Driving traffic isn’t getting easier.
But there’s a simple and obvious reason: the goals of marketers and the goals of Big Tech are not aligned. Search engines and social media networks are not interested in sending you free website traffic. It doesn’t help their bottom lines.
But what if you adjust your goals?
If your goal is visitors, your goals are not aligned with the social media networks (or search engines) because every click to your content is their loss. Many believe that social networks throttle back organic reach of posts with links to websites. That’s why you’ve seen “Link is in the comments below!”
If your goal is views, your goals are perfectly aligned with social media networks. You publish on their platform, they get engagement, you get brand awareness and everybody wins. Just ask a YouTuber or a TikTok influencer.
“Don’t build on rented land.” It’s advice you’ve heard (and I’ve said) many times. But what if building on rented land is quite profitable? What if it grows awareness and trust in your brand? Of course, you shouldn’t build your home on rented land, but maybe it’s smart to rent a place for your content.
That’s the idea behind LinkedIn newsletters. It’s about views, not visits. Make this one adjustment to your goals and you may find reach, awareness and growth much more easily.
Five years ago, we launched our LinkedIn newsletter. Today we are sharing what we’ve learned along with our best advice for starting a LinkedIn newsletter for your brand.
Why start a LinkedIn newsletter? Growth and brand awareness
It’s hard to grow an email list. It’s slow. Visitors are wary of spam, overwhelmed with email and reluctant to subscribe. They have to click, type, captcha, confirm …and then hope their address isn’t sold.
But the LinkedIn newsletter signup is the lowest friction conversion in all of digital. Because LinkedIn already has their email address, the user can subscribe with the tap of a finger.
And LinkedIn actively promotes these newsletters. When you publish the first edition, LinkedIn will invite your connections and followers to subscribe. They want your list to grow. Just like Netflix wants hit shows, LinkedIn wants you to have a hit newsletter.
This is why LinkedIn newsletters grow faster than traditional email newsletters. For our content program, it took 15 years to attract 16,000 subscribers. But the growth of our LinkedIn newsletter has been much faster…
Jay Schwedelson, Outcome Media
“LinkedIn newsletters are a no-effort growth hack. After you publish your first one, LinkedIn automatically invites every new connection and follower to subscribe—whether you publish again or not. That means your subscriber list keeps growing in the background, even if you don’t touch it for months (or years). So, whenever you’re finally ready to send another edition, you’ll have a built-in audience waiting—without doing anything in the meantime. What other marketing effort keeps expanding your reach while you do absolutely nothing?
These newsletters have been so successful for LinkedIn that Microsoft bragged about them on an earnings call.
“We now have more than 450 million newsletter subscriptions globally, up 3X year-over-year.” – Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO,
Views, not visits. Brand marketing, not demand gen marketing. Let’s see how this might fit within a content strategy.
Content strategy
I know of many content marketers who write articles specifically for their LinkedIn newsletter. They already have a blog but they produce new content specifically for this new channel. I get it, but it isn’t necessary.
You can use the LinkedIn newsletter to simply syndicate the content you’re already producing. That’s why it’s perfect for small, scrappy marketing teams. A post goes live on your blog. The next day you copy and paste it over, moving all the text and images, and publish it as a LinkedIn article and newsletter.
Technically, this is “duplicate content” but there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” and Google knows that the original is on your website. It saw it there first. SEO isn’t a risk. We’ll cover the SEO implications below.
Here’s how we do it: Every two weeks we write a new article and publish on the Orbit blog. Our LinkedIn newsletter is weekly, so it alternates between a new article one week and a freshened-up older article the next week. This increases the reach of our new content and keeps the best content from our archives in circulation.
We used to publish the first two thirds of the article, then we’d add a call to action to get the rest on our website. But it didn’t drive the traffic we were hoping for, so now we just post the entire article in LinkedIn with a link to the original at the bottom.
Planning your first edition
Starting a LinkedIn newsletter is easy. It takes about 10 seconds and costs nothing. At the top of your LinkedIn feed, click “Write article.” Then in the top right, click the “Manage” dropdown and select “Create newsletter.” Now you’ll need to make a few decisions.
Personal page or company page?
A newsletter from a person will grow faster than a newsletter from a company, but you can’t move it later, so it’s a big decision. A personal LinkedIn newsletter mostly makes sense for founder-led content programs.
Your LinkedIn newsletter title
This is very important. Give it a very specific name. Boring but benefit-driven is better than clever but unclear. Ours is called “Digital Marketing Tips” because we wanted anyone who sees it to know what it’s about. The ideal newsletter name fits into this blank: “Would you like _____?”
Description
Anyone glancing at it should immediately know what they’ll get and why they should subscribe. So keep it simple and specific. Often great email signup CTAs are mini versions of the content marketing mission statement.
Frequency
Daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly. Commit! Then follow through…
Publish
The LinkedIn editor is very simple. And because it automatically saves drafts, you don’t have to do it all at once. You can start an article, close the tab and come back to it later. Find your drafts in the “Manage” dropdown in the top right.
The email subject line and preheader text
LinkedIn handles all of the email delivery for you. It’s a free ESP! (email service provider) But you don’t get a lot of control. You can’t split test emails with a/b testing. You can’t set up automations or personalize. Really none of the typical email marketing features are available.
The title of the article will be the subject line when LinkedIn sends the email. And the first sentence of the article is the preheader text. That’s why we usually put an emoji at the front of the first sentence. It helps the email stand out a bit in the inbox.
Images
It’s a newsletter, but it’s also an article and a social media post. So images are a key success factor. It’s really impossible to overstate the importance of the visuals.
The featured image
It should be colorful, high-contrast, use a face or be a diagram. It’s going to appear in social streams so you’re trying to make a “thumb stopper.” This is worth 25% of your total effort. Work hard on it. The dimensions are 1920 x 1080, but I’d make it a wee bit shorter. Sometimes the top and bottom pixels get cut off.
Images throughout the article
As with any article, the goal is to add something of visual interest at every scroll depth. Again, you’re publishing on a social network, so your content is competing directly with social streams. Make the article itself look a bit like a social stream by filling it with images, videos, peoples faces, points of view.
Video
YouTube videos are easy to embed into the content. Never miss the chance to embed a relevant YouTube video. It’s a great way to make your YouTube channel (more rented land) more successful.
Mentions
Unlike content on your blog, mention someone in your LinkedIn article and they’ll get a notification. Just put the @ sign in front of their name. This is a huge advantage in social promotion (more on that below) and perfect for any collaborative content program.
This can also make your content more visual. Just add their headshot to the article.
In virtually everything we publish, we include contributor quotes from subject matter experts, influencers and friends. We used to email them when posts go live. Now LinkedIn handles the notifications for us.
Ads for your other content
Do you have a webinar coming up? Did you launch a guide recently? What else are you promoting?
Someplace in the article, maybe halfway down, embed the link to it. It’s an ad for yourself. Here you can see what it looks like. In this case it was a webinar so we @ mentioned the guests …and of course they were notified.
Just don’t forget to go back and remove if necessary, or your old editions will be cluttered with irrelevant or broken links.
Speaking of links, never miss an opportunity to link to content on your blog. You may find (and we will measure in a minute) that LinkedIn newsletters actually can drive a lot of traffic.
Promote
This isn’t just email, it’s social media. So the last step is to create the social media post that goes with the article. LinkedIn makes you do this. And that social post should summarize the article and use all of the tricks:
Start with a spicy soundbite or surprising stat (remember, in the social stream, only the first few lines are visible)
Bullet lists
Emojis (not too many)
Mentions (yes, tag the contributors again here)
Hashtags (one or two)
A long-ish summary of the article (a little more than you thought you needed)
Beyond the social post, we need to do more.
Social media promotion
On newsletter day, we need to be especially active. Respond to comments, answer questions, show gratitude and delete the obviously AI generated comments. The comments on the post are the comments on the article. This brings us to another reason to publish on LinkedIn…
Blog comments are dead
You may have noticed. Engagement in the comments section is so low, that many blogs (including the Orbit blog) have simply removed the comments section. There is still a lot of comments and content engagement, it’s just happening on LinkedIn.
Compare the engagement for one article published in two places: our website and on LinkedIn
All of the likes and comments on the article, by you and by others, increases the reach of that article. So keep the LinkedIn tab open on newsletter day and be social.
Promote it on your profile
If the newsletter is from your personal account, you can tell LinkedIn to feature your newsletter in the “Activity” section. Click the pencil icon in the top right corner, then select “Newsletter” and save.
You can also add your most interesting (or most sales-supporting) articles to your “Featured” section. Click the ‘+’ plus sign and pick one of your newsletter. LinkedIn Premium users can also make the newsletter their “Custom button.”
What about SEO?
LinkedIn articles often rank. So if you are publishing the same article on LinkedIn and on your blog (and your content is optimized for search) there’s a risk that the version on LinkedIn will outrank the version on your own website.
You can mitigate this risk by de-optimizing the version you put on LinkedIn. If the title was keyword focused, rewrite it. This is email and social so the game is 100% human and 0% algorithms. It’s straight psychology.
Another risk is links. If an editor likes the article, mentions it on their website, but links to the LinkedIn version rather than the original on your website, you lost a link opportunity.
You can mitigate this risk through basic link reclamation. Set up an alert to be notified of any mention of your brand. Check the mentions when they appear and if they link to the LinkedIn version, reach out to the editor and ask nicely if they wouldn’t mind referencing the original.
LinkedIn articles can actually improve your SEO. Your article may appear in search results under “What people are saying” and it may appear for phrases you would never normally have a chance of ranking for.
Measure
You don’t get email metrics (open and clickthrough rates)
You don’t get website metrics (engagement rate and key event rates).
You only get LinkedIn Analytics (impressions, views and engagement).
Measuring views and engagement
On your profile, click “Show all analytics” then click on “Newsletter article views” and you’ll see the brand visibility you created. These are views, not visits, but it’s likely much more visibility that you’d have if you hadn’t published on the platform.
In year five, we generated millions of views to our LinkedIn articles. This is good for our brand and of course, LinkedIn loves it. Here’s the report. Notice the consistency. We rarely we miss a week.
Also notice how article views are much higher than social media impressions. That’s because most of the clicks come directly from the email, not from the social stream.
ProTip If you download the LinkedIn Analytics, clean them up and upload them to ChatGPT with an analysis prompt, the AI will create visual reports and suggest content strategy adjustments.
Measuring traffic
Our goal was views, not visits. But because every article on LinkedIn has links to articles on our blog, a LinkedIn newsletter does eventually drive traffic to your website.
It’s possible to track this traffic from internal links by adding UTM tracking codes using a campaign URL builder. But there’s a leak in the tracking bucket: If you add a link using the embed feature (which gives you a nice looking snippet) the tracking code gets removed.
Here’s what the same link looks like at the end of one of our articles. Here’s where we’re letting readers know where the original is…
Of course, Analytics was never really that accurate and that’s fine. But let’s see what it captures. Here’s a year’s worth of traffic from LinkedIn. Almost all of this would be from newsletter articles. I’ve highlighted total traffic, the relative engagement and key events rate, and the leads generated.
Even though this was a brand play and not a demand gen play, eventually it still drives measurable middle- and bottom-of-funnel impact.
Final question: Is it too late to launch a popular LinkedIn newsletter?
How much of the success was timing? Was this all because of a first-mover advantage or early adoption? There are so many newsletters now. Is it still possible win with a LI newsletter today?
I believe that it’s harder today to grow a large subscriber base. Look at the slowdown of subscriber growth for our newsletter.
But do you really need tens of thousands of subscribers to be successful? Remember, because it’s repurposed content, the effort may only be a few hours per edition. ROI is partly a function of that investment, which is no dollars and not a ton of time.
And let’s remember, more than any other platform, LinkedIn is about quality and people, not quantity and algorithms.
Sure, that subscriber number is hard to ignore, but pay attention to who is engaging. Anyone you’d like to connect with? Any opportunities to start a conversation? Maybe collaborate on something? Or meet up somewhere?
The ultimate outcome of a LinkedIn newsletter is the relationships.