By Katherine NoyesFor the select few business leaders who have been able to share their expertise through LinkedIn’s Influencer program since it launched in 2012, the results have been impressive: An average of more than 31,000 views, 250 likes and 80 comments greeted their posts, representing an exposure level many of us only dream of.Well, on Wednesday LinkedIn announced that it is expanding its publishing platform beyond just the likes of Richard Branson and Bill Gates so that any member can now share their views through its publishing program.”Starting today, LinkedIn is opening up our publishing platform to our members, giving them a powerful new way to build their professional brand,” wrote Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s director of product management. “When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled.”Members can now also follow other members not in their network and build their own group of followers, Roslansky said. The company is starting by offering the publishing feature to 25,000 English-speaking members but will be expanding that over the next few months to offer it to LinkedIn’s 277 million members.The implications for paid content and subscription sites are both good and bad. On the plus side, the exposure LinkedIn can provide is great for driving traffic to your site and establishing your editorial staff as experts in your field, especially for B2B sites. Freemium sites will benefit more from this sort of content marketing than hard paywalled sites.But opening up the platform means there’s also going to be a lot more noise out there in terms of free content from professionals. And the exposure level is seductive to many aspiring pundits and publishers, but remember — no one is going to pay to read your posts on LinkedIn. Paid content sites will have to be diligent in protecting their premium content (and would be wise to start offering “tools” as a member benefit to subscribing to your site).