How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters: A Guide for Businesses
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm Michael Stelzner, and I'm your host, Michael Stelzner.

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle. Today, I'm going to be joined by Judy Fox, and we're going to explore using LinkedIn newsletters to grow your business. If you do not have a LinkedIn newsletter and you're

you really care about getting in front of people over and over again, you're going to want to listen to this episode. We're going to go into some really extensive details and case examples of many different entities, including Social Media Examiner and the benefits of starting a LinkedIn newsletter and tips and so on and so forth. I think you're really going to enjoy today's show. Also, if you are new to this podcast, be sure to follow us on whatever app you're listening to so you don't miss any of our future content.

Let's transition over to this week's interview with Judy Fox. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I am very excited to be joined by Judy Fox. If you don't know who Judy is, she is a LinkedIn strategist.

who helps small business marketers generate more sales. Her course is called LinkedIn Newsletter Accelerator. She's also a regular speaker at Social Media Marketing World. Judy, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today? Excited to be here. I'm super excited you're here today. Judy and I are going to explore how to use LinkedIn newsletters for business.

I'm really excited to talk about this. Now, there are plenty of people listening right now who are not doing a LinkedIn newsletters. They might read a couple of them maybe, but why don't we make the case of like, Hey, what's in this for marketers that maybe they didn't even realize is there. What's the benefits.

I would say the initial biggest benefit for marketers is you have a built in subscriber list immediately when you launch. So you're not starting from zero on LinkedIn. You're starting from however many connections you have or followers you have. Those can be immediately requested to be subscribers.

In addition, LinkedIn has over 500,000 members already subscribing to newsletters. Those are people already willing to say yes. So when you launch, you're launching into a world of warm water of people who want to subscribe and read newsletters.

And the other thing I'll mention is there's over a billion members on LinkedIn, but there's still only about 100,000 newsletters. That's not that many that you're competing with that are active newsletters publishing. So you have like an amazing pool to talk right to your niche, right to your audience, have subscribers, have reach. And I guess the last thing I'll say is,

You have the leverage and the authority of LinkedIn giving you that extra edge saying, hey, you're doing this on LinkedIn and it has domain authority. It has just the ability to say, yes, I have something that is giving you credibility. I was chatting with Andy Crestedina yesterday because he's going to be showing up on my other show when we start talking about newsletters.

And one of the things he said is that LinkedIn wants you to be successful with newsletters because it gets people to kind of come back to LinkedIn. Right. And this is another advantage. If LinkedIn is encouraging creative creator entrepreneurs and marketers to create content, then

through newsletters, well, that's a big advantage, right? That might allow you, like you said, there's not that many people doing it considering the number of people that are on there. This could be a really, really big unlock for anyone who's listening. And I will tell you, we've recently started a newsletter on Social Media Examiner, and

And we've got tens of thousands of people that are reading this weekly newsletter that we're putting out that we're not seeing our content before. So that's really, really cool. Now, let's define what a LinkedIn newsletter is, because it's not exactly what everybody thinks of when they think of a traditional email newsletter. So why don't you kind of explain what is a LinkedIn newsletter? It feels initially like it's a hybrid between a LinkedIn

email newsletter and a blog that you're posting on your website. So it's the marry those two together and you have a LinkedIn newsletter. So what I mean by that is it's because of the way it's distributed. It's the way it is consumed. So step number one is LinkedIn newsletter is made up of articles.

So you're publishing articles on LinkedIn. And the thing that I really liked that you mentioned about Andy Crestodino, I love his newsletter, that articles have been around since the beginning of LinkedIn, 2002. Like it feels even weird saying that date because it seems so long ago, 2002. Yeah.

And that's a good message that these will be around for a very long time. They are a kind of like the base of the platform. It was built on articles. So LinkedIn newsletter just gave a place for the articles to live in a niche, in a way to distribute and put them in a container. So now you can publish a newsletter that pushes your articles out into somebody's email inbox and

into the newsfeed and into their notifications. So it gives you three pushes and that's what the newsletter feature does to articles that you're creating. So hopefully that was clear. It's a lot of words. Yeah, well, let's unpack it a little bit. So-

What I'm hearing you say is anybody can create an article on LinkedIn, but a LinkedIn newsletter comes with distribution. That's really what I'm hearing you say, right? Because, and for those that have done articles on LinkedIn in the past, it's kind of like posting on WordPress, right? It's just, you format it, you can make it look really nice and pretty and beautiful.

You know, sometimes articles on their own don't do very much, but articles through a newsletter, that's the magic sauce, right? And similar to articles, comments. Talk to me a little bit about that just so people understand that side of it too. Yeah. So newsletters on LinkedIn are pushing your content out to create conversation. We all say, I want to talk to my ideal client. I want to have the best conversations online online.

And that's the power of having a newsletter because it's pushing it out. And LinkedIn does encourage and has found more ways to highlight the comments of the conversations. So it used to be just read the article down the page, part of your newsletter, you just would publish and it would just be static and you would read it down the page. Now they're positioning the content that you're writing next to the comments and

So instead of having to kind of scroll down to the bottom, dig through comments, the comments are happening live next to the article that you're creating, which is a much more powerful experience. Yeah. And what's really cool is it aggregates the comments from what I've experienced.

You said there's three parts to it. There's the email blast. There's the social post on your page or your personal profile. And then there's what was the last part? Notifications. Notifications. Right. So basically, if someone reads the post but doesn't read the article, they can still comment on it. It just looks like a regular post. Those comments are all aggregated together. And when you're in the articles, you can also comment. Right. So you can comment in two different locations, kind of in the feed and

or on the page or profile and then on the article and it all kind of brings it all together, which I think is really magical. And I like the fact that at least on desktop, it's right there on the side, right? So, and we probably should clarify, you can do this on a personal profile or on a company page, right? Is there any pros and cons as to why you might want to do it on one versus the other? It depends on your team, how many people are a part of the production and getting people to understand

grow the company page. I've seen some really powerful newsletters grow a company page and that's because they have a big team behind it too. So there's a lot happening. I've seen really good daily ones on company pages. I think you can push out a lot of content. You're not overwhelming your subscribers. They're here for it.

they sign up for it, they want it. I think that is the pro on the company page that is a huge benefit. If you can push out a lot of content, you're going to want one on a company page for sure. I think if you try to push out a ton of content

on a newsletter on your personal profile, it might overwhelm your audience, depending on if your audience came to you at your personal profile in the niche that you're discussing. So I think you just get to segment the audience better. I think I'm also unpacking from what you're saying is with the company profile, you can have multiple people who have access to that profile, but that's not going to happen on your personal profile, right? So if you're establishing yourself

as you're part of a business like I am at Social Media Examiner, and you don't want to be the one, I don't want to be the one to have to manage that. Well, if I was doing this on my personal profile, I would have to be the one to manage it because I can't give someone access to my personal profile without giving them access to my login credentials, which is exactly what I don't want to do, but you can do that on a page.

I love that. And can I add a little caveat? Like this is the micro piece of leadership and management you want to do on your personal profile. If you're publishing all the time and you run a business where you don't want to look like you have all the time in the world to publish every single day, that may send the wrong message to your audience where you might actually hold on.

off on how much you're publishing because you do need to be accomplishing the things in the world that you're working on. And if it looks like you're just publishing every second, every day, it sends the wrong signal, if that makes sense. Yeah. So this does beg a question, which I think some of my audience will want me to ask you, how often can we publish a newsletter? Because some of like me, I publish once a week.

like long form content just as a post. It's not an article, right? So is there a place where, well, let's start with how often should we publish newsletters? And then let's talk about like text post versus article a little bit. Sounds good. We have the option to choose from daily, weekly, weekly,

So every other week and monthly. I normally tell people on their personal profiles, weekly, biweekly, monthly is great. Daily, like I mentioned, unless you have a very niche audience on your personal profile, it could be you want to test it. If you want to publish more than what you say for a period of time, like you're doing like a push week, that's great.

for example, that would be great to test on your personal profile. Can you switch this or are you stuck? Yes. Yeah, you can easily switch it. It doesn't send a notification to everybody. It doesn't make a big deal of it. So that's nice. I don't know if anyone's

deciding if that's the biggest factor, I'm going to sign up for this newsletter because it is doing it too little, I guess, if that makes sense. If it was a monthly newsletter, I would actually think you might get more subscribers sometimes depending on your business. So it depends on the goal of your newsletter. So back to the other question about the kinds of content, you know, there are people like me that publish longer form written content on LinkedIn just as a post and

Because I don't really enjoy publishing articles. I get a lot of engagement on the stuff that I publish. So what's your thoughts on a text post versus a newsletter? So the biggest difference between a text post and the newsletter is with a text post, you

You don't really get a chance to either embed any content, have a call to action that goes to an external link that pushes people to your website without reducing some reach. We've had that come up as a back and forth. Does it reduce reach? It does send people away from your post,

At a minimum, if you wanted people to click on that, they're no longer clicking on your post. So with that said, a text post is only about 3,000 characters where a newsletter is over 100,000 characters. So if you have more to say and you have an audience that loves long form content and you do, you would benefit by positioning your content inside the article, inside the newsletter,

And then having a call to action or a clickable image of a ticket for social media marketing world and something that drives the traffic where you wanted to actually send them. Because at the end of the day, we love being informational, educational, entertaining, sharing our stories. But we all know there's business that is meant to be happening here. And at the bottom or even in the middle, like an ad break, you're

You could position what you want people to go to. Do you have a course? Do you have a one-on-one call to book with you? Do you have a podcast to subscribe to that's off of LinkedIn? You can leverage in between written text, the ability to create your own advertisements. And my guess is LinkedIn understands there's going to be links inside these newsletters by their very nature. Correct. So they don't punish you when you have links inside them like they would with the text post. That's really cool.

Okay, so how do we get people to subscribe to the newsletter? Let's assume someone who's listening is not done a newsletter.

So are they starting from zero and they have no advantages? Or, you know, let's talk about this a little bit. Is there some certain advantages they get in the beginning? You have tons of advantages at the beginning because the moment you click publish for your newsletter, it goes out to every single person that's following you and connected to you. Immediately, they get a notification that says subscribe.

And they get a notification that'll push out an email too, saying subscribe to this brand new newsletter, even if it doesn't have any content. I mean, it could have one article, for example. It'll just give a very simple message

screen a little square with a subscribe button, you can click inside your email. So it gets pushed out to every single person you are connected with and follows you. So do you have any control over what is in that text? Does this just say Judy Fox has a new newsletter?

Or does it actually have a title? You don't have control over that. First, that initial announcement in your email, you don't really have control over. What you do have control over is your first article. So yes, when you publish that, most people publish the same time they launch something.

I normally don't see somebody launch their newsletter and then not publish an article. It's got it. It's possible, but most people don't. They do it all at the same time. And I recommend you do it all at the same time. Just because we're talking to people who have never done this before.

Which do they they first have to create an article and then they have to click something that says, here's the newsletter and include this article or kind of walk us through like what the steps are. Yes. So first you want to click write an article. If you have no newsletter on your profile at all, nothing. Write an article is the easiest way to get into the newsletter system. And then your best answer.

place to look for all the tools is underneath what's called manage. And there will be a dropdown that says create newsletter. So the manage folder contains everything that you need, every piece, every tool. There's even more we can talk about. You can create templates now that are repeatable. You can create drafts. You can schedule LinkedIn newsletters. Now you can pre-schedule them out. So

I could schedule them for the next 90 days and be done. So that is also really powerful. Okay. So I would imagine this manage thing you're talking about is available on pages and personal profile. Is that correct? Correct. Yes. And when you go under there, you're going to first create an article and

And then once you create the article, you'll find the button that says newsletter somewhere around there. And then that's what you'll connect it to. Is that how that works? So first you have the world of manage. There's a dropdown list that gives you manage on the left hand side. So that's on the right. The left hand side, you do have your face and it'll have the image of your newsletter if you have created it.

And so you can do the dropdown on the left that'll allow you to select which newsletter, which company page. So you can do all the activity to press all the buttons to make sure it goes out to the right place. So if you have employees who are working on your newsletter, they can do it from their account. They are signed in. They're a super admin or an admin, and they can do the dropdown and select the newsletter for that company page. Okay, cool.

What I heard you say is initially when you set up the newsletter, LinkedIn is going to send some sort of an announcement to all of your fans and or followers on your personal and or company page, depending on which one of these places where you set it up.

And that's like a one-time shot and you're going to get a kind of a big burst. And then what more can we do if we want to continue to grow subscribers to the newsletter? Well, the more you grow followers and connections, you also gain subscribers. Every single person that follows you going forward will be invited to subscribe. Yeah, that is really good because then you're not chasing down each person that just connected with you.

You get to grow as your followers grow. Okay. So how does that work typically? If they follow your page or your personal profile, they just are asked, do you also want to sign up for Judy's newsletter? Is that generally how that works? Yes. Immediately after they click follow, they get a notification in their connections area, their networking area. Okay. That says, do you want to subscribe to this? And I would say that is almost everything.

Unless people are just over newsletters, a lot of people do click subscribe, which is really nice. What else can we do beyond these two things to help kind of grow the subscribers? The best thing that I know worked on my profile was if I was capturing any profile traffic, I featured my newsletter. Featuring your newsletter in your featured section of your profile actually gives you a live subscribe button.

So they don't have to go anywhere. They don't have to leave. They don't have to read any of the additions that you've put out. They just click subscribe right there. So that is really powerful. Is there a similar function for company pages? Yes. I think once you publish it, it just automatically puts it

in the line of options as you scroll down the main page of your company page. I know on my company page, it's near the bottom, but I don't think I have the option to organize it like you can on a Facebook page. I wish we could pull it up. I get that. Yeah. Imagine being in sunny and warm San Diego. Amazing beaches,

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What about other ideas of how we can do it, maybe utilizing things off platform? Yes. So off platform, for example, on Instagram, I drive traffic to my newsletter because LinkedIn gives you a subscriber pop up button. What that means is if I say, hey, read my newsletter as a call to action button on Instagram in my profile or my bio on Instagram,

it drives traffic immediately when they click on that, they're going to get a pop-up that says subscribe to Judy's newsletter. So instead of forcing go follow me first, it sometimes is more powerful to say, hey, get my newsletter versus, hey, come follow me on LinkedIn. More people are interested in getting the knowledge or the resource that you're offering them versus, hey, just follow me for following sake. How does someone get

the link or whatever to be able to use it off the platform? Is there a special thing they got to do? I think you just have to go to your analytics and your creator tools. I do know they've moved it a couple of times. I was clicking on it earlier today. It is kind of buried underneath your analytics and down below where it says if you have creator tools, they've been moving things around. So any advice I give, just check your analytics or check your newsletter analytics. Many times it's underneath that now.

Okay, so there is, I would imagine you can even Google search how to find a URL to promote my LinkedIn newsletter or whatever, but it is an actual URL that will go directly to your newsletter on LinkedIn, right? Correct, yeah. Now, it's important for everybody to understand, even though LinkedIn will email out the quote-unquote subscribers to your newsletter, this is just like followers on LinkedIn. We don't really know who they are, right? We can't export them. This is not...

really meant to be a complete replacement for like a legit email newsletter platform because you can only send to the, they're anonymous, right? I mean, you don't really know who they are or can you download the list? Yeah, I can click. I did that before we talked to make sure I double made sure I can click on my list of subscribers. Now we know with all the AI tools out there, cause we are now in a different age where we,

The tools that I've played with, I've been able to grab my subscriber list off of that clickable page because it is now I would say that might be violation of LinkedIn terms of service kind of thing. Again, I wasn't grabbing their emails, but I do think it's important if you did have links.

Say, for example, LinkedIn announces something is majorly changing on their platform and you no longer have the connections that you have. Or once a year you decide I need to save who I'm connected to because it's really smart strategy. You can now. I mean, it is with all the tools out there. There are so many tools. It is a one page and it is scrollable and you can get all access to every person who has subscribed to your newsletter. Okay.

But what I'm really hearing you say is it's not the same as having a real legit email newsletter where you can control that, right? It's correct. It's intentionally designed to be a little challenging for you to get to those people and know exactly who they are, right? Just like we don't really know on most of the social platforms who these people are unless they actively engage with us, right? Correct. But it sounds like there is a way around it. You were talking about promoting this in your email signatures. Also, talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, so at the bottom of your email signature, you can put the direct link to your newsletter. And again, that subscribe button link, it's a code at the end of the URL that LinkedIn gives you to be able to force a pop up for them to subscribe. And like I said, if you've got

a reach on any other platform or anywhere else, YouTube, you put it as one of your links of places for people to connect with you further. That's just in addition to then asking them to go to LinkedIn to your account. So that's

There's a benefit both places. Because I talked to Andy Crestedina yesterday, I'm going to tell you what he told me and then you can share some other examples as well. But Andy told me that he has 16,000 subscribers on his actual old-fashioned email newsletter.

And he writes a post, I think once a week, really detailed, 3,000 words is what he said. And that post, he promotes using his 16,000 LinkedIn newsletter with just like a little summary and a link to his blog.

He also said that he quite literally copy and pastes almost the exact same thing, but he does do a little tweaking of the front end to make it a little more optimized for LinkedIn. And I think he might potentially use a little AI to help him a little bit on that. But he said that he's grown his LinkedIn newsletter to over 250,000 people. And he said he's been doing it for about two years or three years. And he said it's his number one source of leads.

And he said, whenever he goes anywhere, everybody knows him because of his LinkedIn newsletter. And it's so much bigger than anything he's ever done before. And he's just absolutely blown away by it, right? Because he and I were talking about how we're in this time right now where it's really hard to get Google search traffic. And here he owns an agency that specializes in building websites and SEO and all this stuff.

And LinkedIn is his primary way that he is getting leads and exposure and personal branding and all these kinds of things. So I just wanted to share, and you, do you read his newsletter? Cause I don't, I don't know what's in there. Do you have any sense of what he publishes? I think it's like,

AI and blogging content. Does that sound right? I've definitely read his newsletter because his newsletter was one of the newsletters I studied to be able to take best practices and go through and create my LinkedIn newsletter accelerator to get businesses more business on LinkedIn. That's the entire way when he said he's getting his leads from LinkedIn. It is because you can embed content, you can make it interactive, you

The social proof of seeing so many people subscribe is also the power of getting people to convert. So it just starts to kind of snowball to more and more success for Andy. So I'm very excited to hear that summary and feedback. And congratulations, Andy. So you've got a couple of examples of either people you know or.

or customers of yours, I would love you to share a little bit about what they're doing. So two different, I wanted to showcase both of these clients. So yes, I've worked with them. Their newsletters are my success. So Joe Colantonio, I made sure to check his name.

He has a engineering test company. It's very technical. He has a very intense, he uses maybe the whole hundred thousand words. He leverages the entire newsletter to share roundups and summaries and things.

updates in his community and to position his tickets for his event that he runs every year. So he in his niche community, he's already got 17k subscribers. So I love that he's been running it for only a couple years. And it's so niche, but it's thriving, which is really exciting. So real quick.

Just tell us a little bit about what he's doing with his newsletter, just so people can understand, because there's so many different things you can do inside the substance of the newsletter, right? So he's merging and pairing it with his YouTube channel, which also has he has a great subscribership over there. He has about 300,000 subscribers on YouTube. So when he creates a YouTube video, he's doing all of this roundup and explanation in a video, right?

And then he's getting all the text and he's having his team do all this current community updates, any kind of news updates, any industry data things. I mean, I don't even know what they're saying. It's so technical. Got it. OK, so this is cool. Yeah, his world is so deep and amazing, but he is thriving. I love this. So what I'm hearing you say is he's an engineer covering some sort of niche.

That's super technical. We don't really know. You might know, but I don't think we totally know. But there's stuff happening in his industry, right? And in his YouTube channel, it sounds like he covers the news that's happening in his industry. And then it sounds like what he's doing is he's probably getting a transcript of the stuff he talks about, or maybe he's already got his talking points before he records the video. And then he's giving this to his team and they are producing a newsletter that

Presumably weekly. Does that sound about right? I think it's weekly. Yeah, I was just checking it. And then he's also in the newsletter promoting some sort of event that he does. Is that right? Yes. He sells tickets to an event that he hosts. Yeah. Every year. And has he told you about how successful this has been for him beyond the numbers? Yeah. He wrote me an amazing review. He basically said his business has never seen this success and he credited that to me, which I was very grateful for. So yeah.

Yeah. You got another example that's completely different. And I was going to say he has 89 editions out there of his newsletter. So yeah, that's about two years ish. So, but that's the power of being consistent. He hasn't had any issues trying to sell tickets.

His audience is thriving. And with 17,000 subscribers in that niche community on LinkedIn, that is a goldmine. I love it. And the truth is that we forgot to mention this. This is free. Yeah. This doesn't cost anything, right? Like it would cost him money for sure to have a...

18,000, whatever his subscription size is, newsletter that he has in a traditional way. So that's really cool. And it earned him the top voice badge on LinkedIn. That was that blue top voice badge that is the coveted one. Oh, cool. Part of the reason why he earned that was because

his consistency, leveraging newsletters and the ability to thrive in this niche community. And I think LinkedIn wanted to promote seeing that on the platform. Did you feel like when he got started, he was not well known? He did not have a huge advantage because of his YouTube channel? Or do you feel like that was like his unfair advantage?

It did help that he was comfortable on video and that he could embed the video in here, but I don't think it really translated. I don't think the YouTube traffic was coming over to LinkedIn. I think it was more, he was well known just in general in his industry as a leader, but the ability to leverage more of the B2B conversations versus just individual customers buying tickets to his event, 'cause he also has another avenue of business that's happening.

That is even more powerful. Sweet. Tell us the other example. Kate, Kate Sotsenko. She has the Good Busy newsletter and she's already up to 18K subscribers with only 20 additions. So that's the power of having a lighter newsletter. I guess I would say it's not as heavy. And her main focus is to push traffic forward.

Keep her newsletter short because she wants to keep you good busy. And she pushes the traffic to her email subscriber newsletter, which is I guess she's giving us extra information over on that newsletter. What's her niche? What does she cover exactly? Corporate productivity. OK. So she works and wants to get business with corporations. So she is in more of the B2B space.

And she is doing workshops, webinars, and coming in for coaching and consulting. Do you happen to know how much you said it was on the lighter side? How much content is she pushing inside of that newsletter? I mean, obviously you've got Joe over here putting like almost a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand characters. Help us understand kind of what she's doing. I would say some of hers are only one minute reads where his might be 10,

minute reads. So his newsletters, it actually tells you on the outside of the newsletter, an estimate of how long it will take you to read the newsletter. So I've seen a few of hers. She tries to keep it less than three minutes. His has peaked all the way up to almost 10 minutes. So that's two totally different newsletters that are both thriving and both getting them in business. Is she giving like partial articles and then you've got to go to read the entire thing or how is she doing that?

I haven't necessarily seen that. I think she's just enticing us to get on her playbook and get more details and then get more private conversations happening over at her other newsletter that's not on LinkedIn. So I think that's the enticing language. I will also share with everybody as we're recording this in the middle of December of 2024, Social Media Examiner has a newsletter called The Marketer's Brief. And it says publish daily, but we only publish two times a week.

So I don't know if we're doing that wrong, but the description says a twice weekly newsletter featuring one in-depth article and content previews with insights to improve your marketing. And we've got 18,400 subscribers. Our analytics are looking really strong. And what we do is we take articles off of our blog

And we publish them entirety, if you will, right inside the newsletter. Now, is it okay for us to say daily, even though we're not daily? Do you have, are we doing that wrong? Or what's your thoughts on that? I don't think

I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I think people don't pay that much attention. We delete and distort and generalize everything we see online as consumers. Got it. Because we don't have time to parse through the details like you do. You are running this newsletter. You have time to look through and see what's happening. So, I mean, I think the trust is built by telling us in the description what you're publishing and your details.

I would say we just have a language on LinkedIn of what am I going to get?

So if I know what I'm going to get, there's no other confusion happening there. So you're just fine. Well, and just so people understand, we have 126,352 followers. So we've gotten more than 10% of them to become subscribers. We publish 19 editions to a week, right? So you can do the math on that. It's been less than 10 weeks, right? That we've been doing this. Yeah. And we're really happy with it, which is exciting. So let's talk about

There are some things that people need to understand on the email deliverability side of newsletters. Talk to me a little bit about like what are the limitations? Because I know there are a few limitations that people might need to understand, especially if they're writing longer newsletters. Yeah. So when you write a longer newsletter and nobody's come up with a perfect count of how many characters it cuts off.

But LinkedIn has started cutting off the newsletter that is being delivered in your email. So if I open up my email and I see that social media has just published their newsletter, what was the name of the newsletter? It's got the brief in it. Social media examiner. It's called the marketer's brief.

The Marketer's Brief. I love that name. The Marketer's Brief. And I read it and it's about 50,000 characters. So it's going to cut off at some point to say read over on LinkedIn or...

or join the conversation over on LinkedIn. It's gonna stop the conversation happening over on email. So there's a pro and a con to that. I can't read the entire newsletter that you just published inside my email. It's gonna cut it off.

And it forces the traffic to click over to LinkedIn. The pro is then I might comment and I might actually grow your engagement and reach on that newsletter on the platform, which then grows that social proof of having more subscribers, having more likes, more comments, more engagement, which converts to business.

So I see it as a pro. I would rather people move the traffic over to comment and engage and not stay a silent consumer in email. Well, and the other side of it is the statistics side. Talk to us because LinkedIn doesn't do a great job

With delineating, does it on like where all this stuff is coming from, right? No, we can't see where the clicks are coming from. If somebody clicks from the email button, we don't get to see that. If somebody clicks from the notification button, we don't get to see that. The only difference we get to see is if it's in the newsfeed, we get to see the amount of what's called impressions of that post, right?

And then how many people clicked into the article, but not necessarily just from the newsfeed. So we do get to see those two different metrics. And this is really important for anybody who's listening, who's an email marketer. You're going to be a little frustrated by this. You're not going to get opens and clicks.

It just won't happen. Like if you've got a newsletter that's aggregation, like the example we were talking about with Joe, where you have a lot of links going to different news, you're not going to have any idea how many people are clicking on those email newsletters. You're not going to have any idea on your, what your opens or bounces or any of that kind of stuff. Cause it's just not there. I mean, it's very simple.

And that's the only part that can be a little frustrating if you're an email marketer, you know, and you're used to having all these kind of metrics available at your fingertips. But I would say the upside of it is LinkedIn, people use legit email addresses for their LinkedIn profile. And you don't get to say, I want it delivered via email. It just doesn't.

Does it, right? Doesn't it? Or am I right or wrong on that? Okay.

it would either go into their main inbox or if they've moved it or put it in another folder. So a lot of marketers here are really excited about the option to promote something inside of their newsletter, which they cannot do with great success in their organization.

organic posts on LinkedIn. So can you give us any tips on how to promote and sell inside the actual newsletter itself? I would say the number one tip is make it visual. So I see people trying to convert with just the text and highlighting the text and making it another clickable blue link.

But if you make an image that, I mean, be creative, you might even have arrows pointing, like grab your ticket. Or if you have a community, join the community is in a banner and you can make it a GIF that actually has moving images there.

The more creative you are to catch people's eyes, because we're scanning a newsletter to see, wait, is this important? What's happening here? What can I learn from this? Should I comment? Should I save? You have to make what you want them to do stand out from all of that thinking.

And you have to pick what it what do you want to send somebody to if you try to send them to 10 things, they're probably going to go to none of those. I tell people limit it to two to three, you may benefit. I think I would if you go to Joe's as a great example, he's only sending them to one, he's trying to get people to get his tickets, because he knows if you come to his in person event, he might close more business. So

You have to pick whatever part of the funnel you know if people come in on that, they're going to go to the next thing. They're going to go and convert. So I do have some people really thriving by putting a link, a visual link to their Calendly. If you just want to get your business up and running, you want to book calls, put a visual picture of your Calendly, what it looks like to click on. They'll click on it because it looks clickable, right?

It's not embedded, but it can be a clickable image. You just attach the URL to that image. Well, and if you use Google's free version, which they have a very similar one, you could probably accomplish the same thing. Perfect. So the composer inside of LinkedIn, is it just like WordPress almost? Like, can you just drag images in there and do whatever you want? I mean, like describe that a little bit because obviously I've never been in it and maybe some of my audience doesn't understand because it sounds exciting what you can do inside of it. Yeah.

Yeah. I had a client the other day say, Hey, I have a blog. I have so many old blog posts. How much can I copy and paste? You have on one screen, you have your blog, you have your blank LinkedIn article on your left and you can copy and paste. I did find the only glitch was it didn't like the whole entire thing. So I had to do it in a couple of chunks, especially if it was a longer blog post because

But from a website, just copy and paste it and put it over onto LinkedIn and it was published. So it can be as simple as that. You do want to, if you're going to make your images clickable to make them go where you want them to go, you do have to spend the time to add the URL to that image. So it has a little pencil button in the image and it says add the URL. So you just add the URL to your image.

I think I heard you say that you can embed videos. I would imagine that is mostly on LinkedIn because I know email clients don't play videos. But is it true that like you could put a YouTube video in there or a Vimeo video in there and it would just automatically play on LinkedIn in the article if you're on the app or whatever? Yes, I have a client that just takes videos

the YouTube video because her main primary platform is YouTube. So I love thinking that I put my clients in ABC. A is you're on the platform. You want to be a plus student. B is you're kind of mixing in LinkedIn with a bunch of other platforms and then C not to put anyone in a C student, but you don't need to make LinkedIn your primary platform.

Not everyone needs to. So I would say she just wants to be C-level. She's like, I'm good. I don't need LinkedIn to be my number one platform. So she takes her YouTube video and embeds it in her newsletter, puts the top three takeaways from the transcript. So she'll put it in AI and ask AI, what do you think the top three takeaways are? So it can be summarized, but not too heavy.

And then she just says like, thank you for sharing. And she leaves it very simple to drive traffic back to YouTube, not to keep traffic on LinkedIn. I love it. You mentioned something when we were prepping for this called signature closings.

What is that exactly? So that's if you have something repeatable or you want to just have it easy to copy and paste every single article. So you have a consistent closing, just like you have a consistent email closing. So you can have a signature. You can even have your name if you wanted to have it like all scripty or something. I've seen that. I've seen people do a little bit of a link list where they'll say, here's how to get a hold of me. Here's my podcast.

It's not trying to drive a ton of traffic. I actually tell people make those links less interesting if you want to make the most important thing the most interesting. So a quick little link list at the bottom is also a good idea. I do have one client that treats the bottom of his

newsletter as a bit of a bio on his book because he's a author and he likes to write the bio that he has out in the world. He just keeps copying and pasting it in italics text right at the bottom as like a throwaway. But it still maintains his presence on LinkedIn and allows him to gain more authority and more traction.

Judy, you will be speaking at Social Media Marketing World. So if folks want to meet Judy in person and geek out about all things related to LinkedIn, she will be there. If people want to connect with you on LinkedIn, how do they find you? And then if they want to do business with you, where do you want to send them? Yes, I am at judifox on LinkedIn. And right now, the best way to get a hold of my new LinkedIn newsletter accelerator, because I've taken all these clients and summarized their success for you to have success. I

I am launching it as a course. This is my first official, like just DIY course that I've put out into the world. So I'm going to feature that on my LinkedIn profile. So by the time you listen to this episode, it should be out there and everything should be featured in judyfox.com. Judy Fox. Thank you again for sharing your insights. See you at Social Media Marketing World. Thank you.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 648. New to the show? Follow us. If you've been a listener for a little while, would you let your friends know about this podcast and consider giving us a review on whatever app you're listening to? And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast, which I'm having a blast doing, and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld.info.