A 25-year-old content creator turned a layoff into an opportunity. Now an influencer on LinkedIn, she says the platform can be more profitable than TikTok

“For me, LinkedIn has just as good, if not better, of an infrastructure for creators to make money than TikTok,” Valerie Chapman, 25, a self-employed content creator and creative agency co-founder, tells Fortune.

Chapman, who had previously worked in advertising and content creation, says her LinkedIn career is why she no longer holds a corporate job. Two layoffs inspired her to pivot. And luckily, she brought some experience with her to the platform, as a previous social media management employer had asked her to become a LinkedIn thought leader in order to bring in sales. After she was let go in October 2023, LinkedIn influencing became her new hustle. She now has over 16,000 followers on the platform, with posts that reel in thousands of likes.  

“We’re in the creator economy,” Chapman says, adding that people are using AI to help scale content to their individual communities. “None of that was on my radar until I got into the world of LinkedIn, and really started investigating how other solopreneurs were leveraging their personal brands and monetizing.”

While content creators can build their brand and following on any platform, Chapman says the professional social media platform is particularly rife with opportunity. Influencers who turn to it could score big bucks among a new niche audience—and more people are catching on, with LinkedIn even creating its own “Top Voices” category for the most influential creators on the platform. 

“I would actually say LinkedIn is the most powerful in terms of monetizing your personal brand. No one’s talking about it in that way,” she says. “I just think that right now, so many people see LinkedIn as [just]…a place to apply to a job.”

LinkedIn is being overlooked—but it can be highly lucrative

Unlike TikTok, LinkedIn doesn’t pay creators for how much engagement they get on their posts. But there are other ways to cash in on the platform, Chapman explains. 

“There’s no creator fund, but there’s other ways to monetize, like digital products, which I’m working on. Right now my primary income streams are brand partnerships, primarily with tech companies,” she says. “If you put on a sales hat, there’s tremendous amounts of opportunity on LinkedIn, especially because of the video feature that has just been incorporated in the last year or so.”

Chapman has developed a client roster by cold-calling brands to be incorporated into one of her LinkedIn videos—including her “Gen Z Woman in Business” series. She also says creators can build courses and other digital products—like business workshops or E-books on their area of expertise—that, once distributed, can bring in passive income.

And when clients do take interest, there’s an opportunity to set higher rates.

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“You can actually charge more in brand partnerships on LinkedIn than other platforms, because your audience is a bunch of professionals—oftentimes CEOs and founders,” Chapman says. “So you can charge a premium for that kind of audience as well.”

After four months of hard work growing her presence online, LinkedIn noticed her, and invited to visit the company’s NYC office. She toured the office and had conversations with LinkedIn’s team on the future of work and digital influence. Receiving that recognition was a strong sign she should keep going.

Chapman says she’s since made significant headway as a creator who can now support herself, earning about $10,000 a month by dishing out advice and think pieces on personal brands and AI to her thousands of followers. 

“I will say it took about three or four months to really build an infrastructure where the deals were coming in. It wasn’t like, ‘You got money right away,’” she says. “Once you start emailing people and you have an audience, then you can get to closing a brand partnership fairly easily, if you really dedicate your time to it.”