The Secret Power of LinkedIn Newsletters (And How to Use Them)

[00:00:00] Let me ask you a question. Have you tapped into the hidden power of LinkedIn Newsletters yet? In today's episode, I'm diving deep into why LinkedIn Newsletters are an algorithm-friendly secret weapon for greater visibility, powerful lead generation, and meaningful audience engagement. Plus, I'll share actionable strategies and pro tips from my own experience that you can implement immediately to start seeing results, but only if you continue listening to this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

[00:00:31] Digital, social media, content influencer, marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, TikToking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice.

[00:00:54] Good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

[00:01:22] I am Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach. And today, in episode number 410, we're talking about something incredibly powerful, yet surprisingly underutilized. That is LinkedIn Newsletters. Now, a disclaimer. Not about LinkedIn, but about my voice. If you're a regular listener, you probably know that, hey, Neal, what's up with your voice? I have been struggling with a cold for the past five days. I think I am finally over, you know, over that hump. But it's not 100%, but the show must go on.

[00:01:52] And I want to make sure that I maintain a certain frequency with this podcast. So I might sound really bad, but I'm actually just trying to get all this stuff out of my system. But I feel much better if you're asking. So thank you. All right. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, you probably, hopefully, already subscribe to my newsletter. And if not, hey, now's a good time to start. If you go to my profile in the featured section, you'll notice one of the three featured items. The first one on the left is actually going to be my newsletter.

[00:02:21] But one of the biggest insights I've discovered, analyzing my own LinkedIn content performance, is just how powerful newsletters are. My newsletter posts consistently outperform regular LinkedIn status updates. And these include, you know, link posts, photos, videos, carousels, both in terms of impressions and engagement. And I think the reason is pretty straightforward. LinkedIn loves content that keeps people on their platform longer. And newsletters do exactly that.

[00:02:50] But that's really just scratching the surface. See, LinkedIn newsletters aren't just posts. They're subscribable assets. Now, every week I get this notification that said, Hey, Neil, you have X new subscribers to your newsletter. And I find that on most weeks, I get more subscribers, or I should say new subscribers, to my LinkedIn newsletter than new followers to my LinkedIn profile. So think about that for a second.

[00:03:16] Your newsletter subscribers are essentially at the very top of your marketing funnel. And you can view every single subscriber, which gives you direct visibility into exactly who is interested in your content, whether they're a first, second, or even third degree connection. This makes newsletters not only great for exposure from an algorithm perspective, but also excellent for a lead generation perspective, should you look into those subscribers and take action from there. And here's something cool.

[00:03:46] Newsletters used to be just for personal profiles, but LinkedIn company pages can create newsletters too. I always say the personal profile will outperform the company page, but if you are from a larger company, it is something that you might want to consider. Now, I know some of you might be asking, Neil, what exactly is a LinkedIn newsletter? And how do I get started? You know, the easiest way to describe a LinkedIn newsletter is I don't know if you remember LinkedIn Pulse.

[00:04:14] So LinkedIn used to have a separate blogging platform that they acquired when they purchased an RSS service called Pulse. And I think the URL for some of the newsletters and some of the articles might still have that pulse in the URL. But basically, a LinkedIn newsletter is a regular article series published directly on LinkedIn, allowing people to subscribe. So unlike regular posts, newsletters offer long-form content.

[00:04:41] There's a much greater maximum number of words or characters you can use compared to a typical status update. They're a perfect way to dive deeper into your expertise and perspective on topics that are important to your audience. So creating one is really, really easy. In fact, let me go into my LinkedIn and I will do this in parallel. But basically, from your home screen, there is a start a post area. And right under start a post, LinkedIn's made it really easy.

[00:05:08] You have media, you have job, and then you have write article. Writing an article is the first step of basically writing a newsletter article. When you write a newsletter article, on the top left, it'll basically say, publish as, first of all, yourself, or if you are an admin of a company page, you can publish as that as well. You can also publish as an individual article, but I highly recommend you publish as a newsletter, and you will have the ability to create a newsletter right there from that screen

[00:05:38] if you don't already have one. I do believe that you do need at least 100 connections to create a newsletter, I believe. There's also, from the same screen where you write an article, on the top there, there is a manage button. And if you click on the manage button, it also gives you the ability to create newsletter. So it's actually really, really simple to do. Now, before, there was something called creator mode. You had to have creator mode on to create a newsletter, but that is something you do not need to do anymore.

[00:06:07] And when you name your newsletter, consider naming it something compelling. You also need to set how often you'll publish. This is just to let LinkedIn know. Add a description and choose a visually engaging cover image. And once you launch your newsletter, you should be sharing it across LinkedIn, your other digital channels. What happens is that LinkedIn will automatically send out a notification to a lot of your connections, asking them to subscribe to your newsletter.

[00:06:34] And I think a lot of people, when they publish their first newsletter, they find this bump, or I should say, they get a lot of initial subscribers because of this initial push that the LinkedIn algorithm does. Believe me, it definitely flattens out after that, but enjoy the ride at the beginning. I think this is another way that LinkedIn incentivizes you to try to keep up with the newsletter. So that is how you create one and sort of the idea about all the things you need in order to create one. Now, the next common question I get after I explain that

[00:07:04] is should I republish my email newsletters or blog posts directly into my LinkedIn newsletter? And my answer is absolutely, right? But, and this is really important, the real reason behind repurposing content is to help you establish an episodic rhythm of publishing. Remember, LinkedIn asks you how often are you going to be publishing your newsletter? Normally, newsletters, you know, are published on a certain frequency, whether it is daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly,

[00:07:34] I think you get the picture. So if you can regularly create fresh content for your LinkedIn newsletter, that's fantastic. You don't necessarily have to rely on repurposing other content if you can maintain a consistent weekly cadence. While I personally don't publish as many weekly newsletters as I'd like, I have started using them to repurpose my solo podcast episodes like this one. I did repurpose email newsletters in the past, but I found that it actually took a lot of time to reformat

[00:08:02] my emails from ConvertKit into the newsletters. Instead, I like the idea of repurposing my podcast episodes because I don't really have a blog post for them. So it's not competing against content on my own site. It also allows me to showcase my original thoughts and ideas in long form directly on LinkedIn. So my advice is think strategically about your newsletter content so it doesn't merely become another content repurposing initiative. Now here's a pro tip, something that I have done

[00:08:31] when I repurpose my podcast for LinkedIn, which is leverage artificial intelligent tools like ChatGPT, which I use, to help repurpose and refine your content specifically for your LinkedIn audience, right? With your ideal customer profile, whatever target audience guidelines you have for your LinkedIn connections, use that to help shape the content you create when you repurpose it. Because AI isn't just about saving time.

[00:09:00] It's about enhancing relevance and maximizing your content's impact. I've personally used AI to fine tune my LinkedIn newsletters, and I believe it's made a huge difference in engagement levels. I also want to highlight the SEO benefits of LinkedIn newsletters because after Google's helpful content update, I believe that newsletters published on LinkedIn are increasingly indexed and appear more frequently as user-generated content, similar to Reddit or Quora, though not quite as frequently.

[00:09:30] So for this reason, make sure you, in addition to sort of SEO optimizing the title of your post and the content, make sure you're strategically including internal links back to your website in your LinkedIn newsletters. And on that note, another smart practice that I recommend you do, what I do in my newsletters, is I use a standard call-to-action template that I copy, paste, and place at the end of every one of my newsletters. That helps drive consistent, valuable engagement

[00:09:58] to the properties that I want to send that engagement to. Finally, similar to your LinkedIn posts, look for opportunities to tag people and brands directly in your newsletters. This literally brings them into the conversation, helping boost authentic engagement. And when you boost that engagement, it often extends your reach in the algorithm. So let's recap quickly. Number one, and I want to keep this short and sweet,

[00:10:25] not just because I have a cold and I'm sort of struggling with my voice, but the shorter, sweeter, I hope it becomes the more actionable. You can literally listen to this while you create your first newsletter or you revise a newsletter you haven't worked on in a while. But the recap, number one, repurpose your existing content from blogs, emails, or even podcast episodes, if you're a podcaster, into weekly LinkedIn newsletters to establish consistent publishing rhythm.

[00:10:51] Number two, use AI tools to align your content perfectly with LinkedIn's audience. And an important thing about the repurposing as well is number three, keep your newsletter posts concise. LinkedIn says 500 to 750 words is a sweet spot, or they've said that in the past, but keep it concise to maximize engagement. So when you do repurpose, you might have a 2,000 word blog post, repurpose that into a 500 to 750 word newsletter. If your blog post was about 10 points, you can introduce five of the points,

[00:11:21] or you can basically par down the entire content. But that would be my recommendation to help align it with the LinkedIn audience who are, they're not there to read long articles. So that's why we want to make sure we don't make our articles too long. Number four, leverage SEO in everything else you do with SEO in terms of title keyword optimization, but also strategically placing internal links to your website within your LinkedIn newsletters to give a little bit of juice. And maybe some of your visitors will go to some of those links as well.

[00:11:50] Number five, use a standard call to action template to drive consistent engagement. And number six, tag relevant people and brands authentically to boost newsletter engagement. And that's it. It is, as my Gen Z children would say, it's not that deep, but that is how I believe you can unlock the true power of LinkedIn newsletters. I encourage you, if you have not created a newsletter, to start, publish one episode or one newsletter. I'm looking for like the unit of measurement,

[00:12:19] but publish a newsletter once and let me know how it goes. Let me know how many subscribers you get. Let me know how many impressions engagement you get. I think it'll prove my point, but I'd love to hear from you. And obviously before we wrap up, I want to make sure you subscribe to my own LinkedIn newsletter where you'll find practical examples and see firsthand exactly what I've been sharing here. And I've gone through, you know, repurposing blog posts to email newsletters to my current podcast episode. So I think you're going to see a variation of things.

[00:12:46] Also, head over to my website, neilshafer.com and check out my detailed blog post called LinkedIn Newsletters, why they're worth your time and six best practices on how to create them where I go into a little bit more depth and add even more valuable tips. I'll put a link in the show notes as well, but if you go over to neilshafer.com and do a search for LinkedIn newsletters, in fact, it's probably the URL is neilshafer.com slash LinkedIn slash newsletters. You'll find that additional resource as well.

[00:13:15] Well, that's it for another crackling episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast. I hope my voice didn't shock you and I hope you were able to absorb the content as if it was my healthy voice. But trust me, hopefully the next time that I record this podcast, my voice will be 100% back to normal. But until then, go create that LinkedIn newsletter. I'll see you on LinkedIn. This is your Digital Marketing Coach, Neil Schafer, signing off. You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach.

[00:13:45] Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilshafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshafer.com to tap in to the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group Coaching Membership Community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on Your Digital Marketing Coach.