How to create a personal brand on LinkedIn from zero. From nothing to your first sale.
Welcome to my LinkedIn Guide.
My name is Veeti Roponen, I’m a 2nd time startup founder and I’ve been on LinkedIn for over 6 years now.
During my time as an entrepreneur I’ve grown my LinkedIn presence from zero into a strong personal brand that generates a significant amount of sales for my businesses. I’ve even started being recognized as “Veeti from LinkedIn” on occasion at various startup events 😁
I’ll be going through exactly what has worked for building my own brand and how you can turn your LinkedIn into something that you can leverage in your sales pipeline.
👤 Setting up your profile
Setting up your profile is easy and shouldn’t take long. The primary goal is to make you look trustworthy and professional.
Make sure you have the following in order:
- A professional profile picture
- A short tagline that says your job title and explains what you do
- A minimalistic banner that explains what you do
- Banners need to be very concise and shouldn’t be visually too detailed as they’re very small on mobile devices.
- Previous work experiences
- Describe what you’ve built and what was your stake in the business.
- Education
- If you’re a young entrepreneur and are still in education, hide the entry and graduation years from the education settings to avoid prejudice.
- Avoid listing “online courses” from prestigious universities under formal education. It can raise doubts about your credibility, since it may come across as an attempt to exaggerate your background. For example, I’ve seen many people have “Harvard” as their education when in reality it was just a single online course.
⚠️ Important note: avoid anything cringe as well as framing yourself as someone who you’re not.
🔗 Building your network and connecting with people
Starting from zero with anything is always hard, however networking and getting started on LinkedIn is very straightforward.
If you’ve just made your account and are standing from zero connections or are still in the beginning, here’s how you can start to build your network.
- Start by connecting everyone you know and have met, even vaguely, on the Explore page.
- This is an easy way of getting some hundreds of connections depending on how many people you’ve come across in life.
- Scroll the explore page every day and connect as many familiar faces as you can.
- Go to free (and or paid) startup events and meet people face to face.
- Free low barrier to entry startup/business events are a great way of building a network of real people for yourself. I did a lot of this in the early days. I’d go out to every event possible just to meet new people. I’ve met a least over a thousand people this way over the last five years and it has been a great way to build up rapport.
- Comment on posts you see on the home page
- Whenever you scroll LinkedIn, try to make commenting on posts a habit. In addition to creating a connection with the original poster, comments can accrue a surprising amount of views and engagement if you leave one that’s well thought out.
- Write posts that make people engage with you
- Successful posts can bring in a lot of connections. More about this later!
Building a solid network of real connections from your local area is important. The people you’ve actually met are the most likely people to react and comment on your posts.
It’s important to have large baseline of people who always always react to your posts. This way, your posts are more likely spread across your follower’s network.
If you only connect random people and don’t interact with them you’ll risk having many connections but almost no interactions on your post.
✏️ Writing high quality posts
Along with outbound sales, posting is the second most important thing you can do on LinkedIn. Good posts make you visible to people outside your immediate network, position you as an authority in your space, and often generate warm inbound leads. Posts that go viral can reach hundreds of thousands of people.
Here’s methods I use to write posts and what I’ve found to work well.
Post types that I’ve seen work very well:
Showing results:
- Share numbers, screenshots, and outcomes from your work. People love seeing proof that something works. Example: “How we book 5-15 calls every day using…”
Constructive takes on entrepreneurship, sales, and tech:
- Share your perspective, but keep it balanced. Instead of just saying X is bad, explain what you’d do differently and why.
Lessons learned:
- Reflect on mistakes, failures, or wins. Vulnerable posts often resonate the most because they feel real.
Thoughtful reflections on societal matters
Celebrating wins as a young entrepreneur:
- People want to cheer for you, but framing matters. Be authentic and grateful rather than boastful.
Milestones
Behind-the-scenes posts: Show your daily process, tools, or the messy middle of building. It humanizes you and makes people root for your journey.
Using LLMs as a writing tool 🤖
After publishing several posts that performed really well in our own voice, we trained a custom GPT to help us turn ideas into posts that sound the same way.
This has been one of our most effective tools cutting post writing time by about 95%. We can now articulate ideas and turn them into polished posts at lightning speed.
That said, it’s critical to remember, an LLM should support your thinking, not replace it. Make sure the post still reflects your original intent, voice, and perspective.
Before you hit publish, read carefully and confirm you agree with every word. The credibility of your brand depends on it.
Formatting tips for your posts
- Short paragraphs
- Aim for 1–3 sentences per block. Easy to skim = more people read.
- Always try to write with your own personal voice / style
- Catchy hook in first line
- Emojis (sparingly)
- CTA at the end (optional, but works)
Common mistakes to avoid:
- Being overly self-promotional in every post (people tune out fast).
- Writing long, dense blocks of text (nobody reads walls of text).
💰 Sales outreach and automation
LinkedIn outbound sales has been the single most reliable way we’ve generated business. While posting on LinkedIn builds visibility and credibility, outreach is what puts you directly in front of the people who can actually buy from you.
With our system we’re currently generating around 5-15 meetings per day for our own company.
When we first started, we did everything manually, writing custom LinkedIn messages and recording custom personalized videos manually one by one. It worked, but it didn’t scale. As soon as we needed more predictable deal flow, we turned to automation.
Doing things manually at the start helps you get a feel for what resonates, refine your pitch, and build genuine connections. In fact, I’d recommend everyone begin this way, it forces you to really understand your audience.
A typical LinkedIn sales flow looks like this: you connect with new people, send a short, value-driven message, and once there’s interest, guide the conversation toward a meeting.
For sourcing leads, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is excellent. It lets you filter by industry, company size, seniority, or geography, so your outreach is always highly targeted.
Doing things manually is all good, but if you want to scale, especially beyond your local network and into global markets, manual outreach quickly hits its limits. You simply can’t keep up with the volume needed to drive consistent sales. That’s where automation comes in and why we built MailMoo.
MailMoo is a sales automation platform we built to solve our own outreach challenges. It lets you:
- Automate LinkedIn sales sequences
- Automate follow-ups
- Track opens, replies, and booked meetings in one simple dashboard
💡 More information about MailMoo on our website and in our “How to start LinkedIn outreach guide”
📌 Summary
Building a personal brand and driving sales on LinkedIn isn’t complicated, but it does require consistency and intention.
- A professional profile makes you look credible at first glance.
- A strong network ensures your posts and outreach actually reach the right people.
- High-quality posts position you as someone worth following and engaging with.
- Outbound sales and automation to contact decision-makers directly at scale to help you scale your growth globally.
At the end of the day, the most powerful thing you can do is show up as your authentic self. People connect with people, not with polished corporate-sounding profiles or cookie-cutter sales pitches. Whether you’re writing a post, sending a cold email, or hopping on a call, make sure it sounds like you.
If you combine authenticity with a clear system for posting, networking, and outreach, LinkedIn becomes more than just a social platform, it becomes a growth engine for your career and your business.