LinkedIn Insights from Ethan’s Editor
What I have learned from editing Ethan’s Advice for a year
Welcome to a paid member-only edition of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Daniel Hickey, editor and ghostwriter who has worked with a full spectrum of clients, from first-time founders to Fortune 5 executives.
You can reach him by email at danny@writeyou.co or on LinkedIn.
Ethan here.
I hated English class in high school, totally avoided it in college, and thought I was a bad writer for most of my life. Yet, writing well was key to my becoming a VP at Amazon and is even more critical now with global and remote work.
Writing is your face and voice when you are not there. So, here are some key lessons and actions to help you write like a senior executive, especially on LinkedIn.
To give you an independent viewpoint on writing well, I am enlisting my editor, Daniel, to share his observations after editing a year of my posts.
Daniel’s deep take is below, but here are some of my own quick takeaway lessons that predate my work with Daniel:
As I said, I really did not like writing as a young man. I avoided it, and in high school “MomGPT” helped me as much as ChatGPT helps people now. I thought I was a bad writer for decades after this. However, it turns out I just did not like writing about “English Literature” as a topic. There is a difference between writing a book report and writing about stuff that matters to you. If you want to write well, you must write about something you care about.
I got good at writing by writing a lot in my job. Cranking out 40 to 60 business emails a day for 25 years is about 250,000 emails. The sheer number of times I was misunderstood taught me to be a better writer.
You must be willing to let your writing sit and then go back to it with fresh eyes. No matter how good your first draft is, you will be able to improve it on a second pass the next day.
Never send a “Friday afternoon email” when you are tired. You will both write poorly and say things you will regret. Edit it (or delete it) Monday morning for better results.
Be willing to enlist a second set of eyes. Once I realized how critical writing was to helping you, my reader, I started to look for an editor. Sometimes it is painful to see what Daniel cuts or simplifies, because he takes what I had already been over two or three times and makes it better yet again. But, the result is a clearer message and lesson for the reader.
If you want a single career-changing lesson, #4 is it.
A couple of things about Daniel:
We have never met; I hired him after he produced a couple of trial pieces for me, and we have worked together remotely ever since. We may get to meet for the first time in a couple of weeks, which I look forward to.
Daniel does not ghost write for me, even though he provides this service for other clients. Every piece begins and ends with my writing. Ghost writing has a place for some, but having someone else write “for” me would destroy my sense of satisfaction. I will always do my writing myself because I have a burning desire to share my knowledge in order to help you.
With this introduction, I turn it over to the only man on earth who has seen so much of my writing from the inside.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
About a year ago, I was trying to sell my ghostwriting service like a madman.
I found Jason Yoong (Ethan’s operating partner) in a LinkedIn thread and started warming him up for my two-bit pitch. However, the pitch ended before it even started.
“I don’t want a ghostwriter. And Ethan, the guy I work with, doesn’t want one either. But if you know anyone who can edit, we might be interested.”
Well, I turned my two-bit pitch into a two-bit pivot and raised my virtual hand- “Sure, I can edit.”
Kind and professional, Jason responded with a warm version of “We’ll see about that.”
A few emails later, I was doing a test edit of some of Ethan’s content to see if my services would be helpful. I started out strong, but somewhere along the line, I dropped the ball. This was Ethan’s feedback on my trial run, which included an analysis and some actual edits:
Ethan shot straight with his feedback, and he shot true. Nailed it. Bullseye. Bingo.
I HAD been exhausted, rushing, and worried about overediting. Ethan’s feedback was rigorous, direct, valuable, and kind.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that rigor, kindness, and direct delivery are the same traits that make his writing on LinkedIn so powerful. He shoots straight and always aims at the best way to help. That is why so many people tune in to read his writing.
A year after that trial run, I have read every single one of Ethan’s published posts. I have edited a fair amount of them, and I have even peeked behind the scenes at some unpublished drafts. The whole experience has been a masterclass on what makes someone successful on LinkedIn, and now I am going to leak it all.
I will cover the 6 things that I consider to be the most important factors in Ethan’s writing success:
“To Hell with the Algorithm”
“True Value”
“Clarity, NOT Simplicity”
“Credibility Matters”
“Ethan as a Person”
“Working With an Editor”
Grab your notebook.
To Hell with the Algorithm
If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn creators (or worse, LinkedIn coaches/ghostwriters/course creators), you know that they can’t shut up about tHe aLg0rIthM.
Every failed post is supposedly the result of some clandestine algorithmic change, and every success is an indication that they (and ONLY they) have cracked the new code.
Ethan mainly ignores the algorithm.
We have had the “algorithm” discussion twice in a year of working together, and I started it at least one of those times. Sure, Ethan understands the value of a hook and the novelty of a vacation photo here and there, but his broader content strategy is driven by an organic wisdom that would be considered naive by many of the self-proclaimed LinkedIn experts.
The strategy boils down to “Be helpful, honest, and consistent.”
Sounds silly, right? Too wholesome? Too simple? Too… easy?
You see, Ethan’s posts are never based on baiting the reader into clicking “see more” or posing as the gatekeeper of some secret. The posts are based on giving readers something of which they actually want to “see more,” and they are rooted in Ethan’s genuinely credible experience.
His posts focus on being helpful, not outsmarting his audience or hacking the ever-elusive algorithm.
That brings me to another observation about Ethan’s content: It is filled with “True Value.”
Action: If you want to write well on LinkedIn, forget (mostly) about the algorithm. Focus on providing specific, valuable insights in a way that is relevant to your readers. If you are genuinely doing that, the algorithm will not work against you.
True Value
In the world of LinkedIn influencers, ghostwriters, coaches, and all the other personas that make LinkedIn so insufferable, there is a gospel:
“The hook is everything.”
In other words, only the first two lines of your post matter. If you write a good hook, you can leave the rest of the post as lorem ipsum dolor and trick the audience into clicking “see more.”
This way, you can get a million impressions and join LinkedIn royalty with very little effort.
The bad news is that writing a good hook isn’t actually easy, even though it is only two lines. The even worse news for those trying to grow on LinkedIn is that this advice is bullshit.
If you want people to read, react to, and follow your posts, the whole post needs to be good. And, if the goal is to bring readers off of the platform and into your newsletter, course, or customer journey, the posts need to be really good.
The question is, what does “good” mean? As a “word guy,” I wish I could tell you that “good” meant powerful poetics or pungent prose.
It doesn’t.
“Good” writing on LinkedIn consists of a few things, but it starts with writing that GIVES something to the audience. It either gives them knowledge, confidence, or a feeling of connection. It either makes them KNOW something or makes them FEEL something. That is where good LinkedIn content starts.
In a surprising contrast, posts that make people “think something” don’t tend to perform as well.
The internet is a place where people come to devour confirmation of their preconceived notions, not nibble on food for thought. Introducing a nuanced point of view on LinkedIn is noble, but don’t expect it to go viral.
If you want the post to perform well, you can’t make it too complex.
Now, I know what some of you may be thinking, and it is a good instinct.
“But people arguing in the comments is great for engagement!”
Correct! What you are thinking of here is controversy, not nuance (a nuanced distinction, perhaps). The best way to think of this difference is this:
If your post elicits the reaction of “Let me think about that,” you have touched on nuance and your numbers will show it (negatively).
If your post makes readers say “Let me scream about that,” you have hit the controversy button. Nice work. It will do wonders for engagement.
But be careful, overindexing on the controversy lever will not bring sustainable results. Many a rage-baiter has come and gone from LinkedIn, going mega-viral for a few posts, gaining a massive following, and then seeing their engagement tank.
I would know, I have ghostwritten for one or two of these rage-baiters. 😁
The lesson from Ethan is that stoking controversy can be a tactic, but it is not a strategy. If you have something controversial to say, go for it, but don’t seek out the hot takes every day. Your audience will get tired of it and will not become interested in your product or service.
The only truly sustainable strategy on LinkedIn is to deliver value over and over again. Once you have something truly valuable for your audience to read, you can think about drawing them in with tight hooks and red-hot argument fuel. That stuff will help, but only if you have something to say behind all of it.
Action: Write to provide value. Always ask yourself, “How is this helping my reader?” From there, introduce hook-writing tactics, controversy, or appeals to emotion. Do NOT put the cart (tactics) before the horse (value).
Now, once you have determined what you are going to give to your audience day after day, here is how you can write it.
Clarity, NOT Simplicity.
When it comes to writing the meat of his posts, there is another piece of LinkedIn content “gospel” that Ethan effectively ignores:
“Write at a 3rd grade level.”
Maybe the conventional wisdom says “5th grade” or even “8th grade,” I don’t really know. What I do know is that this advice is condescending and not at all helpful for anyone interested in delivering valuable insights.
Think about it- If the most impactful insights about careers and business really were simple enough to be delivered to children, somebody would already be selling “Baby’s First 360 Review” or “The Good Kid’s Guide to GTM Strategy.”
But they aren’t. Because real life is complex.
Most things that are valuable to working adults require slightly more explanation than a 3rd-grade vocabulary permits, and most adults don’t appreciate being talked down to. What the LinkedIn gurus mean when they say “write at a 3rd grade level” is that writing should be clear. Clear writing is often the same thing as simple writing, but not always.
If you don’t believe me, I have some anecdotal proof. I measure the “grade level” of every LinkedIn post I write or edit using a tool called “Hemingway.” The tool calls attention to sections of writing that may be unclear, and it also tells me the supposed “grade level” of each piece.
After Ethan writes posts and passes them to me for editing, I run them through Hemingway as a part of my editing process. Ethan’s posts are often “graded” between 8th grade and post-graduate level, but they perform much better than other posts that I write or edit at the 3rd-8th grade level.
This is because they are all clear, no matter how “simple” or “complex” any individual post happens to be.
So, what is the difference between clarity and simplicity?
The difference is that “simple language” becomes reductive when it is applied to complex concepts. Clear language does not.
Here is an example: We use simple language when we explain to children how babies are made.
“When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…”
This is a great example of explaining a complex concept with simple language. The result is that the information is not fully accurate, and the child doesn’t really learn how babies are made. This may be fine for a child, but it won’t be very attractive to adult readers.
We see this exact concept at play when some people try to “hack” their LinkedIn content. They write simplistic, reductive advice with the hopes of winning clicks from unsavvy readers.
“10 hacks to becoming a unicorn founder 👇”
From a person who is not a unicorn founder… Yeah right.
Overly simplistic writing may get some views in the short term, but an obsession with simple language will force you into creating simplistic content. Once your audience realizes everything you say is too simple to be true, they will stop reading.
On the other hand, clear writing does not reduce complex concepts. Clear writing exposes complexity and works through it by being precise- it does not obscure complications or become vague.
As an example, open a biology textbook and look for an explanation of how babies are made. If it is a good textbook, you will understand how babies are made in nitty-gritty detail. You won’t be confused, nor will you be left wondering. This is in direct contrast to the way we explain reproduction to children, which omits nuance to the point of inaccuracy.
Ethan’s writing on LinkedIn is like a good textbook. For whatever career topic he has chosen for the day, the reader rarely feels like they need more explanation OR like the content is too complicated. Clear writing, like Ethan’s, is neither vague nor confusing.
When the topic requires more explanation than the platform will allow, Ethan almost always writes a newsletter about the topic or mentions that he will continue to address it in future posts.
The point is that Ethan is successful with his audience because he does not dilute his insights with arbitrarily simple language. He engages complexities and explains them.
That is clear writing.
After reading that, you may be asking “But HOW can I write clearly like Ethan Evans?”
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