LinkedIn has never been my favorite platform. I’ve felt like for a long time that all I get is spam in my LinkedIn, so if I’m being completely honest with you – I barely use it! Sure, I have a presence on LinkedIn. I schedule my weekly social posts to LI, share my blog posts to LI, I even go on there to at least answer messages and comments from time to time or take a look at my connections to accept. BUT beyond that, I’ve found it to be one of the less useful platforms for me.
Now I know it’s different for everyone. If you are in the corporate world, I’ve known LinkedIn to be very useful for finding clients, connections, networking with potential employees. As a freelancer and someone who is no longer working for a soul sucking job like corporate, it’s a little less glamorous.
That’s all besides the point though. LinkedIn has been trying to make some serious strides to compete with other social media platforms and still remain relevant in the career world for younger entrepreneurs like myself. For a little while they had stories, but that has since stopped as far as I know. And now they are launching newsletters.
When I received a request to subscribe to someone’s newsletter on LinkedIn, I was intrigued. So I did a little further digging to see if it was something I’d like to pursue. I have found this year that email marketing has been out performing social media as far as helping me to land discovery calls and clients.
Yep, you heard me right. Email marketing has been one of my number one tools this year. It’s no longer Facebook Groups, and let’s face it – it has NEVER been Instagram. I love writing my weekly newsletters and scheduling them for the month. My click rates have been through the roof, I’ve been hearing a lot of great feedback about my efforts. I’ve even had leads ask me how to build an automation like mine – SCORE!
So anyways, back to my point – LinkedIn Newsletters…should I or should I not incorporate them into my marketing strategy?
Well, from a repurposing perspective, I can easily write a blog post like this one, turn it into an email newsletter for my email marketing platform and now also LinkedIn. I’m sharing my blog posts as LinkedIn articles anyways, so what’s another extra step? Easy peasy.
But when I went to try it out for the first time this morning – I was unsuccessful. Apparently the launch is so new it’s by invitation only. Boo! Maybe next month I’ll be able to actually test this, but I wanted to give you a run down of what I’ve found out from all my research.
If you want to give these LinkedIn newsletters a try, here’s what you need to do first if you haven’t already. You need to set your creator option on LinkedIn.
Here’s how to Manage Creator Mode:
To turn on creator mode:
- Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Click View profile.
- Click on Creator mode: Off under Your Dashboard.
- Click Next on the preview pop-up window.
- Add topics (hashtags) to indicate the topics you post about the most.
- Click Save.
- Follow the prompts to turn on creator mode.
Once you set your creator mode, here’s what you need to do next (taken directly from LI):
To create a newsletter on LinkedIn:
- Click Write an article at the top of the homepage. This takes you to the publishing tool.
- Click Create a newsletter.
- Add a title, description, publishing cadence, and logo for your newsletter and click Done.
- Avoid adding emojis into the title of your newsletter
- Once you have created a newsletter, you’ll see your newsletter title near the upper right corner of the page. If you don’t see the newsletter title, click on the dropdown menu and select the newsletter you want to write in.
- You can now write the first article for your newsletter.
- You can publish up to one article every 24 hours.
- Once the article is ready to be published, click Publish at the top of the screen.
- A window will pop up for you to add more context. You can comment on what this specific newsletter article is about, ask questions of your readers, and @mention or add #hashtags. When you click Post, your newsletter will also be shared in the feed.
- Once you publish your first article, a page for your newsletter is automatically created with an overview of your newsletter, your profile information, and a list of the articles in the newsletter. You can use your newsletter page to provide a preview of your newsletter and share it on or off LinkedIn to increase your reach. You do not have to be logged in to view the page but members must log in to subscribe or share it on LinkedIn.
- Share your newsletter article on your other social channels to drive more engagement across your entire audience.
- By default, your connections and followers will be invited by notification to subscribe to your newsletter once the first article of your newsletter has been successfully published. Subscribing means they’ll receive a notification and email when you write a new newsletter article. You can uncheck this option if you do not want to invite your connections and followers to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you have tried to walk through these steps, you were able to turn on your creator option, but you still don’t have the choice of creating a newsletter…welcome to my world.
This means LinkedIn hasn’t rolled out the newsletter option to you, yet! It’s a soft launch, and us normals have to wait a few more weeks/months in order to fully test it out. From my research, I really do think once I have the option to create a newsletter, it’s going to be really beneficial for me. Here’s why:
- LinkedIn Newsletters Expand Your Audience – The more people engage with yours, the more people it will reach. As a result, you’ll reach a wider audience and build more meaningful connections.
- LinkedIn Newsletters Create Engagement – A newsletter helps refine your contact list. This is because when you invite people to sign up for your newsletter, only those who resonate with your topic sign up. That can improve your engagement.
- LinkedIn Newsletters Help Boost Brand Awareness – A newsletter helps get your brand in front of the right people. It is a great way to remind them about your brand and helps showcase the solutions you provide.
- LinkedIn Newsletters Help Build Authority – It’s the perfect tool to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. By creating valuable content, your audience will view you as a trusted source of information — especially when they need the products or services you provide.
- LinkedIn Newsletters Help Generate Leads – A well-planned LinkedIn newsletter can generate leads for your business by showcasing your expertise. LinkedIn is 277% more effective at lead generation than Facebook and Twitter. With a newsletter as part of your LinkedIn strategy, that number might just go up.
LinkedIn may not be lost on me, yet. They’re hanging on by a thread for many of us content marketers and newsletters may change the game for us.
If you have access, don’t take this feature for granted. USE IT! You might be amazed at the outcome.
