The best LinkedIn influencers to follow in 2026. Creators, founders and personal brand builders actually worth your attention.

Everybody has a list of LinkedIn influencers you should follow.
Most of them are useless.
The problem? Most "LinkedIn influencers" lists are filled with billionaires and celebrities who have social media teams posting on their behalf. Bill Gates is interesting. But you are not going to learn how to grow your own LinkedIn presence by studying someone with 39 million followers and a PR department.
This list is different.
We picked 32 LinkedIn influencers who actually built their audiences through content. People who write their own posts, share real lessons from real businesses, and prove every day that building a personal brand on LinkedIn is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career.
Whether you are a solopreneur, founder, marketer or someone who just wants to get better at showing up online, these are the people worth paying attention to.

Followers: 854K+ | Known for: Solopreneurship, content systems, digital products
Justin Welsh is the blueprint for what a one person business can look like when you take LinkedIn seriously.
After burning out as a VP of Sales, Justin started posting on LinkedIn in 2019 with zero audience and zero online income. Five years later, he has earned over $8.3 million from digital products, all with no employees, no paid ads and a three hour workday.
His content is sharp, repeatable and built around systems. He does not chase trends. He teaches people how to build simple businesses that give them their time back.
What you will learn from following Justin: How to turn LinkedIn content into a repeatable revenue engine without a team.

Followers: 200K+ | Known for: Personal branding, creator economy, LinkedIn growth
Lara Acosta went from posting on LinkedIn as a side project to becoming a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree and LinkedIn Top Voice with the gold badge. She is also a co-founder of Kleo.
What makes Lara stand out is her willingness to share the messy middle. She does not present a polished highlight reel. She posts about the failures, the pivots and the mindset shifts that actually move the needle on a personal brand.
What you will learn from following Lara: How to build a personal brand that feels authentic rather than performative.
Followers: 364K+ | Known for: LinkedIn copywriting, profile optimisation, personal branding coaching
Jasmin Alic spent 15 years as a copywriter for Fortune 500 companies before transitioning into LinkedIn coaching for solopreneurs and executives. He is one of the most technically skilled writers on the platform.
His posts break down the mechanics of why certain LinkedIn hooks work, how to structure a post for maximum engagement and what most people get wrong about their profiles. If you want to improve your writing on LinkedIn specifically, Jasmin is the person to study.
What you will learn from following Jasmin: The craft of LinkedIn copywriting, from headlines to hooks to profile optimisation.

Followers: 350K+ | Known for: Founder branding, systems thinking, scaling creator businesses
Matt Gray built and sold a media company before turning his attention to helping founders build personal brands. He runs Founder OS, a system for turning your expertise into content, community and revenue.
Matt's content is process heavy in the best way. He shares the exact frameworks, templates and workflows he uses to stay consistent as a creator while running businesses. His approach is less about going viral and more about building something sustainable.
What you will learn from following Matt: How to systemise your personal brand so it runs like a business.

Followers: 177K+ | Known for: One person businesses, philosophy of work, digital writing
Dan Koe writes at the intersection of business, philosophy and personal development. He has built a multi million dollar education business and a newsletter with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Dan's LinkedIn content tends to be longer and more introspective than most creators on this list. He challenges conventional thinking about career paths, productivity and what it means to do meaningful work. His audience skews towards people who want to build something of their own but are still figuring out what that looks like.
What you will learn from following Dan: How to think about your personal brand as an extension of your worldview, not just a marketing channel.

Followers: 155K+ | Known for: Digital writing, Ship 30 for 30, content creation systems
Dickie Bush co-created Ship 30 for 30, one of the most popular online writing courses ever built. He went from Wall Street analyst to full time creator by treating writing as a skill that can be learned through reps.
His LinkedIn content focuses on the mechanics of writing online. Frameworks for generating ideas, structuring posts and building a body of work that compounds over time. He is a practitioner first and a teacher second, which is what makes his advice land.
What you will learn from following Dickie: How to become a better online writer through volume, feedback and iteration.

Followers: 80K+ | Known for: Ghostwriting, LinkedIn growth, persuasive writing
Dakota Robertson built a successful ghostwriting business by mastering the kind of writing that performs on LinkedIn. He specialises in helping founders and executives sound like themselves at scale.
Dakota shares practical writing advice without the fluff. His posts tend to be short, punchy and immediately actionable. If you want to understand the mechanics of what makes a LinkedIn post perform, his content is a masterclass.
What you will learn from following Dakota: How to write LinkedIn posts that actually get read, shared and remembered.

Followers: 108K+ | Known for: Entrepreneurship, AppSumo, business experiments
Noah Kagan is the founder of AppSumo and one of the most honest voices in entrepreneurship. He was employee number 30 at Facebook, got let go, and turned that experience into a career built on launching businesses and sharing what he learned along the way.
His LinkedIn content blends personal storytelling with tactical business advice. He is not afraid to talk about what went wrong, which is rare among founders at his level. His book "Million Dollar Weekend" captures his philosophy: start before you are ready.
What you will learn from following Noah: How to validate business ideas quickly and build in public without overthinking it.

Followers: 390K+ | Known for: Business operations, scaling, leadership
Leila Hormozi co-founded Acquisition.com alongside Alex Hormozi and has helped scale multiple businesses to eight and nine figures. She is one of the most respected operators in the creator economy.
While many LinkedIn influencers focus on content and audience building, Leila's posts centre on the hard stuff. Hiring, firing, managing teams, building culture and making decisions under pressure. She brings an operational lens that is genuinely rare on the platform.
What you will learn from following Leila: How to think like a CEO, not just a creator.

Followers: 95K+ | Known for: Buyer psychology, customer research, marketing strategy
Katelyn Bourgoin is a customer research expert who reverse engineers why people buy. Her newsletter "Why We Buy" has become one of the go to resources for marketers who want to understand decision making.
Katelyn's LinkedIn posts break down real purchase decisions and explain the psychology behind them. She does not deal in abstract theory. Every post comes with specific examples you can apply to your own business.
What you will learn from following Katelyn: How to understand your customers deeply enough to write content and copy that actually converts.

Followers: 62K+ | Known for: Creator economy, creator science, community building
Jay Clouse runs Creator Science, where he studies and interviews the world's top creators to understand what actually drives growth. His podcast is one of the best resources on the business of being a creator.
Jay approaches the creator economy like a researcher. He tests hypotheses, shares data and interviews people who have built real businesses through content. His LinkedIn posts distil those insights into practical takeaways.
What you will learn from following Jay: The science behind what makes some creators grow faster than others.

Followers: 76K+ | Known for: LinkedIn strategy, personal branding, content systems
Joe Gannon helps professionals and founders build their LinkedIn presence through structured content systems. He is known for his tactical, no nonsense approach to growing on the platform.
Joe's content is highly specific to LinkedIn. He covers what is working right now, how the algorithm rewards certain behaviours and what most people waste their time on. If you want platform specific advice rather than general branding theory, Joe delivers.
What you will learn from following Joe: Tactical LinkedIn growth strategies that work in the current algorithm.

Followers: 235K+ | Known for: Entrepreneurship, fitness, building in public
Grace Beverley built two businesses (TALA and Shreddy) while still in her twenties. She is refreshingly transparent about the realities of running a company as a young founder.
Grace's LinkedIn content covers the intersection of entrepreneurship and personal development. She shares real challenges from running a product business, including supply chain problems, team building and the mental health toll of scaling fast.
What you will learn from following Grace: What building a real product business actually looks like behind the scenes.

Followers: 1.2M+ | Known for: Peak performance, leadership, personal development
Eric Partaker was named CEO of the Year at the Business Excellence Awards and has worked with McKinsey and Skype. He focuses on helping leaders perform at their best.
Eric's content blends high performance habits with practical leadership advice. His posts are often built around frameworks and mental models that you can apply immediately. He is particularly good at distilling complex productivity concepts into simple daily practices.
What you will learn from following Eric: How to build the habits and systems that separate high performers from everyone else.

Followers: 67K+ | Known for: Copywriting, marketing, content creation
Alex Cattoni is a copywriter, marketer and the founder of Copy Posse. She has built one of the largest online communities for copywriters and marketers through her YouTube channel and LinkedIn presence.
Alex's content teaches the fundamentals of persuasive writing in a way that is accessible to people who do not have a marketing background. She covers everything from email sequences to landing page copy to social media writing.
What you will learn from following Alex: The fundamentals of writing copy that sells, applied to LinkedIn and beyond.

Followers: 195K+ | Known for: SEO, content marketing, building SaaS products
Jake Ward is a co-founder of Kleo and the founder of Contact Studios, an SEO agency that has generated over $20 million in client revenue. He is perhaps best known for his viral "SEO Heist" post, which detailed how he redirected 3.6 million page views from a competitor. The post went so viral it was covered by the New York Times and discussed in an interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Jake's LinkedIn content covers the intersection of SEO, AI and content marketing. He shares real experiments, actual data and step by step breakdowns of what is working in organic growth right now. He does not theorise. He tests, measures and shows receipts.
What you will learn from following Jake: How to think about content as a growth system, not just a creative exercise.

Followers: 40K+ | Known for: SEO, content strategy, scaling agencies
Rob Hoffman is a co-founder of Kleo, CEO of Contact Studios, and a co-founder of Mentions.so. He built a multi million dollar SEO agency from a $50 apartment in Colombia and has worked with companies like Kajabi and Beehiiv.
Rob's content on LinkedIn is refreshingly technical for a platform that rewards surface level takes. He writes about content systems, LLM SEO, and how to build businesses through organic channels. As he puts it, "Jake and I have built and scaled 3 businesses almost entirely through LinkedIn content."
What you will learn from following Rob: How to turn content from a guessing game into a repeatable, predictable growth system.

Followers: 20K | Known for: AI tools, SaaS building, the developer to founder journey
Cam Trew is a co-founder and CTO of Kleo and Mentions.so. He spent six years as a software engineer before leaving to start building businesses. His journey from coding RuneScape private servers at 13 to co-founding two seven figure AI businesses is one of the more compelling founder origin stories on LinkedIn.
Cam's content focuses on the AI tools and trends that are actually moving the needle for creators and entrepreneurs. He writes a weekly newsletter on the subject and shares the behind the scenes of building AI products in a market that is changing every week.
What you will learn from following Cam: Which AI tools and trends are worth paying attention to, from someone actually building in the space.

Followers: 960K+ | Known for: Business scaling, offers, lead generation
Alex Hormozi co-founded Acquisition.com and has built, scaled and exited multiple businesses. His book "$100M Offers" became a phenomenon in the entrepreneurship world and his content has made him one of the most followed business voices on any platform.
Alex's LinkedIn posts are direct, often blunt, and always rooted in real experience. He talks about pricing, sales, hiring and scaling in a way that strips out the motivational fluff. His content reads like someone who has made every mistake possible and is giving you the cheat codes.
What you will learn from following Alex: The mechanics of building offers, generating leads and scaling businesses.

Followers: 1M+ | Known for: Business breakdowns, investing, personal growth
Sahil Bloom went from private equity to becoming one of the most followed creators on LinkedIn and X. His newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and his content consistently breaks down complex business and life concepts into clear, actionable frameworks.
Sahil's strength is making complicated ideas feel simple without dumbing them down. His content spans investing, decision making, career strategy and personal development, all delivered in a voice that feels like a conversation with a smart friend.
What you will learn from following Sahil: How to simplify complex ideas and communicate them in a way that builds a massive audience.

Followers: 190K+ | Known for: SaaS coaching, time management, scaling businesses
Dan Martell is the bestselling author of "Buy Back Your Time" and one of the most respected voices in the SaaS world. He built, scaled, and sold three technology companies before becoming the go-to coach for SaaS founders who want to grow without burning out.
Dan's LinkedIn content is built around a single obsession: how founders can buy back their time by building the right systems, hiring the right people, and eliminating the work that drains them. He shares frameworks from his own journey of going from broke and struggling to running a portfolio of businesses.
His advice is specific, tactical, and always rooted in real experience.
What you will learn from following Dan: How to scale a business without sacrificing your health, relationships or sanity.

Followers: 113K+ | Known for: LinkedIn growth, entrepreneurship, practical content strategy
Sam Browne grew from 500 to 50,000 followers in a single year and has since built his LinkedIn audience past 100,000. He runs LinkMinded, where he coaches entrepreneurs on LinkedIn growth, and has built a personal brand that generates over $300K per year.
Sam is one of the most generous creators on the platform in terms of sharing exactly what works. He regularly publishes breakdowns of his viral posts, algorithm insights and profile optimisation strategies. His approach is practical and replicable.
What you will learn from following Sam: Exactly how to grow on LinkedIn, with step by step playbooks you can implement today.

Followers: 573K+ | Known for: Boring businesses, acquisitions, unconventional investing
Codie Sanchez built her brand around a simple idea: the best businesses to buy are the ones nobody thinks about. Laundromats, car washes, vending machines. She calls them "boring businesses" and has turned this thesis into a media empire.
Codie's LinkedIn content is fascinating because it operates in a space most creators ignore. She covers deal structures, acquisition playbooks and how to build wealth through buying rather than starting from zero.
What you will learn from following Codie: How to think about wealth building through acquiring small, unglamorous businesses.

Followers: 125K+ | Known for: Digital writing, ghostwriting, category design
Nicolas Cole is one of the pioneers of digital writing. He started on Quora, became the platform's most read writer, and has since built multiple businesses around online writing, including Ship 30 for 30 (with Dickie Bush) and his ghostwriting agency.
Cole's content on LinkedIn is deeply focused on the craft and business of writing. He coined the concept of "category pirates" and regularly challenges conventional marketing wisdom. His posts are long form by LinkedIn standards and always thought provoking.
What you will learn from following Nicolas: How to think about writing as a category defining skill, not just a content task.

Followers: 500K+ | Known for: Entrepreneurship, The Diary of a CEO, investing
Steven Bartlett built Social Chain into a publicly traded company before the age of 30 and then launched The Diary of a CEO, which has become one of the most listened to podcasts on the planet. He is also a Dragon on Dragons' Den.
Steven's LinkedIn presence is an extension of his podcast brand. He shares lessons from interviews with world class performers, his own entrepreneurial journey and contrarian takes on business and life. His audience skews younger than most business influencers.
What you will learn from following Steven: Lessons from world class performers, distilled through the lens of a founder who has been through it himself.
Followers: 200K+ | Known for: Entrepreneur education, key person of influence, scaling businesses
Daniel Priestley has founded multiple businesses, written five books and built one of the largest entrepreneur education companies in the world. His "Key Person of Influence" framework has become a standard reference for anyone building authority in their space.
Daniel's LinkedIn content focuses on the strategic side of personal branding. He connects the dots between building influence and building enterprise value in a way that resonates with founders who care about more than just follower counts.
What you will learn from following Daniel: How to use your personal brand to increase the value of your actual business.
Followers: 150K+ | Known for: Media entrepreneurship, The Hustle, storytelling
Sam Parr built The Hustle, a business newsletter with millions of subscribers, before selling it to HubSpot. He now co-hosts My First Million and invests in early stage companies.
Sam's content is entertaining and irreverent in a space that often takes itself too seriously. He tells stories from his entrepreneurial journey with a voice that feels like you are having a beer with him. He covers deal making, media, and what actually happens when you sell a company.
What you will learn from following Sam: How to build media businesses and tell stories that keep people reading.
Followers: 100K+ | Known for: Business ideas, frameworks, unconventional thinking
Shaan Puri co-hosts My First Million alongside Sam Parr and is known for his ability to spot business opportunities before they become obvious. He ran Bebo (yes, the social network) and has a talent for explaining business concepts through vivid analogies.
Shaan's LinkedIn posts tend to be short and punchy, built around a single insight or framework. He is one of the best in the game at taking a complex idea and making it stick in your brain with a single sentence.
What you will learn from following Shaan: How to think about business opportunities with a fresh, pattern matching lens.
Followers: 50K+ | Known for: Mental models, contrarian thinking, marketing strategy
George Mack is a marketer and writer known for his "mental model" threads that have gone viral across LinkedIn and X. He takes concepts from psychology, military strategy and other unexpected disciplines and applies them to business and marketing.
George's content is unlike anything else on LinkedIn. He writes about razors, cognitive biases and decision making frameworks in a way that genuinely changes how you think. If you follow one person on this list for intellectual stimulation, make it George.
What you will learn from following George: Mental models and frameworks that sharpen your thinking across every area of business.
Followers: 200K+ | Known for: Personal branding, employer branding, brand strategy
Amelia Sordell is the founder of Klowt, a personal branding agency based in London. She is one of the most vocal advocates for personal branding as a business growth strategy, and she practises what she preaches with her own LinkedIn presence.
Amelia's content is direct and often provocative. She challenges lazy thinking about branding, calls out corporate nonsense and shares real examples of how personal brands have driven business results. She does not sugarcoat her opinions.
What you will learn from following Amelia: How personal branding drives real commercial outcomes, not just vanity metrics.
Followers: 100K+ | Known for: Long term thinking, thought leadership, reinvention
Dorie Clark is a Duke University professor, author of "The Long Game" and one of the most respected thinkers on the topic of professional reinvention. She was named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.
Dorie's LinkedIn content focuses on playing the long game. While most creators are optimising for this week's engagement, Dorie writes about building a reputation and body of work that compounds over years and decades. Her perspective is a valuable counterweight to the short termism of most LinkedIn advice.
What you will learn from following Dorie: How to think about your career and personal brand in decades, not days.
Followers: 300K+ | Known for: Entrepreneurship, Spanx, founder storytelling
Sara Blakely turned $5,000 and an idea into Spanx, one of the most successful consumer brands in history. She is a self made billionaire and one of the few founders at her level who actively uses LinkedIn to share lessons from her journey.
Sara's content is founder storytelling at its best. She shares stories from building Spanx that are both inspiring and practically useful. Her posts about rejection, resilience and trusting your instincts resonate with anyone who has ever tried to build something from nothing.
What you will learn from following Sara: The mindset and resilience required to build a category defining company from scratch.
You have probably noticed something about every person on this list.
They all post consistently. They all write in their own voice. And none of them sound like they are reading from a corporate script.
Here is what they do differently:
The first line of a LinkedIn post determines whether anyone reads the rest. The best creators spend more time on their opening line than on the entire body of the post. Study the hook templates that top creators use and start testing different styles.
Justin Welsh has said that 64% of his readers are on mobile. That means short lines, short paragraphs and plenty of white space. If your post looks like a wall of text on a phone screen, people scroll past it.
The posts that perform best on LinkedIn are not theoretical advice. They are real stories from real situations. A lesson from a deal that fell apart. A mistake that cost money. A conversation that changed how you think. Look at the LinkedIn post examples that consistently perform and you will see this pattern everywhere.
Every experienced LinkedIn creator has a library of post templates they rotate through. Listicles, contrarian takes, story driven posts, frameworks. The structure gives them speed. The personal experience gives them originality.
Some of the highest performing posts on LinkedIn are plain text. That said, carousels can drive strong engagement when done well, and a polished profile picture and banner image make a real difference to how people perceive your profile.
None of these 32 influencers became influential by posting once a month. The people who build real audiences on LinkedIn treat posting the way a runner treats training. It is not optional. It is what they do.
If you want to start posting like the creators on this list, Kleo can help. It learns your voice, your knowledge and your writing style, then helps you create content that sounds like you, not like a chatbot. It is the same tool that Lara Acosta, Jake Ward and Rob Hoffman built their own personal brands with.
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer does not require a massive following or a famous name. It requires doing a small number of things consistently over a long period.
Here is the playbook, based on what the 32 creators on this list actually did:
Pick a niche and own it. Every creator on this list is known for something specific. Justin Welsh is the solopreneur guy. Katelyn Bourgoin is the buyer psychology person. Jasmin Alic is the LinkedIn copywriting expert. Pick one topic you can speak about with genuine authority and go deep on it.
Optimise your profile before you post. Your profile is your landing page. If someone reads your post, likes it and clicks through to your profile, you have about three seconds to convince them to follow. Make sure your headline, about section, featured section and experience section all reinforce what you want to be known for.
Post at least three times per week. Five is better. The LinkedIn algorithm rewards consistency. Every creator on this list posts regularly, and most of them post daily. You do not need to start at that pace, but three times per week is the minimum to build momentum.
Study what works and do more of it. Justin Welsh saves his best performing content and analyses why the hooks worked. Sam Browne publishes breakdowns of his viral posts. This is not ego. It is data driven iteration. Review your content performance monthly, identify patterns and double down on what resonates.
Engage with other creators. None of these influencers built their audience in isolation. They commented on each other's posts, shared each other's content and built relationships through genuine engagement. Spend 15 minutes each day leaving thoughtful comments on posts from creators in your niche.
Use a tool built for the job. Most of the creators on this list use dedicated tools to write, schedule and publish their content. Kleo was built by four of the creators on this list (Lara Acosta, Jake Ward, Rob Hoffman and Cam Trew) specifically for people who want to build a personal brand on LinkedIn and X. It learns from your voice and your knowledge, so your content sounds like you.
Justin Welsh has made over $8.3 million from digital products. Rob Hoffman and Jake Ward built an agency doing $300K per month, almost entirely through LinkedIn content. And Valerie Chapman earns $10,000 a month from just 16,000 followers.
It isn't like being a TikTok or Instagram influencer where you get paid per post but you do make money from LinkedIn through inbound marketing and lead generation.
The point is that every single person on this list started with zero followers, zero authority, and zero proof that it would work. They showed up, they shared what they knew, and they let compounding do the rest.
You do not need a million followers. You do not need to be famous. You need a niche, a point of view, and the willingness to post when it still feels like nobody is watching.
Yes, and they have been for years. LinkedIn's original Influencer programme (now renamed Top Voices) launched in 2012 with hand picked industry leaders. But the real shift happened when everyday professionals, founders and creators started building audiences through organic content.
Today, LinkedIn creators with 10,000 to 500,000 followers regularly drive more engagement than corporate brand pages with millions of followers. The platform itself has leaned into this, investing in creator tools, newsletter features and the Top Voice badge programme.
LinkedIn does not pay creators directly the way YouTube or TikTok do. But LinkedIn influencers monetise in several other ways. Brand sponsorships are the most visible route, with B2B sponsored posts earning anywhere from $500 to $20,000 depending on audience size and niche.
Beyond sponsorships, most LinkedIn influencers earn through selling their own products, courses, coaching, consulting or services. Justin Welsh has earned over $8 million from digital products. Sam Browne generates over $300K per year from his personal brand. The platform itself is the lead generation engine. The revenue comes from what you build on top of it.
There is no official threshold. Some of the most commercially successful LinkedIn creators have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. The number matters far less than the quality of your audience and the trust you have built with them.
Valerie Chapman reportedly earns $10,000 per month from just 16,000 followers. The focus should be on reaching the right people, not the most people.
A LinkedIn influencer is anyone who has built a meaningful audience and has influence over how their followers think or act. It is an informal label.
A LinkedIn Top Voice is an official recognition from LinkedIn itself, awarded either through invitation (blue badge, roughly 300 people per year) or through contributions to Collaborative Articles (gold badge, around 7,000 holders at any time).
No, just because you're a LinkedIn influencer does not mean you get a top voice badge. You can be an influential LinkedIn creator without being a Top Voice, and vice versa.
Building a personal brand on LinkedIn does not require genius. It requires consistency, a clear point of view and a willingness to show up even when nobody is watching. The 32 influencers on this list all started with zero followers. The best time to start is now.
Start creating content that sounds like you with Kleo.