In the vast world of professional networking, LinkedIn stands out as the premier platform for connecting with like-minded individuals, building your personal brand, and sharing your expertise with others. LinkedIn offers a myriad of features to help you achieve these goals, and one such feature that has gained prominence recently is the Community Top Voice badge. Earning the coveted profile badges on LinkedIn can significantly boost your profile’s visibility and credibility. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the power of collaborative articles on LinkedIn and provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to earn that Community Top Voice badge for your specific niche.
First thing’s first, What are Collaborative Articles on LinkedIn?
Before we dive into the mechanics of earning the gold Community Top Voice badge, let’s first understand what collaborative articles are. These articles are a new way to tap into the collective knowledge of those within the LinkedIn community. They begin as AI-generated conversation starters that need additional expertise from LinkedIn creators and business professionals to round out the topics. These articles often focus on a specific topic or theme, and the contributions of various authors are combined to create a comprehensive piece of content.
Benefits of Contributing
Increased Reach
When you contribute to a collaborative article, your content gets exposed to the audiences of all the co-authors and contributors of the article expanding your visibility and reach within your industry. More visibility? Sign me up.
Diverse Perspectives
Collaborating with others brings different viewpoints and expertise to the table, making your content richer and more valuable. By sharing your expertise in this way it also allows for others to up vote your insights that also give weight to when you’re issued your badge.
Enhanced Credibility
As much as I hate to admit it, having an industry badge show up just under my LinkedIn headline has made people stand up and take notice of what I have to say. This gamification element adds to the rapport and clout many weigh heavily within this professional social media networking platform.
How to Earn a Community Top Voice Badge on LinkedIn
Earning a Community Top Voice badge on LinkedIn requires consistent effort and high-quality contributions. When testing this for myself and sharing this step-by-step guide with friends and clients it’s taken anywhere from 7 days to several weeks to get a top badge.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to increase your chances of receiving this business badge of honor.
1. Visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/topics/home and find your niche(s).
2. Start scrolling through the articles and insights and see which ones spark your interest and share your insights and “hot takes.”
3. Keep at it! LinkedIn hasn’t said outright how much you need to contribute to earn a badge
4. Rinse + repeat for all the niches that are in alignment with you.
Note: You can earn as many badges as you would like, however, you can only display one on your profile.
Now, once you earn your badge, how do you keep it? Great question. I received an email from LinkedIn congratulating me on my Community Top Voice which stated that the badge is active for a minimum of 60 days after you earn it, thennnn you have to keep contributing to keep your badge past the 60 days.
Looking to the Future
Something we all must be aware of is by contributing our expertise to these AI-generated articles, we’re in turn enhancing the intelligence for the future. LinkedIn has come up with a way to gamify collaborative articles so we as humans WANT to engage and WANT that badge prominently displayed for the world to see on our profiles. When in reality what we may be doing is making the machines smarter…time will tell.
What do you think? Will you be contributing to these articles or holding off?