Should I Create a LinkedIn Newsletter?

Recently, you may have received a notification via email or in your LinkedIn notifications, letting you know that one of your LinkedIn connections has published a newsletter. Hopefully, you clicked through and read it. If you are a savvy businessperson, your next thought may have been, ‘Should I create a LinkedIn Newsletter?’

The short answer is ‘DEFINITELY!’

The slightly longer answer is, ‘if you are trying to establish yourself as a thought leader or industry expert, yes, these are a great opportunity!’.

Why should you create a LinkedIn Newsletter?

First, this is all pretty new. They seem to be figuring out the rules and they haven’t made any promises as to what they will do for you, as a Newsletter author, but here is what I have seen or noticed:

• When you publish a LinkedIn Newsletter, LinkedIn is sending notifications, like the one mentioned above, to all of your connections! This is an amazing opportunity. It offers you the potential to reach many, many more people than you ever would with a ‘standard’ newsletter, no matter how good their deliverability rating is.
• And those mailings look pretty official – not only are they sent via LinkedIn, but they have LI branding AND links to your LinkedIn profile. And they include your customized newsletter title. A great way to introduce and reinforce your brand!
• LinkedIn has formatted these mailings to both facilitate social sharing AND they include a call to action to FORWARD the email to others.
• They also include a button which links the reader directly to the post on LinkedIn so they can like and comment on there, it which facilitates engagement.
• Another advantage that is quickly diminishing, is that if you start soon, you can still be one of the first in your network to do it. Seize this opportunity before everyone and his brother is doing it and/or before LinkedIn stops helping boost them.

Note that this is all in addition to having the newsletter content displayed, as a post, in your connections’ news streams.

Why add yet ANOTHER task to my endless list?

Why use yet another tool to get your message out? Because life is noisy. People scroll quickly, and even if they WANT to see your content, social platform algorithms may not serve it up at a time they will see it. We need all the options we can, to get our content in front of our existing community and new prospects. Add this great tactic to your mix!

Who Should NOT create a LinkedIn Newsletter?

OK, so these are not necessarily appropriate for EVERY business. If you are selling widgets or need to sell a large volume of inexpensive items, quickly, this is not a great tool for you. That said, I don’t know if LinkedIn is even a good fit for you if those are your goals but that is another discussion.

I would also caution those who already use email marketing and created their list based SOLELY on their LinkedIn connections. This is rare, but in this case, it might be redundant.

Who can benefit from starting a LinkedIn Newsletter?

If you are on LinkedIn to:

• Establish your expertise
• Engage, grow and nurture your network
• Define and differentiate your brand

then a LinkedIn Newsletter is a good fit and definitely worth trying!

How to start a LinkedIn Newsletter

There are dozens of posts out there on how to start a LinkedIn Newsletter. Rather than re-create the wheel, here is a link to the instructions LinkedIn provides: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a517925

And contact me at LMD@LisaMarieDiasDesigns.com for help getting set-up, defining content, creating an editorial calendar and anything else you might need to best utilize LinkedIn Newsletters.

But do they work?

Here are the results that some of my clients have seen. These people all started with a higher than average number of connections (the average number of LinkedIn connections is 950), but their experiences are still noteworthy.

Michael Feeley publishes weekly. This is ambitious but he is able to keep up this cadence, delivering excellent content on a regular basis. He has over 3,000 connections and over 360 subscribers.  Click here for an index of  past issues his Commit to Change newsletter – https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/commit2change-6884945050934009856

Nancy Calabrese publishes bi-weekly – every two weeks. This may be a bit more realistic for you and still delivers good bang for the buck! She has over 8,000 connections and over 1600 subscribers. Click here to check out past issues of her Conversational Selling newsletter – https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/conversational-selling-6877281229817958402

Martin Shanker just started his monthly newsletter. He hadn’t published in almost a year when we published his first issue and he had almost 200 people subscribe within the first hour it was live! By the next morning he had over 380 and it was still growing. Here is a link to the first issue of his publication, Relationship FIRST – https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/relationship-first%25E2%2584%25A2-newsletter-6892884793743536128

And here is a link to MY LinkedIn Newsletter Digital Marketing WORKS! – https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/digital-marketing-works-6879535007602352128 – check it out and please subscribe if you haven’t already!

How do these compare to traditional enewsletters?

If you have been following the changes in email marketing (click here to read about them) you will know that it is getting harder to get into people’s inboxes and to accurately TRACK who is opening your mail. LinkedIn newsletters are a great way to augment your traditional mailing list, getting your content into inboxes you may not otherwise have access to.

Still not sure if YOU should create a LinkedIn Newsletter?

Give me a call at 212.664.1872 to see if it would be a good fit for you and if it is, to get YOUR LinkedIn Newsletter up and running!