With LinkedIn seeing a rise in usage among professionals, it’s becoming a great place for expanding your B2B presence, whether through paid advertising or organic posting. There, you can reach a specific professional audience that it can be hard to capture otherwise given today’s overly-saturated digital information ecosystem. 
 
There are many ways to use it and tools to take advantage of — today, we’re going to look at LinkedIn Newsletters. Let’s dive in! 

What is a LinkedIn Newsletter? 

One of the nice things about a LinkedIn Newsletter is that, unlike some industry jargon, it is exactly what it sounds like: long-form content — some might say “a newsletter” — delivered to your subscribers via LinkedIn. Pretty straightforward! 

Here’s an example of our own Fujisan version. 

What are the benefits (and how do they differ from other LinkedIn features)? 

Newsletters in general are helpful for many reasons which LinkedIn versions retain, but there are some specific advantages to LinkedIn Newsletters in particular. These include: 

• Having built-in distribution to your followers 

• Having high discoverability within LinkedIn’s ecosystem to increase your audience 

• Being a consistent touchpoint with your professional audience 

• Being easily able to repurpose and send out via email lists (and vice versa) 

The latter is a key component especially because it highlights how few resources it takes to make a LinkedIn Newsletter from a mailing list newsletter or, on the flip side, repurpose an email newsletter and adapt it for LinkedIn. 

Basically, the other points (and overall benefits of newsletters no matter the medium) point out how a LinkedIn Newsletter can be beneficial — this points out “why not?” given it takes so few resources to adapt one to the other. Basically: Here are the benefits, this is the cost — AKA very little, whether measured in time, energy, money, manpower, etc. 

These also differ from other LinkedIn content, which are: 

• LinkedIn posts: shorter form with faster engagement 

• LinkedIn articles: similar to blogs and usually more focused on evergreen content 

• LinkedIn Document Ads: paid advertising for ebooks, whitepapers, etc. 

Why LinkedIn Newsletters matter for SEO and overall visibility 

Now, how does this all benefit your business? 

First, LinkedIn content ranks quite high on Google — even with Google putting more focus on LLM or “AI”-generated results like the AI overview and other components, ranking well in a traditional search engine way is still valuable! After all, people still want to hear from actual, tangible experts to give them trustworthy information, even if this move towards AI makes that harder. 

Furthermore, LinkedIn Newsletters help improve your overall brand visibility, particularly when you’re sending them out consistently and creating work that’s both keyword-rich for findability purposes, but most importantly high quality, educational, and generally useful. 

All of the above really comes back, one way or another, to the concept of building up your trustworthiness by showing others repeatedly that you’re a knowledgeable authority who they should come to for your area(s) of expertise. 

And in doing so, LinkedIn Newsletters also provide an opportunity to include backlinks to your site — for example, a blog for further reading — which can further enhance your SEO strategies. Be sure to use UTM parameters to track your newsletter’s impact on traffic, conversions, and other metrics you want to keep an eye on. 

How to create a LinkedIn Newsletter step-by-step 

You used to have to have Creator Mode turned on to make a newsletter; the good news is that since LinkedIn’s most-recent updates, any user can. If you have a company page, especially one with recent follows and activity, it can be a good time to take advantage of this feature. 

Step-by-step: 

1. While logged in, go to your LinkedIn profile or company page. 

2. Click “Write article,” and from there choose “Create a newsletter.” 

3. Name your newsletter. Be thoughtful about this — you want to express a clear value proposition and ideally have target keywords, but it’s better to have an overall good title than to just jam a bunch of disparate buzzwords into it just to try and play to the algorithm. 

4. Add a banner image and a compelling description. Again, the latter should use helpful keywords when appropriate, but shouldn’t just be foisting them in there at the expense of an actual good description that’s informative and engaging for, you know, the human beings who will be reading this. 

5. Set the frequency — this can be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc. Consider how the frequency could impact quality; a more frequent newsletter is great if you can do it, but you want to actually be providing value each time and not borderline spamming your audience. A high quality, informative, compelling newsletter every month is better than a hastily-churned out piece of slop every week. 

6. After writing, publish your first edition (and don’t forget to promote it through a LinkedIn post)! 

Best B2B practices for LinkedIn Newsletters 

Once you get it started, keep these principles in mind — both to provide the best possible product for your readers, and to have it perform as well as possible. 

1. On social media including LinkedIn, you’re gonna get a lot of “skim readers.” Keep that in mind, and optimize accordingly. 

Basically what it says. No matter how well-written and researched your newsletter edition is, know that people are more inclined to skim it than they are with many other media like a longform magazine article, blog post, etc. 

You can still communicate effectively though even with being at a disadvantage for getting others’ full attention. It starts with, just like all written work, knowing how to write a compelling hook off the top. From there: 

• Take advantage of headers and good headers, writing compelling copy to pique their interest (part of that hook!) 

• Bold the most critical information you want to convey 

• Use bullet points when appropriate (like, say, right here) 

• Include shorter paragraphs 

2. Have a strong, cohesive theme. 

This includes for the newsletter overall, and for each edition. For example, Fujisan’s newsletter is all about digital marketing — “Digital Marketing Newsletter” — and very clearly marked as such. If people can clearly see the information your newsletter provides and how that can help them, they’ll naturally be more interested than if its purpose is vague and unclear. 

3. Be consistent. 

We’ve talked about this before when it comes to producing any kind of content whether email lists, social media posts, videos, and more, but it’s better to post less often consistently than post a bunch and then not at all for a long time. The cadence and dates of your newsletters should be consistent; planning ahead — even making an explicit schedule to visualize them — is key. 

4. Actually create something quality that provides value. 

It stinks that we have to say this, but don’t just push out useless slop providing no insight! There is a huge amount of this out there right now by both individuals and overall brands who seem to think the only thing that matters is that you never stop posting. But the reality is that — shocker — people want stuff that doesn’t suck! 

Provide actual educational insights, industry analysis, case studies, blogs helpfully showcasing your expertise, and you’ll actually be giving readers something of value and attracting them accordingly. Try to just extract value without providing anything useful, and you’ll deservedly find little success. 

5. Use compelling visuals. 

Humans are visual creatures and different points can be best communicated using different visualization media. Infographics are a good example of this, but there’s a bunch of other graphs and visual contextualizers that are ideal for different points. When appropriate, use ‘em! 

6. Include clear CTAs. 

This is true of any digital marketing copy, but make the calls-to-action clear and compelling, wherever they may be taking someone whether to a further blog, webinar, or somewhere else. 

7. Engage your audience. 

Providing a helpful “back-and-forth” can be both beneficial to your readers — they have some thoughts and questions, and your responses can provide further elaboration — and make you more visible on LinkedIn. There are some good examples of this on many different media platforms — for example, STX Hockey famously would pop into Reddit to just genuinely help people out with gear questions — and, beyond that, it can make people feel attached and that they want to return to seek out your authority and help. 

8. Monitor your performance. 

Just like with pretty much everything we talk about here at Fujisan, you want to be able to tell how you’re, ya know, actually doing, what’s leading to better results or worse, etc. Make sure, to that end, to have UTM parameters set up to measure reach, clicks, and other metrics. 

At the end of the day, LinkedIn Newsletters are just one of many potential tools at your disposal to reach new eyes and, in doing so, show them how your expertise can benefit their own purposes. 

Be consistent in your timing, know what keywords and information people are looking for, and craft a strategy based on your findings that uses these keywords as starting points to make high quality, valuable content for your readers. 

Of course, if you’d like help in that realm (or anything digital marketing!) don’t hesitate to contact us at Fujisan for support on developing and implementing the right strategy.