Steal These Templates: The Posts (and DMs) You Can Copy and Publish Today
The templates I use and when they work best. Plug and play.
This morning I helped a client with a post who seemingly did everything right and still got zero traction on it.
The idea was good and through her 10 years of experience as a D2C founder you would think it was going to immediately be a hit.
She had the courage to hit publish, which is more than most people sitting on a decade of value ever get to.
And the post was dead the minute it went live.
117 impressions. Two likes, both from people she went to school with. Zero comments. Zero inbound DMs. Zero of the thing she actually wanted, which was for the one right stranger to read it and think “I need to talk to this person.”
So she blamed the idea thought it was crap or that she blamed herself for not having enough followers yet. This is when most people quit. I sure as hell almost did when I first started.
Honestly though - it was the way the content was structured, not the idea itself.
What it actually looked like a big wall of text in one giant paragraph. The grey block is the enemy for the attention deficit economy.
You don’t have a knowledge problem. You have a structure problem.
You already know your stuff.
If you were at a dinner with friends and they asked you to explain it, you could.
You would probably take a couple minutes and it would include the exact story and the exact numbers.
The problem is we overthink it when it comes to writing or doing videos.
We have a big blank canvas and we could literally write as much as we want. On LinkedIn that is a pretty well oiled machine now, but we can still get stuck with how to structure it all.
What gets you unstuck is a template.
A good template collapses a two-hour post into ten minutes. You’re not creating from nothing. You’re doing a fill-in-the-blank you could finish on your phone in line for coffee.
The free one: the Text Story template
A text post makes a stranger feel like you’re a real person and not another creator in the sea of posts everyone sees. A pure text post these days is far more meaningful and truly feels like a standout.
It conveys a story you experienced and how the reader can learn and leverage your experience or lesson.
Here’s the skeleton. Replace the brackets with your own words.
[LINE 1: the claim. Six words or fewer. Something a little surprising
or a little costly that you did or believe.]
[LINE 2: the stakes. What it cost you, or what was on the line.]
[Drop the reader into the moment. 2 to 3 single lines. What was
happening, what it felt like. Sit in it. Don't rush to the point.]
[The turn. The line where it flips. "Then I realized ___." or
"Here's what nobody tells you about ___."]
[The one idea. The single lesson this whole story exists to hand over.
Say it plainly.]
[Optional: 2 to 4 short lines expanding the lesson, one idea per line.]
[The warm close. Leave them better than you found them. Never end on a
gut-punch.]
[ONE ask, pulled straight from the story. "If you're [the person this
story is for], that's who I write for. [the one next step]."]Now here it is filled in, so you see exactly what “done” looks like.
My dad said I couldn't do both.
So I left a stable job with $300 in the bank to prove him wrong.
The first six months were ugly. I ate a lot of rice.
I second-guessed it every single morning.
I almost went crawling back twice.
Then I realized the fear was never about the money.
It was about being seen failing after I'd made a big claim.
What I wish someone had told me:
No one is waiting for you to be perfect.
They're waiting to see if you're honest about the hard part.
That's the whole social media idea.
Show the rice-and-beans months.
That's what makes them trust you when you win later.
If you're standing at the edge of a big claim, that's exactly who I write for.
Hit follow and I'll walk it with you.That’s ten minutes, not two hours. The big piece will be sharing something emotionally compelling and connecting with the reader, but the format here will help you get started much quicker.
The part of being on LinkedIn or any social platform, is that you’ll vary what you post every day. Partially because not everyone is a monk capable of being on repeat every single day, and partially because the readers need variance in what they see.
I built the full set of post templates for every kind of day, whether you’re teaching or sharing life updates or just having a connecting moment. The bonus I threw in there were some DM templates, because the money conversation usually happens in the DMs and everybody I work with chokes there.
It’s the forty hours you were about to spend this month, already done.
Find the rest below:
