Why You Should Do a LinkedIn Newsletter, with Adam Houlahan, Prominence Global

John Ray: [00:00:05] And hello again, everyone. I’m John Ray on the Price and Value Journey. Today, we’re going to talk about whether and why you should have a LinkedIn newsletter. It’s a rather narrow topic, but one that I got interested in, thanks to Adam Houlahan.

Adam is an international keynote speaker who specializes in LinkedIn strategies for entrepreneurs, and he’s the CEO of the highly successful LinkedIn agency Prominence Global. He hosts arguably the world’s largest free online training event, with thousands of people registering every ten weeks. And he’s considered to be one of Australia’s leading experts in harnessing the power of LinkedIn for business. I think it’s beyond Australia, but that’s just my opinion.

Adam is also the author of three Amazon bestselling books, Social Media Secret Sauce, which I have not read, but I have read the LinkedIn Playbook and Influencer, both of which I recommend. Adam co-authored a fourth international bestseller called Better Business, Better Life, Better World. And that comes from his belief that real and meaningful change comes through the world’s entrepreneurs. His purpose is to positively impact 12 million people in need, and he has surpassed 10 million on the way to that target. Wow. Adam, thank you for coming on the show.

Adam Houlahan: [00:01:36] John, it’s an absolute pleasure and really looking forward to today.

John Ray: [00:01:40] Yeah. Thank you so much. And thank you again for your work. And before we get into LinkedIn, though, I want to just give you a shout out for your work here on the positive impact you’re trying to make on a worldwide basis. So describe that for everyone so they know exactly what we’re talking about.

Adam Houlahan: [00:01:59] Yeah, sure. I think it’s one of those things, John, that all of us, small to medium sized business owners understand. Our governments aren’t really going to make a significant change in the world, and it’s up to us to do what we can to effect that change. And right from day one, when we started Prominence Global, we had an alignment with an organization called B1G1.

And through those guys, we make sure that everything we do, so every, like you mentioned, the events that we host, every time someone comes to one of those events, we make sure a child gets access to a day’s education. When people join some of our programs, we build wells for families, so they’ve got access to drinking water. All those types of things, lots of great things, environmental things, all aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

So we feel like we’re just doing our little bit to make a bit of an impact in achieving that Sustainable Development Goals on time in 2030.

John Ray: [00:02:57] Thank you for that. And I would encourage those of you listeners who are interested, go to the Prominence Global website. You can see it all detailed there and see it all counting almost live. So it’s pretty cool. So thank you for that work, Adam. Yeah.

So let’s get into talking about Prominence Global, specifically in terms of your LinkedIn expertise and how you’re serving entrepreneurs and executives that want to amp up their LinkedIn presence.

Adam Houlahan: [00:03:30] Sure. And like you mentioned at the start, John, yeah, today we’re mostly talking about a very niche topic of newsletters for LinkedIn, as LinkedIn is a multi-faceted platform, serves lots of different needs. Again, as far as us as an agency, we’re very niche. We don’t work with sales teams or people looking for new jobs or people recruiting for jobs, that type of thing.

We very much focus on how business owners or leaders can use LinkedIn to create a really highly engaged personal brand and how they use that personal brand to then generate new business and revenue for their businesses. Very, very niche within the big sphere of what LinkedIn can do.

John Ray: [00:04:13] Yeah. And you’re pretty tied in to LinkedIn in terms of the features that are coming and knowing a lot about kind of what the architecture of LinkedIn and what their overall business strategy is, which gives you an advantage, right?

Adam Houlahan: [00:04:32] It’s something we choose to make sure we keep on top of. Within our team, we have a team that that’s all they do. They just continually monitor all the changes. LinkedIn, you might be surprised, John, we’re like, what, halfway through 2023 and there’s been almost 90 updates to the platform already. The only thing is LinkedIn doesn’t come out and tell us all about them. They create these new tools and things and then leave us all to work it out for ourselves.

So yeah, we see it as a great, great way to just keep the LinkedIn community updated on those changes. And that’s what those events are about, is there’s enough changes every ten weeks to host an event that lots of people choose to come along to.

John Ray: [00:05:14] Yeah, for sure. So as you mentioned, this is a pretty niche topic. And here’s the irony of the topic. I got — I’m a subscriber to your newsletter. I got interested in the topic in part because of your newsletter. One of which was should I have a LinkedIn newsletter? So let’s talk.

And there were some interesting points in that made me think this would make a really good topic for this audience of solo and small professional services providers to hear about LinkedIn newsletters. but let’s do some definitions before we dive in further detail. So what’s the difference between a regular post and a LinkedIn newsletter?

Adam Houlahan: [00:06:02] Yeah. It’s a great question. Good place to start. So think of it like your normal status post, which is probably if you’re checking through your feed, that’s what you’re going to see the most of. And that will consist of might be a short bit of text-based content with maybe an image attached. It might be like a video, a bit of copy attached. It’s all fairly short form content.

A newsletter is different in two important ways. One, it’s actually long form content. So as far as your audience, there’s some of them that like just that short, punchy bite size content and then when they really buy into what you or your business is about, they will definitely be interested in a longer form of article and just you have a blog on your website. They’re going to be somewhere in that 800 to 1200 words, and your newsletter on LinkedIn can be exactly the same. It can be longer, John, but I wouldn’t go longer than that. That’s probably about the sweet spot for them.

Second really important part, as you just mentioned, you subscribe to my newsletter. So people can actually, apart from just being connected with you on LinkedIn, they can actually subscribe to that newsletter. And that means that whenever you upload a new article, they’re going to get notified in their notifications on LinkedIn, but also by email that you’ve released something new. And of course, the visibility of people engaging on that as a general rule is always higher.

John Ray: [00:07:34] Yeah. And so are there any particular individuals, professions that should have a LinkedIn newsletter? Are there some that shouldn’t even worry about it? Let’s qualify those that really ought to have one.

Adam Houlahan: [00:07:50] Yeah. Basically, if you’re going to share content on LinkedIn, and I should preface that by saying high value, highly niched content. So there’s a lot of people that — just to maybe give you some rough numbers, John. Current, we’re coming close to 950 million members on LinkedIn right now. Of that 950 million, only one percent share content on a regular basis. By regular, say, once a week.

But only one percent of that one percent create content that’s niched within a very narrow field of expertise and that’s the content LinkedIn really likes. They want you to create content that just stays in the narrow lane because it makes it really easy for them to know who in the link of those 950 million people likely to be interested in it.

And that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to get our newsfeeds filled with the type of content we really like. Newsletters give a lot of signals to LinkedIn as to how engaged you are on that content, and that allows them to organically show that content under the right circumstances to a much wider audience than maybe just your first-degree connections or the subscribers to your newsletter.

John Ray: [00:09:07] Yeah. And before I started, in part because of the newsletter you wrote about LinkedIn newsletters before, I’ve had a newsletter now for, I guess, five or six editions. I went and looked at a lot of them and they vary widely in terms of quality, like anything else. So let’s talk about that. What makes for a high quality LinkedIn newsletter?

Adam Houlahan: [00:09:36] Yeah, it’s a good question. So the first part is it’s just copywriting 101. Good headline, good imagery, things that capture people’s attention. And then, as I said, probably something in that 800 to 1200 word count. If you make it too short, then of course, you’re not providing the value that a newsletter is able to provide, which is that deeper insight onto a topic. Go too long and, of course, people get a little turned off. Staying somewhere in that 800-to-1200-word character count, word count I should say, a few visual, exactly the same as you do on your own personal blog. You’re going to have a few images that highlight the points.

And the most important thing always, John, is a call to action at the end of it, give people a next step that they should take. And as on the end of those, we will say, look, here’s a few other ways we can help you and links off to other resources that just like these events that we run and other free resources that people can go and consume.

And of course people, if they’ve enjoyed or found value in the content that you’ve shared, then they’re very likely to want to know more and go deeper into what it is that you offer. And I’m sure we’ve all heard the old 711 principle of seven people need to have at least seven touch points and probably 11 hours of content sort of thing before they’re really invested in you and who you are. So the more you can get people engaging off one piece of content into another, the more you deepen that know like trust factor that people tend to have in you.

John Ray: [00:11:12] For sure. Now, Adam when you — the term high quality, I guess, is a term that everybody’s got their own opinion of what high quality is, right? So I think what — and this is a question. I think what you’re getting at is it’s not the place to put a press release. It’s not the place to put something that’s something less than generously helpful content, right? It’s not the promotional piece of it, if you want to call a call to action, promotional is at the very end where if people want to engage with that, they can, but you lead with what’s helpful.

Adam Houlahan: [00:11:54] Oh, exactly. And further to that, John, is probably more high value, probably a way we could, a better way we could say that is highly niched. And if I use my letter as an example and as I mentioned earlier, we don’t have solutions for people using LinkedIn for job search or recruitment or all those other things that the platform can do.

So none of our content is ever talking about those things. We serve the smallest small to medium business owners who use that platform for personal branding and lead generation. And so our content just always stays in that lane. So that’s probably a better way of saying high value is highly niched.

John Ray: [00:12:38] Yeah. It’s like in your case too, it’s not confusing. I mean, if you did a post on or a newsletter on Instagram influencers, that would throw everybody off, right? What’s Adam doing here?

Adam Houlahan: [00:12:50] Exactly. And we all probably are on multiple platforms, but I never profess to be an expert or know a lot about Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or any other platforms. I know how to leverage LinkedIn really well, and that’s why I just stay in that lane. And I never, newsletters or any other content for that matter, ever talk about anything other than how you can get as a small to medium business owner, how you can get value out of the LinkedIn platform.

John Ray: [00:13:18] So I’m sure there are a lot of folks that listen to this conversation and wonder, hey, I’ve got an existing newsletter. It seems like people are reading it. Why should I start a LinkedIn newsletter?

Adam Houlahan: [00:13:35] Yeah. So you most likely should and should have a newsletter or blog or whatever on your website. But your — and you can definitely have like one newsletter on your personal profile on LinkedIn and you can also have one on your company profile. If there’s a reason for you to ever need to talk about more than one thing, that’s how you can split that into two different topics.

But the reality is there’s a certain market that knows how to find and interact on your personal newsletter or your blog, and you’ve got a whole another LinkedIn community who most likely there will be some crossover, of course, but the high majority of them probably never go to your website or your blog for that matter. So you’re just exposing information, good information to a whole new audience.

John Ray: [00:14:25] And let’s say I decide I want to get started. Do I need a certain number of followers to make it work or a certain amount of reach? When should I start?

Adam Houlahan: [00:14:39] John, it’s a wonderful old saying is when was the best time to start? It’s probably like three years ago. When’s the next best time to start? Today. If we wait until all the ducks are aligned, we’ll never get started. So the point being, yes, obviously, if you had more followers or whatever, then it’s going to get more immediate impact. But it doesn’t mean to say if you don’t have a lot of followers, you shouldn’t start one today.

One little thing you should know, or your audience should know is that when the very first time you create your newsletter on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will send a notification to everybody you’re connected to on LinkedIn and say, “Hey, Adam. John’s just started a new newsletter about this. Would you like to subscribe to it?” So they give you this one off nice little boost of visibility. So you’ll pretty much guarantee that you’re going to get a few followers right out of the gate.

The second thing is, now, this wasn’t the case when they first started, but all new people that follow or connect with you from now on also get that, not a mass one like the very first one, but individual by individual. You get an invitation from LinkedIn to follow your newsletter if they’re following you or following you. So you will build a following.

Now, of course, what that really should be a red flag to everyone is make sure that very first newsletter that you put out is your best stuff because that’s the first one people are going to see and where you’ll get this influx of new people.

We’ve had some of our clients, John, and in fairness they probably have 10,000 connections or whatever on LinkedIn or maybe more. And when we help them first launch their new newsletter, got 1500 to 3000 followers to that newsletter within seven days. And that’s because of LinkedIn doing that initial big push for you.

John Ray: [00:16:34] Yeah, that’s fantastic. And by definition, they opt in, so everyone opts in. Unlike folks, your email newsletter, which may or may not have opt ins. Let’s be honest about this. You may be emailing folks that really didn’t ask to be put on your email list, but LinkedIn does not allow that.

Adam Houlahan: [00:17:01] No, they don’t. And so that’s the thing that people that opt in for your newsletter, they’ve made a willing decision to do that. As the author of your newsletter, you kind of have an obligation to serve those followers in a powerful way. I see it personally. I see it as an absolute privilege to be able to have people want to follow my newsletter and engage on that content. I’ll be honest, John, it just inspires me to give them my best stuff and that’s where they’ll always find it.

John Ray: [00:17:30] Yeah. And how often do you do your newsletters? Biweekly, is that correct?

Adam Houlahan: [00:17:35] Yeah, biweekly. Look, there’s no right or wrong. There is a wrong, it’s never. And I think to be honest, John, I feel once a week is actually too much for a long content. I think biweek — look, this is just my personal opinion. I think biweekly is the best cadence.

However, I’ll be fair, I’d say that’s one of those questions you could ask 10 different experts and get 11 different responses. But in my opinion about biweekly is a good cadence for that good long. And keep in mind that there’s a bit of work in putting together a good quality piece of information like that. So don’t put a noose around your neck of having to create that every single week.

John Ray: [00:18:12] Yeah, for sure. Now, in making that decision, does it make a difference in terms of how often you post? Would that play into how often you do a newsletter? In other words, you’re posting every day, right? Or every weekday? What’s your cadence on posting generally?

Adam Houlahan: [00:18:32] Yep. So again, our sort of recommendation and what all of our clients work to and we do as well is three times per week. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And on a calendar month, John, that’s 13 pieces of content. And so two of those are going to be newsletters. So we don’t add more. We just have that as part of our overall 13 pieces of content that we share every month.

John Ray: [00:18:57] Gotcha. Gotcha. And but the most important thing I take it is not the number, it’s the consistency.

Adam Houlahan: [00:19:07] A hundred percent. That’s it. Consistency wins every single time. I would rather see people start with once per month and then build that up to biweekly when it suits. Equally with the rest of their content. So when we say three times per week, we don’t necessarily say start, try and start there. Start at once per week. And then when you’ve got a bit of a rhythm around that, then you can move to twice a week and then eventually three.

But the key thing is, what a big mistake I often see made is people come out of the gate really hard, find it’s really hard to maintain that and then become inconsistent. And it’s very interesting. I wanna share a very quick story with you, John. I was in a meeting on the weekend just gone down in Melbourne, which is a couple of hours flight from where I live.

And one of the people that was there said, oh, by the way, I got a message from someone the other day because I normally post a video on a Friday and I was getting ready for this meeting and I forgot to post it and I got a message saying, oh, I was looking out for your video because I know you post every Friday.

So if you start creating really good content, people will know the cadence of where you post it. Now, some people will love your newsletter, some people will love your videos, some people will love your other content. Rarely will they love all of it. Sometimes they do, but they will know the cadence of your newsletter. And if you start getting inconsistent, then their desire to keep interacting on it will drop away.

John Ray: [00:20:39] Let’s talk about the interplay between if you have an email newsletter now, your blog, and your LinkedIn newsletter. So should you repurpose the content that you are already developing for your blog? Or even more importantly, your email newsletter? Can you put that both places?

Adam Houlahan: [00:21:01] Yeah, 100 percent. Again, remember, you probably have different audiences that consume that content in different places, so not all of your LinkedIn audience are going to see your newsletter. Not all of your email database are going to see all of your email newsletters or your blog. So a good way — you’re going to take a bit of effort to create a good quality newsletter. So by all means, repurpose it across a couple of channels.

Now the key thing there, John, is you probably say, for example, what we do is we’ll post it onto our company blog first. And then a month or so later, we will repurpose it onto our LinkedIn newsletters. So don’t post them at the same time. There’s a bit of a SEO play there as well, so it’s okay to repurpose it. Just give it a good four to six weeks in between different platforms.

John Ray: [00:21:53] Got it. And are LinkedIn newsletters indexed, speaking of SEO, indexed by Google? And are there any preferences that Google has toward LinkedIn newsletters versus post?

Adam Houlahan: [00:22:07] Yeah, 100 percent. They will index on Google and every piece of content that you create on LinkedIn now has its own unique URL. So part of that is the reason for indexation. So yeah, look, definitely because your newsletter is long form, it is going to index better than your standard posts because as hopefully your audience knows, Google has a preference for longer form content than really short punchy stuff.

So yeah, one, yes, it will index. And two, it will index better than your other content because of its longer form, which is again one of those reasons why you don’t want to go short. Don’t short your newsletter, so to speak. Give it enough algorithmic juice so that Google wants to index it.

John Ray: [00:22:56] Yeah. So how do I know that my newsletter is resonating with my target audience, this niche that I’ve put a flag in, if you will, for myself?

Adam Houlahan: [00:23:07] Yeah, it’s pretty reasonably easy. One, you’ll see that, month after month, your people subscribing to the newsletter will grow. And of course, part of that growth comes to promotion as well. So one, when you put out your newsletter, it is getting seen by not only your subscribers, but people will come across it in your feed. And you might want to, if you’re doing some email marketing, you certainly want to at times share about a link to your newsletter, that type of thing. But growth in subscribers is one way to tell that.

The second is, of course, LinkedIn will give you some analytics on that. It’ll show you how many impressions, how many people have liked it or comment on it or shared it. So just, you would gauge that by the growth in those things. To be honest, I don’t get too concerned about likes and shares. LinkedIn is not a big lover of shared content because it’s already on the platform.

Now, having said that, it’s no downside to us if people share our content, it’s great, but the real metrics you want to follow is the subscriber rate that that’s growing. And what I really follow is the number of people that are interacting on the newsletter and like commenting on it and leaving their opinions.

To me, that’s the biggest indicator of anything, is if people are starting to interact on your content by going out of their way to leave their views or thanking you for sharing it or whatever. That’s one of the best indicators for sure.

John Ray: [00:24:35] One of the things — I think I’m hearing a lot of things here, which is very helpful. Thank you. But one of the things that strikes me, Adam, is I think a lot of people have the notion because they get an invitation to a newsletter pretty frequently right now. Is that, hey, there are so many newsletters around, right, why should I start one? And the stats that you quoted right at the top of this episode would indicate there’s still a lot of folks that may never do a newsletter a lot more than or doing one.

Adam Houlahan: [00:25:12] Oh, 100 percent. That’s definitely right. LinkedIn’s own goals are to have about 3 billion members on the platform, so they’re only about A one-third of the way there themselves. So it’s like I said, when was the best time? A little while ago. When’s the next best time? Today. Yeah, just start.

John Ray: [00:25:29] Yeah, for sure. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to just talk in general about what you’re seeing on LinkedIn today, what some of the things that people need to pay particular attention to. I noticed you were talking about some enhancements to Sales Navigator that were pretty interesting. But talk about what’s on your mind these days and what you’re sharing with your clients about LinkedIn.

Adam Houlahan: [00:25:57] Yeah, look, it’s a never ending learning curve. There’s no doubt about that. Though, having said that, obviously those changes transcend all parts of LinkedIn. So you don’t need to be staying across all of those 90 changes that have happened in the last six months. But the things to really focus on is I think the most important thing is to start with an end goal.

Why are you on the platform? What is it you want to do? Who is it you want to be interacting with? And do you want to be seen as a marketer or as a, the term we like to use, John, is a sage. The term most people use is thought leader. I think that term is a little overdone these days. And but the reality is, I think the real value is to be seen as that real authority within your field of expertise.

You don’t have to dominate the whole LinkedIn platform. You don’t have to be Gary Vaynerchuk or Elon Musk or those people who transcend all audiences. You just need to be known and liked and trusted within your area of expertise. And if you can do that job done and LinkedIn wants to help you do that and how they help you, that is still LinkedIn probably gives better organic traction on content than any other platform as long as you understand the rules, so to speak. And if you stick by them.

In simple terms, what that rule is stay very, very niche. Don’t be trying to talk about all things to all people, and that helps LinkedIn to understand who’s your audience. Remember, they know a lot of information about all of us, so they know what you’re interested in. They want to give you content in your feed that is really interesting to you, where what might be in my feed would be completely different to yours.

And that’s okay, because if we’re all getting fed the information that we like and enjoy, we’re more likely to stay on the platform. So the end goal, in my opinion, is to align with LinkedIn’s goals. If you can align your goals with theirs, then it’s a win-win. And LinkedIn is very good at supporting those who support them, if that makes sense.

John Ray: [00:28:10] No, it makes perfect sense. And just to encourage those folks out there that really have not participated on LinkedIn, it occurs to me back to the newsletters that starting a newsletter may be a great way to put your toe in the water. If you’re already developing content for an email newsletter, why not get your toe in the water and start a newsletter on LinkedIn and see where it goes?

Adam Houlahan: [00:28:35] Absolutely, John. The other thing is that, and this is a reasonably new release from LinkedIn, is that you can actually schedule your newsletter. So around consistency, you don’t have to — there’s a little bit of work in formatting your email newsletter or your blog, and it’s the same on LinkedIn. But you can do that in advance, and you can schedule it so that — let’s say you’re doing it biweekly.

You can say, I want this to go out on exactly this time and this day in the future. And so that’s how you can keep that consistency and your audience knows, gets to know when you’re going to post. I think it literally has only been available — by the way, you can do that for all your other content types on LinkedIn as well, but only very new in the last month or so where you’ve been able to do it for newsletters.

John Ray: [00:29:22] We’re getting to the end of this interview, and I want to give you a chance for a call to action. So talk about what you’ve got going right now that our listeners might want to know about and might want to dive into and learn more about you and your work, how you can help them.

Adam Houlahan: [00:29:38] Sure. There’s two things, really easy. Either go to our website, which is prominence.global or just follow me on LinkedIn. That’s where we’re always going to let you know when we’ve put out, we have lots of free events and things where we just love to help the LinkedIn community. There’s literally probably almost one every month of different formats, but we’ll always let you know if you’re following us on there. And that’s the easiest way to make sure that you stay up to date with every, not every single change that’s happening on LinkedIn, but the important ones relative to small to medium business owners.

John Ray: [00:30:15] Terrific. Adam Houlahan from Prominence Global. Adam, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and share your expertise. We appreciate you. And again, I encourage everyone out there to follow you.

Adam Houlahan: [00:30:28] Thank you, John. As I said, it’s an absolute pleasure to be with you again today. And I look forward to doing it again sometime very soon.

John Ray: [00:30:36] Something tells me we’ll have a reason to — LinkedIn will give us a reason to, right?

Adam Houlahan: [00:30:41] For sure.

John Ray: [00:30:41] Yeah, for sure. Thank you again. And folks, just a quick reminder as we wrap up here, that if you want to know more information on this podcast, this series, go to pricevaluejourney.com. You can find our show archive there. You can also, of course, find it on your favorite podcast app.

And you can also sign up to receive updates on a book I have coming out this year. I’m trying to catch up with Adam, 2023, later in 2023. It’s called The Price and Value Journey, Raising Your Confidence, Your Value and Your Prices Using the Generosity Mindset Method. If you want to know more about that book that’s coming and I’m featuring some little pieces on that in my email newsletter, by the way, go check it out.

So for my guest, Adam Houlahan, I’m John Ray. Join us next time on the Price and Value Journey.