In this episode Shanee Moret and Shankar Poncelet will share everything you need to know about LinkedIn newsletters for business owners. You will learn how to launch and grow your LinkedIn newsletter to not only attract better clients but to position yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn.
To Watch This Training On YouTube:
https://youtu.be/DORdpQ5shTw
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Connect on social:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneemoret/
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In this episode Shanee Moret and Shankar Poncelet will share everything you need to know about LinkedIn newsletters for business owners. You will learn how to launch and grow your LinkedIn newsletter to not only attract better clients but to position yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn.
To Watch This Training On YouTube:
https://youtu.be/DORdpQ5shTw
Thanks for listening.
Click here to join the free LIVE LinkedIn Video Challenge.
Connect on social:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneemoret/
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@shaneemoretgrowthacademy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/theshaneemoret
Today we're going to be talking about LinkedIn newsletters. Give you a complete rundown on how to start a newsletter, how to grow your newsletter If you've already started one. If you don't know who I am, my name is Shanae Maree and I have over 265,000 people that are subscribers to my LinkedIn newsletter. Sean Carr.
Speaker 2:My name is Sean Carr Poncelle. I own a marketing agency in San Antonio, Texas. I am very familiar with newsletters and I can tell you the option you are about to learn is very powerful.
Speaker 1:What is a LinkedIn newsletter? It's a relatively new feature and allows you to publish articles on a regular basis around a specific topic. An article previously on LinkedIn would only let readers see your article as a post on your feed, or they would have to go to your profile and maybe see it listed. Maybe, if it ranked correctly on Google, your article would actually pop up With the LinkedIn newsletter. People now have the choice to not just follow you or connect with you, but they can become subscribers, which means that they will receive your article in their email inbox. On behalf of LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Business owners worry about I need to have a newsletter. They don't really know where to start. Linkedin newsletter is for free. The ability to have subscribers and push out a message to people. That problem is solved for you. It's there. It's almost as if they do everything for you. This newsletter, even if you have minimal effort with it, it will grow.
Speaker 1:As you can see here, this is what it looks like when Shankar receives my newsletter in his inbox from LinkedIn. It will say from Shanae Moret, via LinkedIn newsletters-no-reply-at-linkedoncom. This was the date, and then the title of my newsletter is the subject line. So, the title of that particular newsletter edition was LinkedIn Live Events to Help you Grow. He gets the opportunity to open it on LinkedIn, which means that you can drive more people to your LinkedIn page. That's actually one of the greatest benefits that I have seen from the LinkedIn newsletter is that you'll get more profile visits If you understand how LinkedIn works. Your LinkedIn profile is not a social media profile. You need to treat your LinkedIn profile like a landing page. It will sell for you while you sleep, it will educate top prospects for you while you sleep and it will generate inbound, high quality sales for you while you sleep if it is optimized correctly. This was the thumbnail that I had within my newsletter the title and then the context of my newsletter. What's so powerful is that they can click out. As you can see here, I have my call to action PS Click here to join the free live four day LinkedIn video challenge and they can read more. They also have the option to share it on LinkedIn, facebook and Twitter and to actually go to LinkedIn like this and read it on LinkedIn. So I click that button and I'm back on LinkedIn. This is the power of when you are designing your LinkedIn newsletter being cognizant of the readability of the newsletter, because most of your subscribers and most of your readers will actually not read your newsletter on LinkedIn. They will read it from their inbox. Keeping that in mind is essential, especially when it comes to the titles that you use, because the titles will be the subject lines and that will greatly determine whether they even open the email or not.
Speaker 2:You are familiar, if you are in business, with sometimes the frustration around emails not being delivered into the recipient's inbox. And even if they are delivered, very often it goes into the promotions tab. And if you can't get your subscribers to save your contact as a favorite to go into the main inbox, then that's a problem. That's where the power of the LinkedIn newsletter comes in place. Linkedin has such a great reputation. Their domain authority is so strong that when they send your newsletter on your behalf, coming from their systems, it will go into the main inbox. What I have noticed, too, is that there are these many ways of how people can find that content. Obviously, number one is the email in the inbox. Number two is people active on the LinkedIn platform, because it is still an article, it just is under the umbrella of the newsletters. The articles are shareable and searchable on LinkedIn. And then the third one is very powerful is each article is actually indexed by the search engines. This is a resource that is working for you while you sleep.
Speaker 1:As you can see here, this is from Microsoft Bing. I just put in Shanay Marey, linkedin. The number one thing is my profile, but after that it's all of my newsletters. So LinkedIn, events for entrepreneurs these are all my newsletters. So if I click this, they're being redirected to my newsletter, where then they will get the chance to subscribe and to read and to also click up here and to see all of the other editions that I have, where they could just access a library of all the newsletters that I have published.
Speaker 2:And if you write about a specific topic often, then people will find you based on that topic, so it's not just your name. Your name is, of course, very powerful. You're searchable. You're findable online when someone hears about you and wants to work with you. What do most people do? Do some due diligence, right. It's very important that when they type in your name, there's a lot of good content. But if you give good information about any topic that is close to your business, then you start building up that authority online. And this works on all the browsers, by the way, not just Bing, also Google.
Speaker 1:And what's amazing is that you can also launch a LinkedIn newsletter on your company page as well as your personal profile. And we'll get to that. But before we do, very quickly, we will show you a few examples of some great LinkedIn newsletters. The first that we're going to go through is a newsletter created by Ryan Ruslenski. He's the CEO of LinkedIn and he has a newsletter called the Path. As you can see here, this is the main call to action on his profile. But to see whether someone has a newsletter is very simple. You can always go to their activity and if you see a newsletter tab here, you can click the newsletter. You can see how many subscribers they have here, you can see if you're subscribed here and if you're not, you can always subscribe. Then you could show all editions here and it will give you a YouTube style gallery like view where you could see all of their editions. This is also very important to note because you obviously want your thumbnails to be branded a certain way so that it's cohesive. What he does every newsletter is that he will actually share a 10 minute video clip it's embedded into the newsletter of whatever interview from whoever he's featuring in the newsletter. So if I was a child of a single parent, alcoholic father CEOs around a company that you've really been a match. What's awesome is that you could actually embed videos within the newsletter and leverage them as resources to educate and engage your subscribers.
Speaker 2:I think it's very powerful that they decided to let embeddable and playable videos in the newsletter. If you have a YouTube video that you recorded, you can refer to it. People get the information right then and there and they may also go and explore your YouTube channel. So that is very nice.
Speaker 1:One person that leverages that strategy is actually Richard Branson. He has a newsletter 5.3 million subscribers called Ask Richard. Going back to what Sean Carr was talking about with the YouTube embed strategy, Richard always embeds a YouTube video inside of his newsletter and drives traffic to that YouTube channel. I think another brilliant strategy that Richard does is that he takes a question that one of his subscribers has asked in the comments of a previous post and answers that question every single month. In this one, he's answering what are the most useful skills to learn as an entrepreneur and he says Dear Victoria, who submitted this wonderful question as a grandad of five-year question. He outlinks the question so that people could actually go, follow or connect with Victoria, which incentivizes his subscribers to engage with his newsletters, because maybe your question will be the question that he answers and shares with 5 million other people. And at the bottom of the newsletter, as you can see here, he always embeds a YouTube video. His call to action is if you want to learn more, join me on Masterclass for my series on Disruptive Entrepreneurship, and he hyperlinks it out to his Masterclass. If you are an entrepreneur, you feel like maybe it's too soon or too early to give a call to action in your newsletter.
Speaker 2:Richard Branson is a multi-billionaire and is doing it in his, so just remember that the call to action cannot be stressed enough because, yes, we think well, this person knows what to do. It is obvious. No, it's not. There are so many messages we are exposed to on a daily basis and if you want someone to take action, which you should please do yourself the favor and add a call to action into your newsletter.
Speaker 1:The other huge benefit of the LinkedIn newsletter is that you get a list of the subscribers. The downside is that LinkedIn does not share their emails with you. You still have to drive traffic to a lead generation asset and then get inbound emails from doing so strategically. But what you do get is a list of the subscribers. This is my newsletter, so I'm able to see the list. But if I go to Richard Branson's newsletter, I cannot see the list of the 5.3 million subscribed. Only he can, and if I click this, I will see everyone who has subscribed to my newsletter. As you can see here there's a lot of second and third degree connections subscribing to my newsletter, which means that I'm not connected with them directly. If you're not connected with them directly on LinkedIn, you cannot message them whenever you want and you cannot invite them to your future live events. What I would want to do is to start to build some relationships with people who maybe I want to interview, who I see that are prospects. What I could do next is go to Wendy's profile. I could start to engage with her, I could follow her, I could just start to support her and even send her a connection requesting thanks for subscribing to my newsletter, wendy. Something super simple, but I think the fact that you get a list, even if you just have 100 subscribers to start, those are people that are literally telling you I want to learn more from you. I want you at the top of my inbox.
Speaker 2:I have looked at my newsletter. Same situation almost exclusively second and third degree connections. So what does that tell us? It tells us that people who subscribe to newsletters are topic driven. For example, I chose a million dollars in revenue. Why? Because that is all my business mind is set out around and I share a lot about that and that topic right there.
Speaker 1:You're going to have to change it to 10 million soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know right what a problem to have. It's attracting people who are aligned with that type of interest. That is very powerful because it allows you even as someone who may not have that name recognition yet it allows you to speak to people who are interested in what you have to show and teach.
Speaker 1:I think another important point is leverage. If you grow your newsletter, you have leverage to maybe bring some of that visibility to clients. You have leverage to share interviews. If you're a podcaster and doing content elsewhere, you have leverage like right now I'm growing my YouTube channel but I have leverage because I could bring some of my newsletter subscribers to my YouTube channel. There's a lot of leverage that comes with just growing a newsletter to one or 2000 subscribers where you could show the sponsor, the person that you want to interview, the client that you want to recognize. But let's actually show how to create a newsletter. To create a LinkedIn newsletter and to have access to the capability to the feature which is a feature that comes with turning on creator mode, you have to have at least 150 followers or connections, you have to have recently shared original content on LinkedIn and you have to have a history of abiding by their professional community policies and a good standing on LinkedIn. To turn on your creator mode, you're going to go to your profile. You'll see resources Under that, you'll see Creator Mode and your tab may be gray and it may show off, but you want to click this and then what you want to do is go through the process that it takes you through to turn it on and it will just ask you for what hashtags you want, and then it will give you the list of capabilities that you have access to. When you see newsletters and you see the green check mark, that means that it's available, until you see that under your Creator Tools, you do not have access to LinkedIn newsletters. What I'm going to show you is on a company page to starting your LinkedIn newsletter, but you could do this on your personal profile. I just can't do it right now because I've already created a newsletter under my personal profile. It's one newsletter per personal profile, one newsletter per company page. What you would do is you would just go to your LinkedIn feed and you would click Write Article. Once you click Write Article, at the top you're going to see Create a Newsletter. Once you click Create Newsletter, it's going to ask you for the newsletter title. It's going to ask you how often do you want to publish daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly? And then it's going to ask you for a short newsletter description. For example, grow your personal brand. How often? It could be weekly, and then we will share strategies for founders to grow their personal brand and then you want to upload an image 300 by 300. The only thing that people are going to see when they get the invitation to your newsletter are the title and the photo that you embed here. If you don't want to grow your personal brand when you get this invite, you're going to reject it. If you're interested in learning how to do that, you're going to accept the newsletter invite, which is so powerful. So when you're titling your newsletter, you want it to be a strong filter, especially to attract your top prospects.
Speaker 2:Extremely important what you just mentioned, because the way people process that newsletter invite is in my network section as you can see. Shenei has a lot of those Now if she were to look at she can filter them by newsletter invites. You see the profile picture. You have to ask yourself that thing that is bolded is the newsletter's name, those one to two seconds that people give their brain to process? That is that going to make the right person click accept?
Speaker 1:What's beautiful about this process is that when you create the first article under your newsletter, LinkedIn will send a blast of these invites to all of your followers. You don't have to do anything other than publish the first edition under your newsletter for this to happen. If you have 5,000 followers on LinkedIn, it will send to 5,000 people and you should get at least 1,000 to 1,500 subscribers within 24 hours. Of course, there's a lot of nuance to this. If you post regularly and your top of mind, you're probably going to get more subscribers than not. But if you're not really posting on LinkedIn, maybe reach out to one of us because you may want to actually hold off, become consistent and then launch your newsletter. Or if you have 100, 200, or 300 followers, you may actually want to grow to at least 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 followers before you launch. You'll get more out of that launch and you can't launch twice.
Speaker 2:The first time you set this up is so important. You do it right. Yes, you can change the title and image later, but you only get one shot at that mass invitation.
Speaker 1:The other thing to note is that LinkedIn helps you grow your newsletter. So let's say that we weren't by your side through the launch of your newsletter. You got off to a little slow start and you want to pick it up. The number one way to grow your newsletter is to create high quality content consistently, because the more people that you bring to your profile on LinkedIn, if they're not connected to you yet, if they don't follow you yet, they will actually get a trigger. If I'm not connected or follow you and I go to your profile, linkedin will then send me a little notification saying hey, do you want to subscribe to Sally's newsletter? And I will be able to say yes or no. So the more people that you actually bring to your profile through your content, the faster your newsletter can get organic subscribers from the LinkedIn platform. Now, another question in shocker is how often should they post a newsletter? Because you have the option of monthly, bi-weekly, weekly or daily. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that are like well, I don't want to send it every day or every week because I hate newsletters. But just because you hate newsletters doesn't mean that your top prospects hate newsletters just like you. And what we have found is actually either daily or three times a week has been the best frequency for LinkedIn. The only thing is they don't have a three times a week option, so you'll either have to do weekly or daily and then make sure that you note that in the description of your newsletter. In terms of advice, I would say start with the bandwidth that you know that you have. Don't commit to daily if you have no strategy and you have no idea what you're going to post and you have no content. Only commit to daily If you have quality content that will hit that inbox and they will want to read, because the last thing that you want is people unsubscribing from your newsletter, not opening it, not reading it and then maybe even unfollowing you or disconnecting from you on LinkedIn, because they just feel like you're harassing them and selling them sales pitches. You want to send out quality with the bandwidth that you have and at the regularity that you promise, so you don't want to tell them hey, I send out a monthly newsletter and then start sending out daily ones, because it's not what they signed up for and if you're an entrepreneur, you really want to understand tracking. In our next video, we'll go through the best practices of the actual content strategy and tracking the data, and all of that within the newsletter, because there's only so much that LinkedIn gives you. We'll share what LinkedIn gives you, but really on the back end, you have to track Personally. What we track is okay. We sent a newsletter today. The call to action was to join the challenge. How many people actually joined the challenge today and from that actual newsletter? Because I don't care if it got the most views on LinkedIn. I don't care if it got the most comments on LinkedIn when it comes to the LinkedIn newsletter, I just care about how many internal views it got. So how many people actually read it from their inbox and how many emails that added to our private email list. If you don't have an email list yet, that's something that you also want to work on and that we can help you with. So reach out via LinkedIn DMs. But your call to action has to be very clear and how you will determine whether that newsletter was a success or a flop has to be very clear. These are the stats that LinkedIn gives you. This is one of my newsletters chat GBT marketing prompt for business. Go watch the video on YouTube, subscribe here. You'll see that it only got maybe a little bit more than 4,000 impressions as an article posted internally to LinkedIn. But look at this this is the only number that I care about. This is the number of people that opened it in their email. I only care about this and I only care about how many emails it drove to be added to our private email list.
Speaker 2:The whole topic of tracking is a big topic. What I see business owners do is they drive themselves crazy because there's so much you can track. There are so many techniques that you can use to track. What matters is what Shanae outlined is knowing your KPI, your key performance indicator. Have one metric that you decide is most likely relevant to what I want to achieve, and then follow that metric, meaning if, and for good reasons Shanae cares about article views. If that is the metric you go by, drive all your actions to improve that metric.
Speaker 1:This is so powerful because it breaks my heart when I see people that having coaches or consultants for 10, 15, 20, 25 years and they don't have an email list, should social media disappear tomorrow, they have no way to reach people that they can serve and to sustain their business. Recently, kajabi did a study. The number one predictor of profitability in any online business is actually the growth of your email list size, and what we have found with ourselves and with clients is that the LinkedIn newsletter could become the biggest driver for building your private email list. If you're looking for a content strategy for your LinkedIn newsletter, personal message Shankar or myself and look out for the next video, because the next video will be in-depth content strategies to build your private email list from your LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe to the channel, share with your friends if you thought that this was valuable and leave whatever other questions that we may have missed about the LinkedIn newsletter feature in the comments.