A LinkedIn content strategy that survives a busy week.

Most LinkedIn strategies fail in the second week, when the founder who wrote them has a board meeting, a hiring crisis and a client on fire. So the strategy has to be small enough to hold in your head and honest about where the material will come from on a bad week. Everything below reduces to four decisions.

• Territory. The one thing you want to be known for, in a sentence a stranger could repeat. Every pillar serves it; a post that does not is a post for a different account.
• The mix. What job each post does. Mostly reach new people, sometimes deepen trust with the people who already follow you, rarely ask for anything.
• Cadence. A weekly number you will still be keeping in month three. Three is the honest floor for LinkedIn; more is fine once three is boring.
• The source. Where posts come from when you have no time to think. For a founder that is the week: what got decided, what got measured, what went wrong.

A post does one of three jobs. Name the job before you write it and the post gets clearer; count the jobs over a month and the profile stops reading as salesy or, just as common, as a stream of observations that never asks for anything. Sonar's vocabulary for the three, and its default shares:

Awareness: 60 in 100

Posts for people who do not know you. An observation about how your market behaves, a lesson from something that went wrong, a number nobody else in your niche will say out loud. The test is whether a stranger in your industry would save it. Nothing about you needs to be in it except the fact that you were there.

Nurture: 30 in 100

Posts for people who already follow you and are deciding whether you know what you are doing. How you made a call, what you measured before and after, the mistake you would not make twice. Depth and proof. These are the posts a buyer reads three of before they reply to a message.

Convert: 10 in 100

The ask. A place on a cohort, a call, a hire, a case study with a result and a next step. One in ten is the default because the other nine are what earned the right to it. When Convert runs more than fifteen points over your target across three or more posts, the profile reads as a pitch deck, and Sonar says so on Home.

Off the clock: about 10 in 100

The fourth kind sits outside the funnel. A post about what you do on a Sunday, with no work angle attached and no lesson bolted on at the end. LinkedIn has taught a generation of founders to tie every hobby back to leadership; the audience can smell it. One in ten posts that is light by design keeps the account sounding like a person. If you cannot write it without a moral, skip it that week.

A pillar is a recurring subject, wide enough to hold fifty posts and narrow enough that a stranger could say what you cover. "Pricing for services businesses" is a pillar. "Growth" is a hope. Four to six is the working range: fewer and the account repeats itself by month two, more and none of them compounds.

• Half in the territory at large, half in your proof. Two or three pillars should be industry-level subjects anyone in your space would follow, and the rest should turn your own company and story into evidence inside them. A set that is all company topics is a newsletter; a set that is all industry takes is a pundit.
• Give each pillar a plain search phrase. An editorial name like "The vetting story" is fine on a plan, and useless when you want to know what happened in that subject this week. "Vendor due diligence for agencies" is what you search, and what a tool can search for you.
• Add up to three personal pillars. The Sunday subjects: the sport, the reading, the city. They feed the off-the-clock post and nothing else. Keep them out of your market research or your feed turns into gym content.

Three posts a week is the LinkedIn default in Sonar and the floor most people who do this for a living suggest; X runs faster, and its default is six. A founder's real constraint is attention on a bad week, so the right number is the one you can hold through a fortnight of travel. In the best time to post on LinkedIn data on this site, the people who posted three or more times a week also had the highest typical post; frequency did not cost them.

• Set the number per platform. LinkedIn at three and X at six is two different rhythms from the same week, and one voice.
• Fix the days and the slot, then stop deciding. Monday, Wednesday, Friday at your audience's morning removes twelve small decisions a month.
• Measure the streak before the numbers. Twelve weeks at three a week is the point at which the numbers start to mean something; before that, the only metric is whether you kept the cadence.

The plan above dies on the first week with nothing to say. The fix is to stop looking for ideas and start looking at the week: a founder's calendar and calls produce more publishable moments than they could ever post. Six kinds are worth a standing search, and they map onto the mix without effort.

Ten minutes on Friday with the week's calendar open, writing one line per meeting that produced any of the six, gives you more than the following week needs. If you connect the calendar and the calls to a tool that does the search for you, the ten minutes become answering two questions.

Three posts a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at your audience's morning. Twelve posts, split close to the default mix: seven Awareness, three Nurture, one Convert, one off the clock. Each row names the kind of moment to look for; the subject comes from your own week.

Run it once, then run it again with the pillars rotated. By the second cycle you will know which pillar your audience answers and which one only you care about, which is the moment a strategy becomes yours.

The numbers that matter for a founder's profile fit on one line and are all relative to your own history. Raw engagement is a vanity contest with people who have ten times your following.

• The ratio. Each post's engagement against your own average on that platform. A post at 1.5 times your mean tells you what to write more of; a post at 0.3 tells you what to drop, once it happens twice.
• Impressions in the first day. Whether the post reached people at all, before anyone decided whether it deserved a reaction. LinkedIn shows this only to you, on the post's analytics.
• The mix, actual against target. Count the jobs at month end. Eight or more tagged posts is enough to see a drift; the usual finding is that Convert crept up or Nurture never happened.

Followers move too slowly to steer by week to week; read them quarterly. And leave the day-of-week question until you have six weeks at one slot, for the reasons the timing guide sets out.

At sign-up Sonar reads your published posts and your brief, asks what you want to be known for, and proposes four to six pillars with a plain search phrase behind each. The mix targets (60/30/10 to start, your off-the-clock share beside them) and your weekly goal per platform (LinkedIn 3, X 6, anything from 1 to 14) live in Settings under Pillars, and every surface steers by them: the daily pick on Home leans toward whichever job the week is short of, bulk generation spreads across your targets, and the weekly Insights edition names the drift once eight tagged posts exist.

The source is the part it does for you. Connect your calendar, your meeting transcripts, Slack or your notes, read-only, and about once a week Sonar reads the last seven days and keeps the moments: decisions, numbers, lessons, stories, wins, conflicts, each with its source and with private people written as roles. Every week five drafts are dealt from that material in your voice; keep a card and it lands on your board in the slot you chose. How a week becomes posts walks one invented week through it, and the pricing is one plan with every feature on.