People keep telling you not to do these three things—and they’re wrong. Jay Schwedelson is breaking down some of the most persistent marketing myths floating around LinkedIn and your inbox. From link placement to email resends to reposting content, the “rules” might be more superstition than strategy. Jay puts them to the test and shares what actually works based on real data (and a little experimentation of his own).
Best Moments:
(01:10) A massive LinkedIn study finds posts with links actually get more engagement
(02:45) Why the myth about LinkedIn penalizing outbound links never made much sense
(04:05) Resending emails to non-openers can boost total clicks by 15%
(05:35) The key to resends: switch up your subject line and send at a different time
(06:26) Repeating content on social isn’t lazy—it’s necessary, and nobody notices
(07:15) How Jay’s team recycles high-performing posts every six months
(08:15) The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders’ wild pay jump and what reality stars really earn
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Transcript
Jay: We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And I cannot stand when marketing stuff, tactics, tips, whatevers gets circulated and recirculated and put on important websites and influential people talk about it and the information is not true because I fall for it sometimes and then I avoid doing certain tactics and.
Jay: It's very annoying. So I want to share a couple tactics that are just, I think blatantly not true. And the reason I decided to do this episode is 'cause I saw this study that came out just now. This study came out and it kind of blew my mind. So this is the first myth buster, and then I have two other ones.
Jay: So the first myth, myth buster. Was about posting on LinkedIn and the other ones are not about LinkedIn. So the study came out from this company called Metro Cool. Okay. Very well established company. And they studied over 577,000 LinkedIn posts. And what the study was all about was if you put a link in your LinkedIn post on a company page, on a personal page, um, and you put a link in your post.
Jay: Will that cause that post to have less circulation? Because what everybody believes, what I believed is that if you put a link to something off of LinkedIn, you know, a YouTube link, a link to some downloadable piece of content, something, right? You take them off of LinkedIn, that LinkedIn doesn't like that and it will decrease the circulation because the algorithm doesn't like that, that your post won't go anywhere.
Jay: And I've, I, I fundamentally have believed this forever. And so I saw this study and they said. They studied 577,000 posts across 48,000 different company and personal pages. I mean, I don't even know how they did that. That's a bananas amount of whatever. And here's what they found. They found that posts with links have higher engagement, 13% higher engagement when a post has links in it.
Jay: This is like, are you kidding me? That is wild. Um, and it also, now, I had higher engagement and interactions, but it had 4.9% more views than posts without links. So after I saw this, I'm like, what? This is like the opposite of everything. 'cause what I do is sometimes I put a link in like the comments, 'cause I'm scared to put a link in the post.
Jay: So when I saw this study this week, I said, all right, screw this. I wanna try it out on my own page. So I went on my own page. I put up a post, and I put a link in it and I expected it. The post to do garbage, like go nowhere. And it did really well. It did really well. I had a YouTube link in there. I'm like, look at this.
Jay: Who knew? Now, does that mean that you should put links in every post? Uh, no it doesn't because I think that. Links in posts. Now that I'm really thinking about how it all works, I don't think that the algorithm and LinkedIn are penalizing you for putting a link in your post. What I really think about is that the post itself is penalizing itself.
Jay: What do I mean by that? People are on LinkedIn to be on LinkedIn. They're on LinkedIn to see stuff on LinkedIn. They're not really on LinkedIn to be taken off of LinkedIn. So when you put a, a link in your post and you're trying to get people to go off of LinkedIn, I think that the reason that we all feel like it, it hurts our performance is because in and of itself, I.
Jay: It's taking away from what people want to be doing. So I'm now very interested to keep testing this, but if it's one of those things that's out there, it's like, oh, I can never do this garbage. When you hear something you can never do, that's the thing that you want to test. So another one of those that's been circulated a lot lately is really it's email marketing.
Jay: It's this idea of you should not resend to non openers anymore. Meaning, let's say you have a newsletter. You send out your newsletter. Like I send out my newsletter on uh, Thursdays. Okay. And let's say I get a 40% open rate on the newsletter. And then on Sundays we send out an email to everybody who didn't open it on Thursdays, right?
Jay: We send out to non openers. Now there's all these articles, all this stuff that gets circulated now saying, no, no, no, no. That's a thing of the past. If you resend to non openers, you are going to be considered spammy. It's gonna hurt your email deliverability, and there's so much good correct data out there.
Jay: Now that dispels that myth, you 100% should be sending. To your non openers. Why? Let's, before we get to the deliverability piece, why? Because when you actually send to your non openers overall, your net click-through rates, the overall amount of clicks that you get when you combine your first send or your second send go up by about 15% because you're reaching people on your list who want the thing that you're sending.
Jay: They just missed the first email. It's not that they ignored the first email, they missed it. They are busy. Okay? So the critical thing when you resend a non openers. You need a different subject line. Like what we do is, you know, send out the regular newsletter, whatever it says, or the promotional email, and then the next one will be like, oops, you missed it, subject line.
Jay: Or you scroll past this one. Something in the subject line that's very different than the first one. And I like to acknowledge the fact that the person missed the first one. This applies to newsletters, promotional emails, consumer B2B, it doesn't matter. And then send it out at a different time of the day.
send your regular one out of:Jay: It's so not true. You get like a, a, a fraction of a percent more unsubscribes. So, um, it only is bad actually if you use the same subject line twice. Don't do that. So that's another myth. And then the last one is. This idea of repeating content. Everyone is so scared to repeat content on social media or in their emails, but especially on social media.
Jay: You know, people think, oh, on our company page, or on our personal page, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on meta, whatever, we posted that we can't post that again because we're gonna seem repetitive. We're gonna seem like we have nothing to say. Are you kidding me? Why don't you go to Gary v's page? You know Gary Chek, right?
Jay: Uh uh. All he does is repeat his stuff and he crushes it. And it works so well. Listen, on average, on social media, regardless of platform, you are only going to reach about seven to 10% of your followers that on any given piece of content you put out there. And I would argue that that's even pretty high. I think it's less so nobody's seeing it.
Jay: So in my company, what we do is, uh, we have a six month marker. We look at content on a rolling cycle. Anything older than six months that did well, we are reposting that every single day and that's what we're doing. So if you think you're being repetitive, you're not, you're just being ridiculous if you're not actually posting again.
Jay: Alright, speaking of ridiculous, before we get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast, which is truly ridiculous. I wanted to let you know this podcast was exclusively presented by Emma from Marigold. Ooh, here we go. An ad read, tune it out. You're bored. Whatever. No, Emma's awesome. It's an email setting platform that you could use for your attention, your loyalty, your all your email marketing stuff.
Jay: It is awesome for business, for consumer, small, medium, large. What are you doing? You need a great email platform. This is what I use and for listeners of do this, not that only. You can get 50% off of Emma for three months. Come on. All you gotta do is go to Jay schon.com/emma, so it's my horribly long name.
Jay: Jay schon.com/ EA 50% off. Come on, check it out. Alright, let's get into, since you didn't ask, um, well this is a ridiculous topic, but everything I'm talking about is ridiculous. So I saw. That. So the new season of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders thing came out on Netflix. Great. I'm not, I'm like just getting started on it.
Jay: Great show, by the way, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. And it's a great show. It follows Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, making the team or not making the team. It's great. Anyway, there was a lot of controversy last year 'cause they talked about how much they got paid and they were only getting paid like $15 an hour.
Jay: And uh, they were doing all this work late at night, whatever, and it was all over the place. So now this year came out, now the New Season's out. They got a 400% increase in salary. They're making $75 an hour and all these appearance fees and all this stuff. And they said for veterans people have been on the team more than one year.
Jay: The cheerleading squad, they can make a hundred to $150,000 a year. I'm very happy for them 'cause I felt like they were getting screwed. But then of course I had to go down a rabbit hole. I said to myself, I wonder how much people make on all these ridiculous reality shows are that I watch. I wanna know how much they make.
Jay: So I had to do some research and I know if you actually care about what I'm about to say, I. You are in the fraction of 1% on this earth. 'cause this is really stupid stuff. Alright, so on the Bachelor, any of the Bachelor shows, which of course I watch all of them. The Bachelor, the Golden Bachelor, the Bachelorette, you name it.
Jay: Do you think they get paid? Well, here's the answer. So the person who is the Bachelor or the Bachelorette, the main person, they get paid about a hundred grand. What's up? Just to be that person, but all the other people, the Dous is that you're picking from. In terms of, you know, who, who the, the Bachelor bachelorette's selecting from are the 30 people.
urvivor make anywhere between:Jay: The Real Housewives, I know this is important. If you are a new cast member, you make anywhere from 60 to a hundred thousand dollars for a season. And, uh, veteran cast members make anywhere from 300,000 to $1 million per season. Look at the information we have here, dance Moms. Thousand dollars per episode.
Jay: They make 90 day fiance. They make a thousand to $1,500 an episode. So what does this all mean? I have no idea. I really don't know what it means. And the, the sad part is a lot of these people, this is like what they do for the rest of their lives. They'll go ahead on the Bachelor, then they try to squeeze out money afterwards.
Jay: I don't know. What it means is this is not a good career. That's what it means. Don't do that. Um, but hey, you're here. I appreciate you. If you, um. Leave this a review, then I would think you're very cool 'cause it helps to circulate the show or leave it a comment. Even better. If you're on Spotify, leave it a comment, I'll comment back.
Jay: We could hang out. We'll be BFFs and you're awesome. Thanks for being here later.