasaki asked me for a few pages for his book “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.” I outlined four ways brands could create YouTube videos that truly enchant an audience: inspire viewers with emotional stories, educate them with useful information, enlighten them with documentaries, or entertain them by making them laugh.
Four felt complete. It was clean, teachable, and easy to remember. I used it. Other people used it. I even built it into a piece for Search Engine Journal years later, “What Is a Content Marketing Matrix & Do We Need One?”
Then the data kept arriving. By 2023, I was writing a different SEJ article with not four, but 39 emotions – count ’em.
I had never connected those two pieces until Borden’s email forced me to. The gap between them, 14 years and 35 emotions, is the most useful thing I have learned in 24 years of writing about this industry. The four-category framework wasn’t wrong when I wrote it. It was just the size of the dataset I had access to at the time. The mistake would have been treating it as finished.
The Practitioners Who Get Stuck Are The Ones Who Fall In Love With Their Framework
This is the part of my answer to Borden that applies directly to anyone doing SEO, content marketing, or social media marketing work right now, not just LinkedIn posting.
Every framework you build, every category system, every “the four types of X” or “the five stages of Y,” is a snapshot of what the evidence showed you on the day you built it. AI Overviews didn’t exist when most of our content frameworks were written. Neither did AI Mode, Gemini-embedded search, or AI Overviews appearing in 2.5 billion users’ results. The frameworks built for a 10-blue-links world were not wrong for that world. They are simply the size of the dataset that existed then.
The practitioners who get stuck are the ones who keep applying 2019’s framework to 2026’s data because the framework is familiar and the new data is inconvenient. The ones who keep growing are the ones who stay curious enough to ask, “What would this framework look like if I rebuilt it today, with everything I now know that I didn’t know then?”
This is exactly the trap a lot of AI Overview content strategy is falling into right now. The “answer the query in 40 words at the top of the page” framework was built for a world where the goal was winning a featured snippet. That framework wasn’t wrong for that world. But AI Overviews don’t reward the page that already said everything; they reward the page a user clicks through to after the Overview, and they’re rewarding it for being more than the summary that sent them there. A page built to win the old framework is, by design, the page with nothing left to offer that user. The four-category model and the 40-word-answer model failed for the same reason; both were finished products built for a dataset that kept growing after the deadline.
What I’d Tell Anyone Starting Their First 10 Posts
This is the answer I gave Borden directly, and it’s the same advice I’d give to anyone in SEO, content marketing, or social media marketing starting from scratch, on LinkedIn or anywhere else.
Find something you believe confidently. Then find the research that complicates it. Write about the gap, honestly, including the part where you were wrong or incomplete.
That single move does three things at once. It gives you a topic (your existing belief), it gives you a hook (the data that challenges it), and it gives you credibility that a polished, unchallenged framework never can, because readers can tell the difference between someone defending a position and someone genuinely updating one.
2 Steps To Apply It This Week
First, pull up the oldest framework, list, or “the X types of Y” piece you’ve published, the one you’re proudest of, the one that still gets cited or linked. Search for what’s been published on that exact topic in the last 12 months. If a four-category framework from 2009 quietly needed to become 39 by 2023, whatever you wrote in 2019 or 2021 almost certainly has a similar gap waiting in 2026’s data. Don’t defend the old version. Write the piece that updates it, and say explicitly what changed and why.
Second, before you publish anything framed as “the X ways to do Y,” ask whether you’re presenting a snapshot or a conclusion. A snapshot says, “Here’s what the evidence shows as of now, and I’d expect this number to grow.” A conclusion says, “This is the complete list.” The first framing ages well. The second framing is the one you’ll have to walk back in front of an audience, the way I just did with my own 2009 framework, in public, 14 years later.
The entrepreneurship data Borden shared, the 70% growth, the 4x profile views for weekly posters, isn’t really about LinkedIn specifically. It’s evidence that more people are now doing what writers and SEO practitioners have always done, which is putting a belief in public and finding out, often quickly, whether the evidence agrees with it. The lesson is the same either way. Stay curious about what the data says next, especially when it disagrees with the framework you already published.
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