Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Ella Orr, founder of Much More Social, a social media marketer who helps people who have come out of corporate setting to set up their own businesses to be seen online. And we will be talking about LinkedIn newsletters. Welcome, Ella.
Ella
Oh, I'm delighted to be here with you both. You feel like old friends. It's lovely.
Esther
Called us old.
Ella
Sorry.
Melanie
That's a great start that is, isn't it?
Esther
But we are. We've known Ella for years now through the wonderful network of digital women. So it is just like having a conversation with a friend we've known for ages. And we're excited because we know very little about this topic. Well, I hold my hand up.
Melanie
Oh no, I don't know much.
Esther
about this topic, and it's something that I feel that everyone needs to know about. Ella, first of all, start us off by saying, Why LinkedIn? And what's going on with the platform over there?
Ella
Well, I'm delighted to come onto your show and talk about the wonderful platform LinkedIn, because I know that some people have the real ick about LinkedIn, and they don't get it, they don't understand it. It feels very professional. It feels very corporate. It feels like, I think the most, the main thing for a lot of people is they feel like they can't be themselves on LinkedIn. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is to help people to see that this is just like any other social media. Yes, I said it, social media platform. So I mean, I've been very active on LinkedIn for the last... Since 2018, about 2018, so six years. I started my business round about that time I came from a teaching background, so I thought that LinkedIn was something else. We call it the professional networking platform. I had this idea about what being professional was like on LinkedIn, and it's nothing at all about the way that I think about it now. I think like every other social media platform, it's got its issues, it's got its challenges. Everyone's talking about lack of visibility at the moment and problems with reach, and we're not quite sure what content is working on there. But I certainly think that it's still a professional platform. Of course it is, but it is a place where you can be yourself and you can talk about topics that are going to help you to be seen by your ideal client, which is at the end of the day, what we're all trying to do. We're all trying to get in front of the people who we eventually want to sell to.
Melanie
So do you believe that there is a Facebook-ification that's happening on LinkedIn, or do you think it's still streamlined towards the professional entities?
Ella
I think it's really interesting this definition of what a Facebooking platform is like, what that means. I mean, obviously, back in the day, a few years ago, back in six, seven years ago, when When we were talking about putting pictures of your breakfast on, or this is what I had for lunch, or whatever, I mean, those things. No, I mean, that content doesn't necessarily go down that well on LinkedIn, apart from if you happen to be somebody who works in the nutrition and well-being industry profession. So there will be people... I mean, I know a good friend, I'm I'm not going to mention here, but she works in the... The only reason I'm not going to mention it is because it makes it sound like I'm singling her out as somebody who posts pictures of her food. But she posts pictures of her food to inspire people, to motivate them to eat better, to have good gut health and things like that. So, yeah, there is a certain stream of LinkedIn content, which is probably a bit Facebooky and a bit, people, and spouting their mouth off, saying things before they engage brain and all that thing. But unfortunately, that is the way that human nature is. But I think a lot of people, I mean, the way that I overcame this when I first started going on LinkedIn was because I was seeing that content in my feed, and I thought, I don't want to see this. I don't want to see the bad mouthing, the controversy, the trolling type posts, or the extremely self-promotional posts. I mean, that's why I can see why a lot of people are put off LinkedIn. But you do have to curate your feed. And we talk about this all the time, don't we, on every social platform, is that if you are seeing content in your feed that you don't like, it's boring, it's salesy, it's spammy, or it puts you off because it leaves you feeling very negative, then you need to spend time on the platform telling the algorithm what it is that you actually do want to see. I see great content in my link. Well, great content. I mean, unfortunately, it is a little bit overtly... There's a lot of adverts at the moment, but I am trying to sift through the sponsored posts, of which there's a lot of LinkedIn at the moment, but try and sift through those to get to the personal content, the content of the people who I follow, who's content I want to see. I have a much better experience on there, and I do get into conversations on there. So I think it really is about spending time on the platform and finding the people, finding the topics, finding the areas of interest that are going to keep you on the platform, which at the end of the day is what LinkedIn wants.
Melanie
Well, you actually segued beautifully for me there, Ella. So I don't know if my mind melded with you there briefly.
Ella
It was choreographed, Melanie. It was choreographed.
Melanie
But no, what I wanted to bring up was, as we were mentioning at the very top of the show, that there is a strategy to how we use our marketing. Where LinkedIn newsletters slot in, is that a way of complementing maybe paid ads that you're doing in building awareness? Or can you do ads that send people over to your newsletter on LinkedIn, that thing?
Ella
Yeah, I I think, I mean, you could do that if you wanted to. I mean, I've never really, well, I've never touched the paid side of LinkedIn in terms of ads. I mean, I have got a premium, I am on LinkedIn premium, but I've never gone down promoting my posts in any particular way, promoting my content. But I would definitely say one of the great features about LinkedIn is the newsletters, which historically people always thought of more as maybe LinkedIn articles, that longer form content. You can still publish LinkedIn articles, but the great thing about newsletters is that you will get subscribers to your newsletter. That's a very good metric for you to be able to see who is really interested in you and what you have to say, what your expertise is, where your particular interest lies. It's a way to build up a perhaps a more engaged connected following rather than just posting content out there or publishing an article. That's why I feel like LinkedIn newsletters, if you can get your head into publishing something, which would be like publishing your blog post, but putting it into a LinkedIn newsletter, which then, and this is the great thing, is the first time you publish your LinkedIn newsletter, every person who you are connected to or follows you gets a notification to say that you are publishing a newsletter. That goes out to everybody. So there is an opportunity in that very first fantastic and published That fantastic moment when you do your first LinkedIn newsletter to reach out to everybody and tell people about what your newsletter is about, what they'll get from it, what the advantages will be of them I'm subscribing to your newsletter. Then once people subscribe, they get an email notification. There are notifications that are pushed out by LinkedIn to say that you've published your newsletter. That's something then that's dropping into people's email. They don't actually even need to be on the LinkedIn platform to be subscribed to your LinkedIn newsletter.
Melanie
Cool.
Esther
So that's a way to get people who are already connected to you to subscribe. But how do you get people who aren't connected connected? Maybe they're second or third level connections. How do you get them to connect?
Ella
Well, it's about being visible on LinkedIn in the ways that I always advise to people to, first of all, know about the content that you want to go and consume, because if it's content that you're interested in, you're much more likely to get involved in the conversation. We need to remember that LinkedIn is all about conversations. I don't... I mean, whatever other people might think about, oh, you've got to be... You can go and read. Yes, you can go and read content on there and you can go and put a little like or reaction and all that thing. But it's the conversations that matter because if you're spending time on a platform, it's got to lead to something, and it's never going to to anything. If you're just consuming the content, you're just lurking, as I hear a lot of people use that term, whether or not you like it or not, but it's true, is it LinkedIn lurkers? You've got people who are reacting as well with the different emojis. But the thing is, if you can actually comment on posts, that is immediately going to get you noticed by the person who wrote the post, but it's also going to get you noticed by the person people who are in the comments thread. If you can write a decent comment, not just a thank you, a good, or I really like that, or whatever, but get involved in a conversation. That often depends on the quality of the post. If it's a very salesy post, you're not going to write that comment on a sales post. But if you are going to comment on a conversational post or one that's got a bit of personality in it, something like that, then that's much more likely then for you to and comment, and then people hopefully will go and look at your optimized profile, of course.
Melanie
You mentioned the optimized. Absolutely. Because it's part and parcel of everything else you do on LinkedIn. You're not just meant to just optimize your LinkedIn newsletter and hope for the best. So let's manage expectations here, Ella. So not everybody here is used to doing newsletters. Maybe they're not used to doing email marketing. Or even if they are used to doing email marketing, is this another way of doubling up on email marketing? Where they do the email to people and use the same content in the email to go into their LinkedIn newsletter? And if so, how often should they do the LinkedIn newsletter?
Ella
Yeah, that's a great question, Mel, because the thing is, is that we're in the business, aren't we, of repurposing. So if If your email, your usual email newsletter that you send out to subscribers is your thing, you can always repurpose that content from your email newsletter into your LinkedIn newsletter. So then you're getting a double whammy, really, because you're publishing your your usual Mailerlite, Mailchimp whatever it is, but then you're repurposing that content onto a specific platform. LinkedIn gives you... I mean, I would probably tweet it a little bit, maybe just give some highlights in the LinkedIn newsletter to then try... Because what you want to do is try and get people away from LinkedIn onto your email list. So if you could think of a way that you could just write some headlines from your email newsletter as part of your... That would be the content of your LinkedIn newsletter. And then maybe if there's some events that you're going to, that thing, you could put... I mean, think, think of a structure for your LinkedIn newsletter that complements your email newsletter. And then also making sure that... Or if you've got a blog, you could take snippets from your blog post and put that as a LinkedIn newsletter. What I'm trying to say is you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You really, really don't. You just want to, you want to think about be able to be able to hit all bases So the content that you've got maybe for a particular month, you could repurpose that in your LinkedIn newsletter. So you can publish your LinkedIn newsletter monthly, or you could do it, but you can do it every two weeks, or you can do it every week. You're given the option to do that. And you can almost... I can almost see that if you've got a good chunky blog post, you could publish snippets of that as a LinkedIn newsletter each week. And then you have four LinkedIn newsletters, which are then Google-.
Esther
For one blog.
Ella
For one blog, which are... I mean, then the beautiful thing about this as well is that there is SEO attached to your LinkedIn newsletter. There's much more likelihood of people finding you through a search, a Google search or any search engine through a LinkedIn newsletter than there is through them finding you through other LinkedIn content. And that's why I think the LinkedIn newsletter is really worth looking at. But you do have to... I know for a lot of people it's like, oh, I've got to publish something on LinkedIn. Honestly, if we can get over that hurdle, you'll be running. You will be running. You'll be sprinting to that line and winning the Olympic gold.
Melanie
Can you schedule LinkedIn newsletters? And if so, how far?
Ella
You can, you can, because the thing with your LinkedIn newsletter, so if you go to LinkedIn As if you were going to write an article, when you get that create a post thing that comes up, you want to write something, you're given the option to write an article. When it says write an article, LinkedIn actually presents you with an editing suite where you can actually say, I'm going to write an article or I'm going to write a newsletter. If you're going to write your newsletter, you then... I'll come on to this in a minute because there's something I think there's some ways to really get your newsletter to stand out to people. But when you write your LinkedIn newsletter, you always then have to publish a post with it. So you're scheduling the post which contains the LinkedIn newsletter. You can schedule content on LinkedIn now very, very easily because there's an inbuilt scheduling tool on a LinkedIn platform.
Esther
Do any of the external schedulers work with LinkedIn newsletters, or is it still just all internal within LinkedIn?
Ella
You'd have to use your... You'd have to use LinkedIn. You'd have to use a scheduling tool that obviously works alongside LinkedIn. The I would say, I mean, obviously you've got Hootsuite and Buffer, I think are still the traditional ones that work okay with LinkedIn.
Melanie
Still here.
Ella
Hello. Oh, sorry, my screen just went off. I don't know why my screen's gone off, but there you go. As long as you can schedule posts from the third party tool, you can schedule your newsletter. But I think there's still some debate about reach, because you know, LinkedIn is very funny about third party tools.
Esther
All platforms are, to be honest.
Ella
All platforms are. Yeah. And that's why I'd say, play safe and use the scheduling tool within LinkedIn, which is so, so easy. It's just a little clock down at the bottom of the post and you can just schedule. I don't know. I'm not quite sure how far ahead you can schedule, but you're not going to be wanting to schedule weeks and weeks and weeks in advance with your newsletter. If you're thinking about the way that your content calendar in the way that you create content.
Esther
So you were saying that you can send send out a newsletter every month, every fortnight, every week.
Ella
Yeah, yeah.
Esther
But how often should you send one out? Should you have a newsletter daily or should you have a newsletter four times a week? What expectations do people have when receiving emails and notifications and newsletters? Because as you said, LinkedIn will send them an email, so you are still getting into their inbox. And I don't know about you, but my inbox is quite full of stuff. How often should people publish?
Ella
Well, the least... Sorry, I'm trying to think of the way to phrase this now. You can only go from weekly. Weekly is the minimum. So weekly, so you could only do it once a week. Then you can have twice a month, and then you can do monthly. Now, obviously, some people are, quite understandably, they're busy or they get a bit tired, they get a bit jaded, and they leave their newsletter for months and months, and then they publish another one. I mean, it's the same with email, isn't it? We know that we should be in these routines, but we don't always get into them. But there has been some quite recent... Well, it was a few months ago now, actually, it was about six months ago now. Goodness me, doesn't the year go very quickly?
Melanie
Especially in this podcast.
Ella
Richard Van der Blom, who we saw speaking at Uplift Live, let's give that a shout out on here, the LinkedIn conference that we went to. In his algorithm report that he published, which was about six months ago now, I think that from the findings that he'd done with all the millions of posts that they had analysed, they were saying twice a month is a good cadence to get into publishing your LinkedIn newsletter. Because I think then that drip feeds the newsletter sufficiently without bombarding people every week with a LinkedIn newsletter. But I mean, some people write shorter newsletters and do send them every week. So I think it all depends on how much you feel your audience wants to hear from you.
Esther
And how much time you have to keep up with it as well.
Ella
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for some people, let's face it, if LinkedIn is their only platform and they have got a really engaged LinkedIn audience with 25,000 plus followers and whatever, and a good smattering of connections, then they are just going to speak to their LinkedIn audience all the time through the content channel of this newsletter, which is a... Some people have got incredibly engaged audiences with their newsletter. And they also, dare I say it, ladies, run it alongside a podcast or something like that, or a YouTube channel. So they use the newsletter as another way to get people to listen to their podcast, to get people to their YouTube channel or so forth.
Melanie
I swear this is so weird. This is the second time we've done this. You've done another segue for me because I was sitting here thinking, okay, can you insert a YouTube video or embed an audio file, like a podcast. It still works as effectively. It's not... Yeah? It doesn't affect the algorithm.
Esther
I can see the cog's turning rapidly in her head.
Ella
Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn does that in the newsletter as well, which I think, again, hats off to LinkedIn, because there's some things, I mean, goodness me, dare I say, that technically you think, Oh, it's so clunky with LinkedIn. But with this, I'm a bit disappointed because I do understand that you've lost the... I think you can't post gifs anymore within your newsletter, which I used to like to do to break up the text a little bit. But you can certainly put images in there. You can put Vimeo files, you can put YouTube snippets, you can put audio files. There's quite a lot that you can into your LinkedIn newsletter to give people a little taster to then go to the longer form content that you want to direct them to. I can see Mel's cogs turning.
Melanie
I feel embarrassed now. So is there anything else that we haven't covered? Because remember, we don't know LinkedIn newsletters very well. So is there anything else that our audience should know about, about the capabilities, how to manage it? Can you add editors to it as well, or is it only solely managed by the person who's got the newsletter attached to their profile as well?
Ella
Yes. It's very much your, and I'm going to mention this, your personal brand content. But I was going to say, backtracking a little bit, is really think carefully about what you're going to call your newsletter. So mine is Ella explains personal brand. And that, obviously, it's my name. They know it's me, it's Ella, and they also know that this woman, Ella, is attached to personal brand, which is what I'm all about. I'm a social media marketer who specializes in personal branding. And that's the reason I started my newsletter, because I wanted to have a regular piece of content that signposted people to the that this is what I specialize in. If you want to know about personal branding, come to me, especially if you want to know about personal branding from the point of view of being somebody who's come out of corporate. And basically, you started your business and you're not quite sure about how to get visible on this platform or anywhere else on social media. So make sure that you're... And I would go in, if you're thinking about this, go and do a bit of homework on what other newsletter titles there are out there, because what you don't want is your newsletter to be confused with someone else's, just like the name of your podcast.
I'm sure you thought a long time about what you were going to call your podcast.
Esther
Yes.
Ella
Things like that. Also, obviously, again, the title and the tags and everything, that's also going to be influenced by SEO, so you need to keep that in mind as well. So don't go off on some jazzy tangent thinking, Oh, I've got to come up. I'm going to come up with some really obscure, quirky name, but then also that then SEO is going to get completely confused about. Make sure you've got some clear visuals in there as well. Having a regular... I mean, I try to keep my cover because you add a different cover image to every edition. So I try to make it relevant and enticing. Also, the other thing is think about how your newsletter is going to look on mobile. That's why you need to break up the text with images and little video clips or quotes, things like that, because it's got to read well on mobile. Let's face it, I think 70% of traffic we were told at the Uplift Live conference being read on mobile now. You've got to have all those considerations as well. But you can draft your newsletter That's the other thing I was going to say to you. So if you start it and then leave it for a couple of days, you want to go back to it, all your draughts are kept on your LinkedIn draughts. The other thing I was going to mention is, I have mine as my featured posts. So when people land on my LinkedIn profile, the first content they see is my newsletter, because that's where I want people to go. So if you're proud enough of your newsletter, then make sure that you put it there as your title, your billboard content.
Esther
Yeah, brilliant. So you were saying there that it is your own personal newsletter. So does that mean that only personal profiles can have newsletters or can company pages have them as well?
Ella
Yeah, you can do company page newsletters as well. They're very successful. I have to say, LinkedIn is really pushing, can you believe it, really pushing LinkedIn pages at the moment. They're still not necessarily giving them the visibility But they are... They're not giving LinkedIn... Sorry, the LinkedIn page content visibility, but they are... I feel there is definitely a move to raising the profile of LinkedIn pages. So if you're thinking about, well, we've got a company, we've got a small business, and it's our company page or our LinkedIn page that we want to really focus on, then think about having a LinkedIn page newsletter, again, it works in the same way as you would do for publishing content on your personal profile, and it would really give your company page followers and connections a real great piece of content each month. And again, it could be something that comes from your blog on your company website that then is repurposed to your LinkedIn newsletter. Why not? Go for it.
Esther
Why not? Ella, how can people get in touch with you?
Ella
Well, come and find me on LinkedIn.
Melanie
No, really?
Ella
Ella, much Much More Social. You'll see me because there's a lot of purple As you can see from my wall behind. It's quite a lot of purple on my profile. And yeah, I'd love it. If you came and followed me, please do follow me and connect with me. But please, if you connect with me, tell me that you listen to me on Esther & Mel's podcast. Please do, because I like to know where people have come from, where they've heard about me. I'm really passionate about LinkedIn. I've also got a website, Much More Social, so that's muchmoresocial.co.uk. But please do, as I say, I really am passionate about helping people get to grips with LinkedIn, getting comfortable with it, because honestly, this is still a professional platform. Yes, we want to put our personalities into it. Yes, we want to have conversations with real people. We've got to stop the bots taking over. We've got to be real on these platforms. I have got a lead magnet which is all about creating LinkedIn habits, because I think the more that you can be on the platform, get to know about it, get to know how people comment, get to know the posts that work, get to know about what to do to optimize your profile, Well, honestly, you will feel that you will overcome that fear factor with LinkedIn. So please do, if you want to have details about the lead magnet, if you come and connect with me, I can send you the details of that, but it will mean that you're obviously coming to my email list as well. So I've got a LinkedIn email. I've got a LinkedIn newsletter and I've got my email list as well. But yeah, it'd be It'll be great to get... I just want to get more people comfortable with using LinkedIn.
Melanie
Yeah.
Esther
Brilliant.
Melanie
Well, thank you so much for today, Ella. We grilled you there for a good 30 minutes. But we're just trying to think of all the questions that our listeners may have about the subject. It has been out a while, but it's still quite an underutilized tool. And as you can hear, it's massively useful for search engine optimization. I didn't realize it was so powerful, actually. So let everybody contact Ella Orr at Much More Social. I couldn't believe she kept on calling it her lead magnet. I would personally call it a download.
Ella
Yeah, I know.
Melanie
But it's her lead magnet.
Esther
It's hers. Let her call it whatever she wants.
Melanie
We will be back very soon with another podcast. Say goodbye, guys.
Esther
Goodbye guys.
Ella
Thank you. Lovely to speak to you. Bye.
Melanie
So Esther.
Esther
Yes, Melanie.
Melanie
So now we're doing YouTube videos.
Esther
Yes.
Melanie
LinkedIn newsletters.
Esther
If you say so. Thanks, Ella.
Ella
I knew there was a reason to be here.
Melanie
Oh, my God. It's so true, Ella. It is. God's Honest truth.
Ella
I bring.
