May 20, 2026
Day 2 of BrightonSEO April 2026. Diantha van Surksum sat down with Ekua Cant in the podcast corner the morning after Ekua’s main-stage talk on personal brand in the AI age.
The talk’s premise had been simple. Everyone has access to the same AI tools now. The output is starting to look the same. Standing out requires a different question than “how do I post more?”
Ekua Cant is a LinkedIn visibility expert, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and the author of Your Platform Power: How to Build a Profitable Speaker Brand in a Polarized World. Her stated mission is to help one million diverse speakers get paid to speak by 2030.
She posts on LinkedIn seven days a week. She also explicitly says nobody else should copy that cadence without asking why.
Most of the conversation in Brighton was about the obvious stuff: how to train AI to sound like you, how often to post, whether to put your face on every update.
The interesting part came near the end, when Diantha asked what advice Ekua would give someone with only a day per week to spend on LinkedIn. Ekua’s answer reframed how the entire production model works.
Most LinkedIn advice treats comments as engagement. Ekua Cant argues they are actually content drafts tested in real conversations.
Why does AI still produce generic content on LinkedIn?
The problem isn't that AI can't write well. The problem is that almost nobody trains it properly before letting it write.
Her recipe is concrete. Feed it samples of your actual writing: articles, blog posts, emails, whatever exists in your voice. Ask it to ghostwrite in a style as close to that as possible. Then add something most people skip: a vocabulary list. Ten words you genuinely like and want to use. The instruction is to work one of those words into every output.
That vocabulary list is the move that closes the tone gap. Generic AI prompts produce generic outputs because the prompts themselves are generic. A list of ten words you actually use forces the model to anchor itself in your specific lexicon.
The second move is editing. Ekua compares the AI to a toddler: praise it when it does well, correct it when it doesn't, never assume it'll get it right on the first pass.
Most LinkedIn AI failures aren't model failures. They're “publishing without editing” failures.
What does posting "seven days a week" actually require?
Ekua posts on LinkedIn every day. Then she tells everyone not to copy that. The contradiction resolves once you separate cadence from clarity.
Her actual argument: pick a posting frequency you can sustain with quality, and then be obsessive about being clear about what each post is for. Most people aren't unclear about their cadence. They're unclear about their goal.
The seven-day-a-week thing has a specific reason behind it. Ekua's framing: your content doesn't always go out to whom you expect it to.
The more posts you make, the more chances the algorithm has to find the right audience for each one. That's a coverage argument, not a volume argument. And it only works if each post is sharp enough to earn its slot.
She also flags a downside of her own cadence that's worth naming. When she misses a day, people notice. Showing up daily creates an expectation. Sustainability matters more than peak output.
For the agency owner, SaaS marketing lead, or independent strategist with a day job, the practical translation is: one or two genuinely thought-through posts a week will beat five posts that aren't. The clarity of the goal sets the cadence, not the other way around.
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Should you put your face on every LinkedIn post?
A persistent debate, particularly in Dutch and Benelux LinkedIn culture, is it self-promotional to use your own picture on every post. Diantha asked Ekua directly.
Ekua's frame: the discomfort comes from applying the wrong mental model to LinkedIn. Once you recognize whose channel it actually is, the picture stops feeling like an intrusion.
The reframe matters because the discomfort comes from applying the wrong mental model. Treating LinkedIn like a publishing platform feels like the picture is an intrusion. Treating LinkedIn like your own street makes the picture the natural default. People showed up to see you.
Her practical version: pick a selection of pictures you feel happy with and cycle through them. Use pictures with you and other people for variety. Don't agonize over every shot. The bar is "comfortable presence," not "perfect headshot."
What if your best LinkedIn posts are hiding in someone else's comment thread?
This is where Ekua's argument tips from tactical advice into a category error correction.
Most LinkedIn advice treats two activities as separate: writing posts (content production) and commenting on other people's posts (engagement). Posts are where you build authority. Comments are where you signal participation. The metrics for each are different. The mental energy you spend on each feels different.
Ekua's reframe: comments are content production. The work is identical to writing a post. A thoughtful comment in a relevant thread is a structured idea you've articulated in response to a specific argument. That's the definition of a post.
The implication is more interesting than the tactic. A thoughtful comment is content that's already been tested in a real conversation. It was written in response to a real argument, posted in front of a real audience, and earned whatever response it earned. By the time you repurpose it as your own post, you already know whether the idea lands.
This is the inverse of how most LinkedIn content works. Standard posts are written in isolation, posted into a feed, and only then tested by the audience. Comment-first content is tested before it's posted.
The condition is that the comment has to be substantive. Ekua is explicit that "Congratulations!" or a generic agreement doesn't qualify. Automated comments don't qualify. The threshold is thoughtful, specific, and on-topic, and adds to the conversation.
For an agency owner or marketing lead with limited time, this changes the production math. The hour you would have spent staring at a blank LinkedIn composer becomes an hour of engaging with five thoughtful posts in your space. The result: five candidate ideas tested in real conversations, two or three of which become posts under your own name later that week.
The reframe of comments as content is also the reframe of LinkedIn time as production time, even when you're not posting. The hour spent in someone else's thread is the hour spent drafting your next post.
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How does this connect to AI citation?
The bridge from personal brand to AI search visibility runs through one specific surface: LinkedIn Pulse articles.
Pulse articles are different from LinkedIn posts. They're longer, they get indexed differently, and they're structured more like web articles than like social updates. Ekua flagged them as an underused surface, specifically because AI citation tools treat them that way.
The structural elements that make AI citation tools surface a source are well-established: clear topical focus, structured argument, supporting facts, and balanced presentation. The same elements that make a good Pulse article. Ekua's advice for structure is the same advice that would apply to a citation-optimized page on your own domain.
Her recipe: one topic per article (not five). An intro that doesn't assume the reader knows your space. Three main points. A summary that frames what you actually said. Written simply enough to explain to a friend or a child.
The audience for this is double-stacked. LinkedIn surfaces it to your network. AI citation tools surface it to anyone asking a relevant question. The Pulse article you'd write anyway for thought leadership becomes a citation surface for the broader GEO conversation, at no additional cost.
The fuck-up Ekua still uses as a cautionary tale
Every SEO Cast episode ends with the same question: what's your biggest fuck-up? Ekua's is from her early days using AI on LinkedIn.
The posts didn't perform. The voice was off. The audience noticed before she did. The fix became the discipline she now teaches: AI as a drafting engine, never as a publishing engine, and the human edit as the actual differentiator.
The lesson holds in 2026 as much as in 2023. The models are better. The output is still generic without intervention. The audience still notices when nobody intervenes.
Resources
- Be Your No.1 Cheerleader: Ekua Cant's site, with her book Your Platform Power, her speaker coaching frameworks, and her LinkedIn visibility work
- Ekua Cant on LinkedIn: her daily posting practice, applied to her own audience
- BrightonSEO April 2026 schedule: the conference where this talk was recorded
Listen to the full conversation
The full SEO Cast interview with Ekua Cant was recorded live at BrightonSEO April 2026 on Day 2. She covers her full BrightonSEO talk: how to train AI on your voice, the cadence vs. clarity argument, the comments-as-content reframe, and the LinkedIn Pulse article structure for AI citation. The comment-thread insight lands near the end of the episode and is the most actionable takeaway in the conversation.
Head of SEO
As Head of SEO at Seeders, Hans helps companies scale smarter by combining search behaviour, paid performance, and conversion insights into systems that drive real growth. Recognised as a Top 20 Content Marketer by Small Business Trends, he brings a lean, experimental approach focused on building what actually works. Rather than relying on reports or one-off strategies, Hans focuses on creating marketing systems and tools that turn visibility into measurable business impact. His goal is simple: help clients move from scattered efforts to structured growth.
