Neal Schaffer

You hired a designer. You picked a clean template. You launched a website you were proud of. And then, not much happened. The rankings never came, the leads trickled in, and most of the traffic you did get bounced before doing anything. If that’s you, the problem usually isn’t your taste. The site was designed to look good instead of designed to be found and trusted. Those are two different goals, and most businesses only plan for the first one.

Many people who try LinkedIn ads quit within a month. They launch a campaign, watch each click cost several times what they’d pay on Facebook, see a thin trickle of impressions and leads, and decide the whole platform is a rip-off. I understand the reaction. LinkedIn is the most expensive place to advertise in B2B, and it punishes sloppy execution faster than any ad platform I know. But the marketers who walk away are usually measuring the wrong thing. I’ve spent more than a decade in this space.

You set up your LinkedIn profile, dropped in a banner image, and it came out blurry, stretched, or cropped right through the middle of your text. You are not alone. The single most common reason a LinkedIn banner looks unprofessional is the wrong size, and the fix takes about thirty seconds once you know the number. This guide is for anyone setting up or refreshing a LinkedIn presence: a personal profile, a company page, or both.

Most people still think of LinkedIn as the place you go when you need a job. Update the profile, fix the headshot, start applying. That mental model is costing businesses a fortune. LinkedIn has more than 1.3 billion members across over 200 countries, which makes it the largest professional network on earth. But the size matters less than the makeup. These are professionals, decision-makers, and buyers with budgets, and they show up to LinkedIn with their work brain switched on.

SEO. Content. Blogging. TikTok. LinkedIn. Email. Paid ads. Influencers. Podcasting. YouTube. AI. Every week someone tells you about one more thing you absolutely have to be doing, and the list never gets shorter. That is the real reason most digital marketing strategies stall. Not a lack of effort. There’s simply too many options and no way to decide between them. I have spent more than fifteen years on the other side of that problem.

Influencer ads are now the single ad format buyers most want to grow. Creator and influencer ads or partnerships are the type of advertising the most buyers (57%) plan to put increased focus on in 2026, up from 48% a year earlier, according to the IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study as analyzed by eMarketer. And yet plenty of brands still run influencer marketing the way they did in 2018: gift a product, cross their fingers, and hope a post goes semi-viral.

“LinkedIn LION” is one of the oldest topics I have ever written about, and somehow it still sends people to my site every month. Most of that traffic comes from Google, and a growing share now comes from AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity that surface my older writing when someone asks what a LION is. That tells me the term still confuses people in 2026, more than fifteen years after it caught on.

Two years ago, 60% of consumers said they preferred AI-generated content. Today that number sits at 26%. The audience didn’t just stop loving AI content. They started rejecting it. And yet 91% of marketers are now using AI in their work, according to Jasper’s 2026 State of AI in Marketing report, up from 63% the year before. We’ve never had more adoption with worse audience reception. That gap is the whole story of AI marketing in 2026. The bottleneck has shifted.

Most small businesses I work with sit in one of two camps on social media advertising. Camp one avoids it entirely because they tried Facebook ads once, spent $500, got nothing, and decided paid social just doesn’t work for businesses like theirs. Camp two does the opposite. They throw money at Meta, see a few clicks, throw more money at it, and a year later realize they’ve spent five figures with no idea whether any of it actually drove revenue. Both camps are making the same mistake.

On May 15, 2026, Google published its official guide to optimizing for generative AI features and used it to push back on much of what the GEO industry has been selling. According to Search Engine Journal’s coverage of the announcement, Google told site owners they can ignore content chunking, llms.txt files, special markup, and AI-specific rewriting. The headline: AEO and GEO are still SEO. What Google did not dismiss is internal linking.