The short version: to post an article on LinkedIn, click “Write article” under the post box on your homepage (or go straight to linkedin.com/article/new/), add a headline, a cover image, and your content in the rich text editor, then hit publish and share it to your feed. It takes about ten minutes once you know where the button is, and the button is the bit almost everyone gets stuck on first.
Article or post: which one are you trying to publish?
Before I give you the steps, sort this out, because it changes everything. LinkedIn has two completely different formats and people mix them up constantly.
- A post (status update) is what you see filling the feed. Text, an image, a poll, a document carousel. Character limit is 3,000. No headline, no cover image, no separate URL.
- An article is a long form piece with its own headline, its own cover image, its own permanent URL (something like linkedin.com/pulse/your-headline-yourname), and it gets indexed by Google.
If you’ve written a 200 word thought and want it in the feed today, you want a post, not an article. If you’re writing something with subheadings that you’d be happy to have show up when someone Googles your name in three years, that’s an article. Most people asking “how do I post an article on LinkedIn” mean “how do I use the Write article feature,” so that’s what I’m covering here, but I’ll come back to the post option because for most people it’s the better choice more often than the platform wants you to believe.
How to post an article on LinkedIn: the steps
- Log in on desktop. The article writer works far better on a browser than in the mobile app. You can start an article on your phone but editing it is fiddly, so if you’re serious about it, sit at a laptop.
- Find the “Write article” option. On your homepage, click inside the “Start a post” box at the top of your feed. In the row of icons underneath (photo, video, event, and so on) look for the small document or pencil icon labelled “Write article.” If you can’t spot it, go directly to linkedin.com/article/new/ and it’ll take you straight there, no hunting required.
- Add a headline. You get up to 100 characters. Front load the useful word or number, because LinkedIn truncates long headlines in the feed and in Google search snippets. “5 Pricing Mistakes I Made in My First Year as a Consultant” beats “Some Thoughts on Pricing and What I Learned Over the Years.”
- Add a cover image. LinkedIn recommends 1280 by 720 pixels. If you skip this, LinkedIn will either leave it blank or grab something odd from your text, so upload your own. A clean image with your face, a bold quote, or a simple graphic outperforms a stock photo every time I’ve tested it.
- Write the body in the rich text editor. This is not the same box as a normal post. You get proper formatting here: bold, italic, bullet lists, numbered lists, block quotes, H2 and H3 style headers, embedded links, images inside the text, and video. Use the headers. An article that’s just one long grey block of text gets abandoned halfway down, every single time.
- Preview it. There’s a preview button top right. Check it on the preview, not just the editor, because spacing and image placement sometimes shift.
- Publish. Click “Publish” and LinkedIn will then prompt you to share it to your network as a post, which you should always do, because publishing an article alone without sharing it barely reaches anyone.
Total time if you’ve already got your text written elsewhere: about ten minutes. Total time if you’re writing it fresh in the box: give it an hour for anything worth reading, because the temptation to just dump a stream of consciousness in there and hit publish is strong, and it shows.
A real example of what happens after you hit publish
In 2016 I wrote a LinkedIn article about the mistakes I’d made building an email list, roughly 1,800 words, no fancy design, three subheadings and a bulleted list near the end. It got a modest response at the time, a few hundred likes, maybe forty comments. Nothing that felt like a win that day.
It’s still online. It still turns up on the first page of Google for a specific phrase I used in the headline, and to this day I get the occasional LinkedIn connection request or email from someone who found it through search, not through the feed, nearly a decade later. Compare that to a punchy 150 word post I wrote last month that got 400 likes and 90 comments in eight hours and was completely gone from anyone’s view by the weekend. Both did their job. The article is a quiet asset that keeps working. The post was a spike, a burst, then silence.
That’s the trade off nobody spells out clearly enough: articles compound slowly through search, posts spike fast then die. If you want long term discoverability, write the article. If you want a reaction today, write the post.
The uncomfortable part nobody selling LinkedIn courses tells you
Here’s the bit that doesn’t get said often enough. LinkedIn’s own algorithm does not favour articles the way it favours native posts. Articles ask people to click through and leave the main feed experience, even though the reading pane opens in the same window, and LinkedIn’s whole business model runs on keeping people scrolling inside the feed, not clicking off into a separate reading view. I’ve had plain text posts with zero images out-reach a well written, well formatted article by ten times the impressions, published on the same day, from the same profile, to the same audience. That’s not a fluke, I’ve watched it happen repeatedly across years of testing.
So if your only goal is reach this week, an article is often the wrong tool, and a short, punchy post with one clear idea will beat it. Articles win on searchability, credibility, and having something substantial to link to from your email signature or your bio. Posts win on immediate distribution. Most people writing “how do I post an article on LinkedIn” guides skip this because it makes the feature sound less exciting, but you’ll waste less time if you know it going in.
When an article is the right call
- You’ve got something you want to point people to for years, not days, such as a personal case study, a detailed opinion piece, or a “here’s how I did X” walkthrough.
- You want it findable through Google, not just LinkedIn’s internal search.
- You’re building credibility with someone who’s about to click your profile before a sales call or a job interview, and you want a substantial piece of writing there for them to read.
- You need to include several images, a longer structure with headers, or an embedded video inside the body of the text itself.
If none of those apply, write a post instead. You’ll almost always get more eyes on it faster.
Formatting tips that change performance
- Keep paragraphs to two or three lines. The reading pane is narrow and a wall of text feels heavier there than it would on a normal blog page.
- Use one clear H2 style header every 200 to 300 words so people can scan and re-enter.
- Put your strongest sentence in the first two lines, because that’s what shows in the preview when you share it as a post afterward.
- Aim for 1,200 to 2,000 words. LinkedIn’s own data has shown articles in that range performing better than very short or very long ones, and from what I’ve seen with clients, anything under 600 words rarely justifies using the article format at all instead of a post.
- Add one internal reference to your own previous work if it’s relevant, it gives readers a reason to keep exploring your profile instead of leaving after one piece.
Can you edit, delete, or schedule a LinkedIn article?
Yes to editing. Go to your profile, find the article under your activity, click the three dots, and select edit. You can update it as many times as you like, and it keeps the same URL, which matters if anyone has already linked to it or bookmarked it.
Yes to deleting, same three dot menu, though once it’s gone it’s gone, so download a copy first if you might want the text again.
No, not natively, to scheduling. LinkedIn will not let you queue up an article to publish itself next Tuesday at 9am the way it lets you schedule a normal post. If you want that kind of control over your publishing calendar, you’re better off building your workflow around a proper scheduling tool for the regular posts that promote your article, and looking at what to look for in an app for scheduling posts before you commit to one, because not all of them handle LinkedIn’s format quirks the same way.
Where an article lives, and why that matters
Once you publish, your article sits at its own URL under linkedin.com/pulse/, it shows on your profile under a dedicated “Articles” section, and it can appear in Google search results independently of your LinkedIn profile page. That’s the entire reason articles are worth the extra effort over a post: they’re the one piece of LinkedIn content that has a life outside LinkedIn itself. I’ve written more on where the best place to publish your LinkedIn articles is in 2026, because LinkedIn isn’t always the only, or the best, home for a piece you’ve written, especially if your own website or newsletter would serve you better long term.
What to do the day you publish
- Share it as a post the moment it goes live, with two or three sentences of your own summarising why you wrote it, not just “new article, check it out.”
- Comment on your own share within the first hour if you get any responses, because early engagement in that first hour tells LinkedIn’s system to show it to more people.
- Send it directly to five or ten people by DM who you know would find it useful, not as a spam blast, as an actual “thought you’d find this useful given what we talked about” message.
- Drop the link into your email newsletter or your next client update if it’s relevant, since the article’s URL works fine outside LinkedIn too.
If you’re running this across a small team rather than solo, the coordination around who’s sharing what and when starts to matter, and it’s worth checking what works as the best social media post tool for small teams so you’re not all posting the same link at the same minute and cancelling each other out in the algorithm.
If you’re doing this on your own, without a team
Most of the people who ask me this question are solo business owners, coaches, consultants, freelancers, not marketing departments. If that’s you, the honest bottleneck usually isn’t the publishing step, it’s consistency, because writing one article is easy and writing one every fortnight for a year is where most people fall off. A decent scheduling and reminder system for your surrounding posts helps more than any article formatting trick, and I’ve covered the best post scheduling tool for a solo business owner in more detail if that’s the piece you’re missing, not the “how do I click publish” bit.
And if you’re also cross posting your writing to other platforms, know that the landscape has shifted underneath a lot of people without them noticing, similarly to how Threads has changed since its early spike, which I broke down in how Threads has changed since its download peak. LinkedIn’s article feature is stable and has been for years, but the attention around it moves, and the format that worked for reach in 2022 isn’t the one working now.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the “write article” button on LinkedIn?
Click into the “Start a post” box on your LinkedIn homepage feed and look for a small document or pencil icon among the row of options underneath, labelled “Write article.” If it’s not visible, go directly to linkedin.com/article/new/ on a desktop browser and it opens the article editor immediately.
Is a LinkedIn article different from a regular LinkedIn post?
Yes. A post is a short update in the feed with a 3,000 character limit and no separate page. An article has its own headline, cover image, permanent URL under linkedin.com/pulse/, gets indexed by Google, and supports proper formatting like headers and embedded images inside the body text.
Do LinkedIn articles get more reach than normal posts?
Usually less, not more. LinkedIn’s algorithm tends to favour posts that keep people inside the main feed over articles that pull them into a separate reading view, so a short, sharp text post will frequently out-perform a well written article on impressions and comments in the first 48 hours. Articles win on long term Google discoverability instead.
Can I schedule a LinkedIn article to publish later?
Not natively. LinkedIn lets you draft an article and come back to finish it, but there’s no built in scheduler that will publish it automatically at a future date and time. You’d need to publish it manually when you’re ready, though you can schedule the regular posts you use to promote it once it’s live.
