In this episode of Do This, NOT That, Jay discusses the power of LinkedIn newsletters and why every marketer should be taking advantage of this feature. Jay explains how LinkedIn newsletters work, their benefits, and tips for getting started.
Key Points:
– LinkedIn allows you to publish a newsletter directly on their platform if you have over 150 connections. This gives you instant access to your network.
– When you publish your first newsletter, LinkedIn will automatically invite all of your connections to subscribe. This gives you a built-in audience.
– On average, 10% will subscribe instantly, growing to 20% over 30 days. With 1,000 connections, you could gain 100-200 subscribers without any extra work.
– Every new connection gets the invite, helping you build your subscriber list passively over time.
– There are under 100k newsletters on LinkedIn so far, giving you a huge opportunity.
– Each newsletter you publish will be emailed directly to your subscribers’ inboxes, bypassing algorithms.
– Click-through rates tend to be 20% higher than regular email newsletters.
– It’s completely free and only takes copying and pasting your existing newsletter.
Transcript
Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.
You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that we are here.
All right, do this, not that excited for this, because we're going to talk about something that probably most of you are not doing. You might zone this out, but I hope you don't. But this could change your personal brand or your business. And I'm not kidding.
The topic is LinkedIn newsletters. This is not just. You send out an email newsletter right now, great. You have a database. You send to it, that's fine.
But a lot of people don't know this, and you also don't realize the importance of it. But LinkedIn has the ability now for you to publish your newsletter on LinkedIn, and you're sitting there like, who cares? Gonna go to five people.
Nobody's gonna see it. And that could not be further from the truth.
Let me explain to you how it all works and why I'm desperate for you to try this, and I want you to try it. You could do this on a company page. You could publish a newsletter. You could also do it for your personal page.
The only requirement is to have at least 150 followers or connections on your personal page or your company page.150, which is really not that many. Once you have at least 150, you could do this. And then what you do is you go on, on your LinkedIn profile, your company profile.
And when you go, you go to click new post, and it says the word publish is one of the options. You click publish, and that is where you can publish your newsletter.
Now, when you publish your newsletter, you could literally copy and paste whatever the newsletter is that you already send out. And if you don't have one, you could just do it on LinkedIn. But let's say you do have one.
You could literally copy and paste the words and the images and you could put it right there into the LinkedIn newsletter format and then you hit publish. Now, why does this matter? Why do you care? Why should you be listening? This is amazing.
When you publish your first newsletter on LinkedIn, you've copy and pasted or you wrote something, you hit publish. Two things automatically happen, okay? It does a post on the link on your feed, on your Company page feed or your personal feed.
It does that automatically about your newsletter. But what else it does is it sends out an invitation to subscribe. It does it on LinkedIn.
You've probably seen them in your own notifications to every single person that you are connected to or that follows you. Every single one. Okay?
So if you're connected to a thousand people, okay, and you publish that, first time that you publish, an invitation will be sent on within the LinkedIn app and on the desktop version saying, do you want to subscribe to Joe Schmo's newsletter? Yes or no? Okay? So instantly, okay? You're going to get a decent portion. On average, the instant subscription rate is about 10%.
And then over 30 days, it goes up to about 19 to 20% of your audience says yes. Think about that for a second. Okay, let's say you have a thousand connections.
You're going to get between 100 to 200 people signing up for your newsletter instantly. And then every time you make a new connection or you get a new follower, they get that same invitation to subscribe without you doing anything.
It is getting people to subscribe without you doing anything. Now, that's amazing in and of itself. Here's the other amazing thing.
There are less than a hundred thousand email newsletters being published on LinkedIn. There's not. Now, that may sound like a lot, but there's a billion people on LinkedIn. That's not that many.
But here is the secret sauce that people don't realize about the LinkedIn newsletters every time. Then you go to publish a newsletter right on there, and you did one. Now you're going to do the second one and you go. And you hit publish again.
Yes, it does a post on your feed, great. But there's something else that happens. The secret sauce is that it then sends out your newsletter.
It sends your newsletter out via email to everybody that said yes when they subscribed. When they were asked to subscribe on LinkedIn, it sends out an email to everybody that subscribed.
So that email has like a hundred percent inbox delivery because it's coming from LinkedIn. So now you have an email newsletter that everybody you're connected with has been asked, do they want to subscribe?
A good chunk of them are saying yes. And then every time you hit publish, it's automatically going to the person's inbox.
This is the only thing in social media and all of social media, okay, I don't care if it's Facebook, I don't care. It's instagram. Threads x LinkedIn.
The LinkedIn newsletter is the only thing in social media that beats the algorithm because it invites everybody in your network and then it sends to everybody an email that subscribed to your newsletter. The other really wild stat is you're still going to want to send out your regular newsletter.
You're still going to send out your newsletter to your database and then you're going to copy it over and send it out again on LinkedIn. So I've done a zillion head to head tests.
The wild part is click through rates on the LinkedIn version have been about 20% higher than on the regular version that we send out, which is wild. Which is wild. So it's a really great path to go down. Oh, did I mention it's completely free? It costs you nothing, right? So what are you doing?
Copying, pasting, hitting, publish and going out. And some people say to me, well, Jay, people are going to get it twice.
I have people that follow me or my company and they're also subscribed to my newsletter. And you know what? Who cares? Nobody cares. No one's opening up. The first news I got, nobody cares. They got a second one.
When they get the second one, it is in the LinkedIn shell. It feels different, it looks different. We have seen zero impact on any duplication issues and people getting upset.
And if those people do get upset, they're losers. And who cares? Do not think twice about that nonsense. This is too good of an opportunity and it is a must do. It is a must test.
So LinkedIn newsletters go deep on this. Try it out. It is a win. All right, I gotta take a deep breath. Why do I, I mean, every time I can't chill out. What's wrong with me?
This is the time we get to the end part of the podcast called since you didn't ask. And that is where we talk about things that have nothing to do with business or marketing, just stuff. I'm gonna tell you what's on my mind.
I don't know if you deal with this, but I am in marketing. That's what I am in. And if you're listening to this, you're probably in marketing too.
For some reason, everybody in my family and in my universe outside of work thinks that because I'm in marketing that I know how to do, like technology. So I'll get a phone call from somebody in my family. I got one the other day, hey, can you help me fix this? My wi FI network's not working. Whatever.
I'm like, what? And they're like, well, you know, you do computers. That is the sentence I always get. You do computers. What does that mean?
I do computers because I use a computer. This has been going on for years. This concept of marketing equals out to knowledge of technology outside of the job, which is ridiculous.
My TV is not working. Can you take a look at it? My Internet's not working. Can you figure it out? My printer is not working. Can you take a look at this?
You know how to do this stuff and it's not true. And what do I end up doing? I've given up. I. I have given in to the nonsense. And I say, sure, because I don't know what else to say.
And then all I do is I unplug the thing and I plug it back in. And if that doesn't work, I go to Google and I go on Google and type in what do I got to do? And then I somehow.
The worst thing that happens is I fix it. This is what happens. I will ultimately somehow fix it. But it has nothing to do with any baseline knowledge that I got.
Because I'm in the world of marketing. I don't understand why one equals the other. I'm not like part of the geek Squad. What I know this is a rant.
I don't know if you face the same issues, but this is like, I don't know. It gets to me. Anyway, that's what's on my mind. So there you go.
So we talked about LinkedIn newsletters, we talked about the fact that I'm not in the Geek squad. And I really appreciate you checking out this episode of do this. Not that you did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
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