How to choose sources for your LinkedIn posts (and why 3 good ones beat 10 generic)

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about anyone’s LinkedIn posts: what you write is a direct function of what you read. If your sources are the same as ten thousand other professionals — HBR, Bloomberg, Forbes, McKinsey Insights — your posts will be similar to those of ten thousand other professionals. Math, not opinion.

Source selection is the most underrated decision in the entire process of building a LinkedIn presence. And yet it’s the one that, more than any other, decides whether your posts will be recognisable.

Let’s see how to pick sources that produce distinctive material.

The problem with generic sources

Picture two Marketing Directors both publishing 3 posts a week for a year, both leaning on HBR, Marketing Brew and Harvard Business Review. At year’s end they’ve produced 156 posts each — but 70% of their starting material was the same. Predictably: their posts overlap in themes, examples, even the “data points” cited. It gets hard for their audiences to understand why follow one over the other.

Generic sources have three problems:

1. They’re read by every one of your direct competitors. The informational edge they give you is zero.
2. They’re optimised for general audiences. What you read is already pre-digested to be accessible to the largest possible number of readers — so by definition it’s general.
3. They’re predictable. If your audience reads HBR and you cite HBR, you’re not adding information: you’re repeating what they know.

A generic source can be useful as a complement, 20-30% of your mix. Not as a primary source.

Three criteria for a high-value source

A source is good for you if it meets all three of these.

1. Specificity: covers a defined domain, not “the world”

A specialist source on a narrow topic produces content only you could read (because most don’t even know it exists). Examples:

• For a scale-up SaaS CTO: The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz) covers software engineering at senior+ level. His total audience is a fraction of HBR’s, but it’s exactly your audience.
• For a B2B Marketing Director: Lenny’s Newsletter, Reforge Articles, First Round Review. Same logic.
• For an Italian founder: StartupItalia, EconomyUp, Italian Tech by Repubblica.

2. Cadence: publishes at least weekly

A source publishing once a month will never give you enough material to be a primary source. Look for sources publishing weekly (more is fine, not strictly necessary). Anatomy of a healthy source: most recent article within 14 days, at least 10 articles published in the last 6 months.

3. Coherence with your positioning

A great source on a topic that has nothing to do with what you do and who you speak to is useless. If you’re an accountant with SMB clients, an excellent source on generative AI coding doesn’t help your positioning (however interesting it may be to you personally).

Check question: “if I receive your post based on this source, does it make sense coming from you given your profile?”. If the answer is “yes, clearly”, the source works. If it’s “well, depends”, probably it isn’t the right source for your role.

Three types of high-value source

Type A: Blogs/newsletters by operators in your industry

People who do a job like yours or adjacent, who write. Not journalists, not generalist consultants, not generic thought-leaders. Operators. Lenny Rachitsky (PM @ Airbnb), Cal Newport (computer science professor), Gergely Orosz (engineer), Tomasz Tunguz (VC, ex operator). They’re specific, they have a point of view, they read specific people.

Type B: Research reports / industry data

McKinsey Global Institute, Stripe Atlas, GitHub Octoverse, Sequoia Capital research, Bain & Co. retail reports. They produce data anyone could cite but most don’t, because the reports are long and not glamorous. Citing one specifically (with the right number, and the report link) gives you instant credibility.

Type C: Topics without a fixed source

Sometimes you don’t have a specific source but you want to follow an evolving theme: “AI in B2B sales”, “crypto taxation in Italy”, “energy transition in SMBs”. For these, a system that does automatic weekly research on the theme replaces the fixed source with a curated stream of relevant articles.

How to build a 5-source portfolio

For most professionals, 5 sources is the right number. More than 7-8 becomes hard to manage (even mentally). Distribute them like this:

• 2 specialist industry sources (Type A or B), in English (because in English you find 100× more, but pick carefully)
• 1 Italian source specific to your domain (because citing Italian content for an Italian audience works much better than always citing English)
• 1 high-quality generalist source (HBR Italia, MIT Technology Review) as a “safety anchor”
• 1 free-form topic you want to monitor but for which you haven’t yet found the definitive source

Common mistakes

• Changing them too often. A source deserves at least 60-90 days of use before evaluation. Earlier than that, it’s noise.

• Keeping too many active. More sources = more noise = more selection time = less writing time. When adding an important source, remove the least useful one.

• Not varying usage frequency. Even among your kept sources, you should privilege the one that produces the best prompts. If a source hasn’t inspired a post in 3 months, replace it.

The underlying principle

The distinctiveness of your LinkedIn profile flows from the distinctiveness of your sources. Read what everyone reads, write what anyone writes. Read specific things, write things only you can write.

It’s the curation investment with the highest ROI of all. And it’s done once, not weekly.