I Grew Thousands of Followers Posting About Pizza. Here's What It Taught Me About LinkedIn.

I posted about pizza on LinkedIn. Every day. For about nine months.

Not marketing tips dressed up as pizza. Just pizza. Reviews, rankings, opinions, the occasional aggressive take about pineapple.

I gained thousands of followers doing it.

And no, the lesson is not "post about pizza." The lesson is the four things the pizza taught me about how this platform actually works, and they apply to whatever you're actually trying to sell.

Lesson one: pick a lane and refuse to leave it

Most people's LinkedIn reads like a personality with the hiccups. A leadership quote on Monday. A hot take on Tuesday. A humblebrag Thursday. A photo of a conference badge Friday.

The algorithm has no idea who you are, so it can't decide who to show you to. And neither can a human scrolling past. You're a blur.

Pizza was a lane. A dumb, delicious, unmistakable lane. Every post pointed the same direction, so the platform figured out fast who to hand me to, and the pizza people found me and stuck around. The topic was almost beside the point. The consistency was the whole trick.

Pick a lane. Stay in it long enough to get boring to yourself. That's usually right about when the audience starts to find you.

Lesson two: nobody cares what you sell, they care what they feel

Here's the uncomfortable one.

Your ICP does not wake up wanting to hear about your product. They wake up with a feeling. Frustrated. Curious. Seen. Amused. Behind. The content that works finds the feeling first and earns the right to the pitch later, if at all.

Pizza is pure feeling. It's warmth and opinion and a low-stakes fight you can have with a stranger and both walk away happy. It gave people something to react to that had nothing to do with what I actually do for a living, and that's precisely why it worked. It got me in the door as a person, not a billboard.

Stop posting what you and your colleagues talk about in your meetings. Start posting about what your ICP talks about in theirs. The gap between those two things is where most brand content goes to die.

Lesson three: the hook is the entire game

You get one line. That's it.

Line one decides whether line two ever gets read. No throat-clearing. No "in today's fast-paced world." No warming up. The reader is moving at speed and you have to reach out and grab them before the thumb wins.

Pizza made me ruthless about hooks, because a boring pizza post dies instantly and the feedback is immediate. I learned to open with the tension, the claim, the confession, the fight. Not the context. The context can come in line four, once you've earned it.

Write your first line. Then delete it, because it's almost always the throat-clearing. Your real hook is usually the second thing you wrote.

Lesson four: quality over volume, always

Everyone will tell you to post more. Post daily. Feed the machine.

The pizza thing looked like a volume play, but it wasn't. It was a consistency play with a quality floor. I didn't post more pizza than I had good pizza takes. I posted a good one, every day, in one lane, and I stopped when I had nothing worth saying.

Ten forgettable posts don't add up to one good one. They add up to ten reasons for someone to unfollow. The platform rewards the thing people actually stop for, and people stop for good, not for frequent.

Volume is what you do when you don't trust your quality. Fix the quality and you need less of everything.

The part that's easy to miss

Here's what the pizza actually was, underneath.

It was a real, public, low-stakes experiment in how attention works, run by someone whose actual job is winning attention for brands. I wasn't goofing off. I was testing everything, in a lane that didn't matter, so I'd know exactly what to do in the lanes that do.

That's the whole game. Test where it's cheap. Learn the mechanics. Then point the same mechanics at the thing you actually care about, whether that's a product, a service, a book, or a name you're trying to build.

The pizza was never the point. The reps were the point.

What to do with this

If your content isn't landing, it's almost never a volume problem. It's a lane problem, a feeling problem, a hook problem, or a quality problem. Usually more than one.

Pick a lane. Lead with the feeling. Nail the first line. Keep the floor high. Then be patient enough to let it compound, because it does, right about the time you're convinced it won't.

I do this for a living. Brands, voice, content that actually sounds like a human wrote it. If that's a problem you're trying to solve, you can see the work or just reach out.

But first, go pick your pizza. 😘