LinkedIn Engagement — comments first, outreach second

From a standing start your posts reach almost nobody, and publishing harder does not fix it. A substantive comment on a post that already has an audience puts your name, headline, and a paragraph of thinking in front of people already reading about your subject, for six minutes of work — the cheapest distribution on the platform, and the most badly used.

Nothing here sends anything — no credentials, no API calls. Automated connecting, messaging, commenting, liking, and sharing are prohibited by User Agreement §8.2.

Workflow

1. Build the comment roster. Name 8-12 accounts they would read anyway, with audience overlap and rough size tier, then:

python3 scripts/comment_target_planner.py --account "Priya Raman:5:4:larger" \
  --account "Tomas Lind:5:3:peer" --minutes-per-day 18 --output human

Tiers are huge (10x+, crowded), larger (2-10x, the best ratio), peer (~1x, where reciprocity compounds), smaller (goodwill). The roster caps any account at twice a week — commenting daily on one person reads as following them around — and keeps the huge tier under half of any day. It builds the roster, never the comments: a generated comment is exactly what §8.2 names, and it is recognisable anyway.

2. Outreach — check the volume before writing anything.

python3 scripts/outreach_volume_guard.py --invites 20 --pending 5 --minutes 120 \
  --acceptance 0.42 --output human

Exit 0 safe / 2 tight / 3 over a cap or the time budget / 4 refused above 40 invitations a day, because nobody reads that many profiles and writes that many specific lines. Pending invitations count against the weekly limit (observed around 100), and acceptance below 20% is a stop signal — it is the pattern LinkedIn reviews, and the targeting is wrong.

3. Write one message, for one person.

python3 scripts/outreach_message_builder.py --type connection \
  --recipient "Priya" --specific-line "..." --reason "..." --output human

It refuses without a person-specific line, refuses an ask in a first-touch connection note, and enforces the 200-character cap (300 with --premium). In large third-party samples a note barely moves acceptance (~26.4% either way) but roughly doubles the post-accept reply rate: the note earns the conversation, not the meeting.

4. The order that works. Comment on their work for two weeks. Then invite, referencing something specific from that reading. Then, after acceptance and a pause, ask once, small.

Rules

• Nothing is auto-sent. Ever. The user pastes and sends, one person at a time.
• No engagement pods. Coordinated reciprocal commenting is inauthentic engagement under §8.2 regardless of who pressed the key. Build a real reciprocity list instead.
• Every message carries a line that could only have been written for that person.
• Never paste the same comment twice. Identical comments at volume are the definition of the thing §8.2 prohibits.
• One follow-up, a week later, only with something new to say.
• Agreement is not a comment. Add the counter-example, the number, or the case where it breaks — or skip the slot.

Scripts

Script	Role
scripts/comment_target_planner.py	Weekly roster from scored accounts, inside a time budget, with per-account and per-tier caps.
scripts/outreach_message_builder.py	Assembles one message; refuses templates, premature asks, and 14 dead phrases.
scripts/outreach_volume_guard.py	Caps invitations against the observed weekly limit, pending backlog, acceptance floor, and the hours available.

References and assets

• references/comment_strategy.md — tiers, what a comment competes on, pods, replying to your own posts (7 sources)

• references/outreach_ethics_and_benchmarks.md — the benchmark numbers with their provenance, and the personalisation claim corrected (7 sources)

• assets/outreach_worksheet.md — fillable per-person prep sheet

• assets/example_outreach.json — input shape for the builder

Distinct from

• linkedin-content — writes posts. A comment is a different craft on a different budget.
• marketing-skill/cold-email — email. Different channel, law, and caps.
• business-growth/, commercial/ — sales process and deal economics, not networking.

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Version: 1.0.0