Billy Boone · the system behind the posts

The Content OS Checklist

Ninety days of my own LinkedIn run as an experiment, and the three checks every post now has to pass before it ships. Every number here is from my account.

01 · The finding

The number was never the problem. The number had no one attached to it.

For three months I posted the operator numbers I'm proudest of (fleet output, hashprice, margins) next to posts about people (a laid-off friend, a skeptical uncle, a guy at a barbecue). Same account, same weeks, same audience.

Average impressions per post, Aug 2026. Five data posts against six story posts, one LinkedIn account.

59xgap between the two groups

72%of 13 months of impressions came from the top 50 posts

~2,000median impressions per post, the baseline everything is scored against

4.4ximpressions per day when cadence went from one post to three, with every post gated

02 · The three checks

A post ships only when all three are on the page.

Extreme emotion. Fear, regret, guilt, disbelief, discomfort. Something happened to a real person, and the reader feels it before they understand it.

Flop: In the last 30 days, nineteen S21 miners produced 0.06 BTC. Winner: I watched a guy pay eleven grand for a machine that is a paperweight in my office today. Same data. One has a victim.

Proof of credibility. Hard, specific, named. A dollar figure, a date, a rank, a number you can only know from the inside. Adjectives are not proof.

Not we grew fast. Instead #175 on the Inc 5000, #1 in Iowa, the #1 result on Google and ChatGPT for hosted Bitcoin mining.

Hint of value. What the reader walks away with, or what they get by commenting. A frame they keep, a question they can answer, an asset you send.

This page is the hint of value for the post that sent you here. The post was complete without it.

Format carries the emotion. Dialogue and encounter posts (a real person, a real objection, your answer) win on my account roughly half the time. Pure data never has. Wrap the number in a person and the number starts working.

03 · Structure

Four rules the algorithm actually rewards.

Time to value. The line right after the hook pays off the hook. No setup, no "a lot of you are new here." Payoff first, context second.
Miniature hooks. Every five or six lines, one line that makes the reader think "wait, why?" Two per post minimum. Attention resets constantly; re-earn it.
The cutoff line dangles. Mobile shows about 210 characters before "see more." The sentence that crosses that line should be mid-thought.
One thought per line, blank line between. A wall of text on LinkedIn is a scroll, not a read.

04 · Sourcing

Only spend production time on ideas that already won.

Eighty percent of what I post is validated before I write it. Twenty percent is a test. Every post carries a tag so I know which one it was when the numbers come in.

Internal. Export your own analytics. The median post is your baseline. Anything at four times the median is an outlier. Re-run outliers with the same topic and format, a fresh body, and either the same hook or a new one. My worst-timed cycle-top post ran twice a year apart and cleared the bar both times.
External. A post that beat its author's normal, not a post with a big number from a big account. Take the structure, never the content, and add proof only you have. LinkedIn's content search with a quoted phrase, sorted by Top, past month, is the finder.
Test. Your own ideas, build-in-public, opinions. Three to six attempts before a concept is judged. A test that clears four times baseline graduates into the internal pool.

05 · The kill list

Things a linter removes before a human ever sees the draft.

~~Em dashes~~ the fastest tell that a machine wrote it

~~Three short sentences in a row~~ "Same account. Same week. 60x." reads as a slogan, not a person

~~"It's not X, it's Y"~~ the contrast flip, in every form

~~"Here's the thing" / "Let's unpack"~~ throat-clearing

~~delve, unlock, elevate, game-changing, seamless~~ words with no owner

~~Brackets in the body~~ notes live in the draft's notes field, never the post

The gate is a script, not a checklist. A draft that fails it does not get scheduled. That rule exists because a checklist I trusted let a slogan through.

06 · The weekly loop

Ninety minutes, once a week.

Score every post from the week as a multiple of the baseline.
Anything at two times or better gets the four-variable audit: topic, format, hook, body. Which one won it? On my account it is usually the topic.
Update the arsenal: proven topics, formats, hooks. Promote tests that cleared. Retire winners that stopped clearing after four to six weeks.
Fill next week: one internal, one external, one test per day, every post through the three checks and the linter.