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Feeling fed up with posting on LinkedIn and wondering why the return on effort just isn’t there? You’re not doing it wrong—you’re just missing the decisions that actually make visibility work. In this episode, Deirdre Martin breaks down what came up again and again during her recent LinkedIn Visibility Challenge and explains why posting more is a waste of time if you haven’t decided your goals, your positioning, and the role LinkedIn plays in your business. Drawing on real client stories, her Uncopyable Code, and years of lived experience helping ex-corporate coaches and consultants replace their salaries and scale to six and seven figures, she shows you how clarity beats consistency every time. You’ll walk away knowing exactly what to decide so LinkedIn starts creating demand, trust, and clients, without burning you out.

For the full list of timestamps, key takeaways, and all resources mentioned, visit the full episode page here: https://deirdremartin.ie/blog/linkedin-positioning-decide-3-things

Want to talk to Deirdre about scaling your business? ⁠⁠Click here.⁠⁠

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Are you fed up with your LinkedIn return on effort right now?

If you're listening and you're thinking, Deirdre, I'm posting, I'm showing up,

I am doing the fricking thing, and it's still not translating into clients.

Oh, I get it.

It's so frustrating.

And here's the thing, posting more isn't a strategy.

It's like LinkedIn cardio.

And if you're using LinkedIn like a treadmill, sweating your fricking ass off.

Praying the algorithm throws you a bone, then you're not building

authority on the platform.

You're not building your thought leadership.

You're burning calories, wasting energy unnecessarily.

I see this all the time, and in fact, my LinkedIn visibility challenge, I had

people show up on that and they were telling me that they had gone and done

courses with so-called LinkedIn gurus who literally told them you need to

post on the platform three times a day.

What?

No, you do not need to post on LinkedIn three times a day.

With that frustration and exhaustion, it came up again and again and again.

These were seriously smart people who showed up for the challenge.

Serious operators and ambitious entrepreneurs, people who know that

they're great at what they do, but they're starting to wonder if they're a

little bit invisible online, and their return on effort was just not paying off.

And so what came through was a pattern that was really painfully clear.

They weren't.

Not getting the clients because they're not trying hard enough.

They are on the platform posting.

They are reaching out, inviting people to have conversations.

The reason that they weren't getting the results that they deserved for

the efforts that they're putting in was because they had a gap, and

that gap was around positioning.

But also goals, and I'm gonna dive into this a little bit today because here's

what I see coming up all of the time with nearly every single person that

I meet who is showing up on LinkedIn first, they have no clear intention

for what they're doing on there.

The second is there's no defined outcome in terms of what

success actually looks like.

And then there's no real anchoring in terms of their visibility.

So instead of building momentum, what ends up happening is they get

stuck in this kind of decision loop that ends up burning them out and

creating all of this decision fatigue.

So where they're.

Constantly posting and then deleting and rewriting and second guessing.

Putting it out there, wondering if it's enough of them, if it's

too ai, then wondering why did it work, why didn't it work?

And not actually understanding what's going on with the platform.

And listen, I totally get this.

This is not about not putting in the effort.

This is more actually to do with direction.

If we haven't met yet, I'm Deirdre Martin.

I work with ambitious entrepreneurs who are fricking brilliant at what

they do, but they're totally on the edge of burnout because they're

doing too much without seeing the returns that they absolutely deserve.

And what I've learned over and over again is this, is that

visibility without positioning.

Drains you.

Whereas visibility with clarity is what builds your authority

and thought leadership.

So today I wanna help you close that gap in terms of positioning and goals.

So we're gonna be talking about why just post more is a

total and utter waste of time.

Seriously, bad advice, and how to decide what LinkedIn is actually

being used for in your business.

And then how to position yourself so your visibility creates demand, and you're

not just on there for the sake of it.

So this is grounded in what came up from the live challenge that I did,

backed in some of my unique frameworks and also shaped by real client work

and my own work and my own visibility.

So this is not just theory bs, this is like what's working on LinkedIn right now.

What helps you get visible and get clients on the platform.

So if LinkedIn is feeling a little bit heavier than it should if you're

showing up, but questioning whether it's worth it, like what's the point

if you're doing all the right things.

But you still feel like you're not getting traction.

Stay with me.

Because once you fix the thinking behind your visibility, the

strategy gets a whole lot easier.

So I'm gonna break this into three parts.

First one is, your goal isn't a goal if it doesn't have a why attached.

So here's the thing.

Most people set LinkedIn goals like.

They're ordering off a menu.

I want more followers.

I want more reach.

I want more impressions.

I want to go viral.

Okay.

Yeah, those things are cute, but tell me.

For what?

Why do you want that?

Because if you don't decide what LinkedIn is for in your business,

you'll do what everybody else does.

You'll go on the platform, you'll scroll, you'll compare

yourself to your competitors.

You'll copy what you think is working or model your content on that.

You'll post random stuff when you feel guilty because, oh, you haven't posted

in a few days, and then you'll decide, no, LinkedIn doesn't work for me.

Does that sound familiar?

I've been like that.

I've been that soldier on Instagram, I have to say.

Right?

And I find Instagram so hard to show up on consistently, whereas LinkedIn,

it just feels so much easier for me.

And so like a lot of what I'm talking about here applies to different platforms.

while I'm talking about LinkedIn because it's where most of my ideal

clients use as their primary platform.

Let me tell you that this works.

LinkedIn works.

What doesn't work is you treating it a little bit like a slot machine, which

tends to be my approach to Instagram.

It's like, ugh, okay, I'll put a coin in here and pull the

lever and see what happens.

But in the challenge that I ran recently, I used a marathon analogy

because it's the truth, right?

You know, it's a little bit like entrepreneurship generally.

When the a gun goes off and you take off, you're full of adrenaline and

still by mile one you're feeling unstoppable, you're buzzing.

You're like, yeah, I'm in a rhythm.

I can do this.

Or you know, if it's January, it's like, yeah, new year, new me, watch

me go, all that sort of stuff.

And that's all adrenaline.

But what happens is over time, adrenaline wears off and you end

up in this kind of messy middle.

And if you don't have a real target, as in if you don't know where the finish

line is of the marathon, what ends up happening is you actually end up quitting.

And it's not because you are weak or you're not good at the platform or because

your competitors are better than you.

It's because your brain is doing what brains do.

It's trying to conserve your energy, it's trying to protect you.

Your brain hates ambiguity.

It hates open loops.

It hates, I'll figure it out as I go.

Your brain actually hates that.

And if you're making a thousand micro decisions every day about what to post,

who are you talking to on the platform?

What angles should you take when you going to show up?

What offer are you planning to sell?

Your mind is going.

Fuck off.

It's like that's just too much.

It's mental overload.

So it's actually starting to look for shortcuts and there's research out

there that the average adult makes an estimated 35,000 decisions per day.

And entrepreneurs, seriously, you can amplify that because you're running the

business, you're running the whole show.

You're wearing so many hats.

And that's one reason that visibility feels so fricking

exhausting because it's more than.

Just posting.

You're not just posting.

You see, you're deciding and you're deciding constantly.

So here's what I'd love for you to do.

I'd love for you to think, I have a dream for LinkedIn.

What is that dream?

Pick your I have a dream and make it super specific and

don't make it be more visible.

Try something like, I wanna generate two client conversations

per week from LinkedIn.

Or I wanna build authority in one niche, so referrals start

happening without me chasing them, or I wanna book speaking gigs.

I wanna sell X number of spots in a program, and then ask yourself the

question that most people avoid.

What is the motivation behind that?

Why do you want to do those things?

Is it because you want freedom, flexibility, you wanna travel, you wanna

pay off the mortgage in your house?

You just wanna feel relief from having some financial stability coming in.

What is it?

Because motivation beats discipline every single time.

So here's what I'd love for you to do right now.

I want you to write down one LinkedIn goal that you're gonna

focus on just for the next 90 days one, and then finish this sentence.

This matters because, okay, if you can't finish the sentence, you don't

have a goal yet, you have a wish.

Once you have a real goal, then you're gonna move to the part so many

people skip, and that is point two.

If your positioning is generic, your content becomes invisible.

Now, this is a truth bomb that nobody wants to hear,

but I'm gonna drop it anyway.

Most posting won't work.

It won't get you clients.

It won't, because it doesn't fix a positioning gap.

And what I mean by that is if your message sounds like everyone else, your

content won't actually create any demand.

It might get polite likes, it may even get comments, like Great

posts, or, you know, love this.

Da da da.

But it won't actually convert because your ideal clients are swimming

in so much AI generated bland BS stuff that is like rampant on every

social media platform right now.

So the framework that I use with clients to help get through this and

really identify what makes you unique is what I call the uncopyable code.

The biggest risk in a busy marketplace or in a busy platform

isn't showing up and doing something that is imperfect or scrappy.

It's actually the biggest risk is being ignored and being forgettable,

people not remembering you.

And I want you to feel the difference between these two

statements as an example, right?

I help business owners scale.

That's the first one.

Versus I help ambitious entrepreneurs on the verge of burnout stop doing more

and build a business that actually holds space for them to generate the revenue

and lifestyle that they dreamed of.

One is like a flat piece of wallpaper, and the other is a mirror.

And in the Apex offer architecture that I work on with clients, there's this

concept that, we've entered a red ocean of storytelling, meaning everyone's using

the same type of storytelling frameworks or the same copywriting techniques.

Everyone's using the same hooks, they're literally being rinsed and repeat.

And everyone's positioning the client as the hero and themselves and the guide.

Story brand style, which I love and I absolutely advocate for.

And don't get me wrong, I love it.

It's clean, it's clear, it's really effective, but it has its place.

And I think that place is for bios and websites, but when everyone

uses the same structure, it actually stops differentiating you because

those frameworks become an anchor.

Holding you back instead of allowing you to.

Take off in your own unique way.

And so ubiquity becomes a liability.

So if your LinkedIn strategy is basically like tell a story, be

consistent post value, you're playing in the Red Ocean game.

And if you're like, what is the Red Ocean game, Deirdre?

Just think about like one fish and a ton of sharks.

Red ocean versus blue ocean, no sharks, right?

The sharks are your competitors and they're right beside you,

splashing around, and they are yelling the same thing.

They're all fighting for that one fish.

The goal isn't to be better at the same stuff.

When you show up on LinkedIn, the goal is to become uncopyable, which

means that you stop trying to be.

A service provider or a coach and you become a category, you

literally become a category.

So in the challenge, I had people look at their who in terms of their demographics.

Sure.

Because on LinkedIn that helps you find those people like their

job titles, industries, location, but also a little bit deeper in

terms of their psychographics.

What keeps your person awake at night?

What are they terrified of?

Like what do they crave?

And then we asked why should they care about why you say?

what difference do you actually make?

What do they get on the other side after having worked with you?

Because when you nail those answers, you stop sounding like.

A freelancer, a contractor, a consultant, or a coach or whatever you

call yourself and you start sounding like the only logical choice for that

kind of person that's positioning.

And one of my clients actually showed up for the challenge when I

hosted it live, and his name is Mike.

And I'm just gonna share a quick story about Mike.

He was literally showing up on LinkedIn weekly, but all of his

content was client talk and topic talk.

It was helpful, informational, it was safe, but safe doesn't stand out.

So we worked on his brand strategy and his positioning, and what we

determined was the thing that was actually missing was his point of view.

And once he showed up and started to share that, suddenly

his content didn't just inform.

It actually started to signal who he was, what his identity was.

So he was able to show up and say, this is who I am, this is what I believe,

this is what I see in the market.

And people started to really follow that.

People started to really trust him.

And yes, it generated incredible results for him.

It generated over a million impressions for him on the platform in less than a

year, but more so it opened doors for him that he didn't even know existed.

So I want you to take an action step here as well, and I want you

to answer this in one sentence.

I help.

Who do you help?

Who is, what is the struggle that they have?

Get specific outcome without the thing they hate.

So let me recap that.

I help specific person who is, who has a specific struggle, get a specific

outcome without the thing they hate.

When you can write that sentence and make it human, make it real, make it sound

like something that you would actually say that your client would actually say,

then what you can do is you can take that pressure, test that positioning,

and use it to help spot the gaps fast.

That is a great way for you to determine if what you're talking

about is actually landing.

Now I have also created a LinkedIn visibility checklist that ties in so

well with what I'm talking about here and how you can show up on the platform in

a really strategic and intentional way.

So go and grab that.

It's free and you'll get it at deirdremartin.ie slash

LinkedIn visibility checklist.

Now when you are writing that headline, don't overthink it.

Use it to reflect on these questions and tighten your direction.

Okay, now we're gonna move on to the part that actually turns your positioning into

visibility and converts, point three, and that is that facts don't create trust.

Feelings do, and your point of view helps seal the deal.

So.

One of the things that's really prevalent on LinkedIn right now is

that it's rewarding story, not the once upon a time in a land far, far away

type stories, but real actual stories, observations that you've made and that

you share based on a situation that you talk about that maybe has a little

bit of tension, that created a feeling in you and that resulted in a shift.

And the simple reason that that's working and why that is so effective

is that when your content has feelings in it, it makes people feel something.

And that's what makes them stop scrolling.

Because if all of your content is facts and frameworks and tips.

AI can write that now, and it reads like something that AI did write.

And so people are actually starting to be repelled by that

stuff and not because AI is evil.

It's not, and I couldn't live without it.

I use it all the time, but because AI feels a little bit cold flat,

soulless, because guess what it is.

So facts are great, but feelings are fricking greater.

And you might say something like, I was doing everything right

and it still wasn't working.

From the outside, it looked fine, but inside I felt panicky.

The frustrating part wasn't that I was posting more, it

was what it was costing me.

I. That's human, that's relatable.

And that's the kind of stuff that builds trust.

And there is neuroscience behind this, right?

Stories create attention because they create tension and tension triggers

your brain's pay attention system.

Oh, that was a bit of a mouthful.

I just try saying that quickly three times.

So your client's brain doesn't care about your top five tips.

It cares about wait.

What happened next in this story?

And this was where for Mike, that shift that he did was genius.

And the strategy that we created was he didn't need to start to

post daily that he didn't have the capacity to be able to do that.

We didn't make him, you know, stand up and dance in front of the

camera and do crazy TikTok shit.

We didn't make him become someone he's not.

We literally chose the easiest, fastest way for him to be known.

And that was one weekly video where he shared his thoughts and opinions

about what he was already covering in his podcast and newsletter

that was already going out weekly.

So he wasn't creating anything from scratch.

He was literally translating, and the key was this.

He stopped being a narrator and became a commentator.

And the difference is a narrator is like, here's what we've covered in this episode.

Whereas a commentator is like, here's what I think you're getting

wrong, and here's what I do instead.

And that's the difference and that.

Opinion that he started to share was what generated demand.

And like demand doesn't come from just showing up and being helpful.

It comes from being clear, specific and brave enough to have a point of view.

And that's exactly why I teach Dramatize for LinkedIn stories because

it creates that story arc, it creates the emotional, Paul creates the oh

shit, or oh God, that's me moment.

And when your story and positioning a line, your content stops being content,

it becomes sales, pre-work persuasion.

So here's an action step I want you to take on this as well.

That's three for today.

I this week I'd love for you to post a story, some story that includes a

real observation from your business, a feeling you had, and it can be one line.

It doesn't need to be a full diary entry, but like something that talks about

the shift that you made and the belief that you now hold, that kind of thing.

And when you.

Go to end the story, finish it with an invitation, not a pitch, not book a call.

Now more like, if this resonates with you, drop me a message.

I'd love to point you in the right direction kind of thing.

And when you do that, what you're doing is you're leveraging permission

marketing, and permission beats pressure every single time.

It also helps.

To generate trust.

And by the way, if you want a bigger, more tactical 2026 strategy

to turn visibility into clients on LinkedIn, go and listen to episode

157, the LinkedIn strategy for 2026.

It's one of the best complements to what we're talking about today.

Okay, recap.

Time today was simple, but not easy.

A goal without a why for LinkedIn or any other platform can quickly

become a bit of a guilt spiral.

And posting more won't fix a positioning gap.

Facts inform, feelings connect and point of view helps create trust,

which is what generates conversions.

So write your positioning statement.

Because if your posts don't match your positioning, your audience is

gonna get confused and confused.

People don't buy.

Okay, again, go and grab the LinkedIn visibility checklist

at www.deirdremartin.ie slash LinkedIn visibility checklist.

You can use it today.

It'll take you 10 minutes, so grab your pen cup of coffee, and just go for it.

If this episode helped you even a teeny bit, do me a favor and share

it with one entrepreneur who you know is working hard on LinkedIn and

wondering why isn't it working as hard for them as they're working for it.

Also, rate review and subscribe to the show.

You know the drill.

And until next time, keep mastering your business.