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The TRUE Value of LinkedIn Newsletters | NOW WITH AI
Published December 2, 2022 · 446 views on YouTube
Why are LinkedIn newsletters more valuable than a regular post?
A LinkedIn newsletter reads like a single article rather than a typical post, and it has a longer reach: the first issue goes out to everyone in your contact list, and after that, whenever someone clicks or shares it, it goes into everyone in their list too. That compounding reach is what makes a good newsletter article “rack up” numbers over time in a way a normal post doesn’t.
How do you turn a LinkedIn comment into a newsletter article?
In this conversation, Zachary describes commenting genuinely on other people’s posts and forum threads instead of trying to sell anything. When a comment gets traction (in his example, 40-50 reactions on someone else’s post), he treats that as validation and expands it into a full newsletter article sent to his own audience, testing whether his people respond to the same idea.
Is writing LinkedIn content worth the time investment?
The speakers frame this as a time-allocation question more than a content question. Before using Jasper, Zachary says he dreaded writing LinkedIn articles because consistency is hard, and unlike other platforms, LinkedIn audiences don’t want to hear from the same person three or four times a day. His view: crank out a newsletter article in roughly 15-20 minutes, and spend the time you save on direct, one-on-one conversations with customers to find out “where people’s values are” — since what people value can change week to week.
This video is a short use-case conversation, not a step-by-step tutorial. It captures Zachary sharing how he approaches LinkedIn newsletters at the AI Author Scale with AI Summit, including how AI (Jasper) changed his article-writing process.
Full video transcript
So a newsletter is basically just a single article. It’s not like what we think of as an email newsletter — it’s like an article. The thing is that it has a longer reach: you can get to more people. The first time you put one out, it’ll go to everyone in your contact list. After that, then you have to work for it, getting additional subscribers. But when people click on it, then it’ll go into everyone in their list. So you put out a good article and the numbers can really rack up.
This is certainly a cool way to approach the article-writing process. With this newsletter, I think as a whole there’s room for a whole separate call and training on how to grow a newsletter once you have it. And just like recapping where we’re at here — this is obviously a demo we’re walking through, talking through it — my bet is that you can crank out one of these articles in what, 15-20 minutes on a good day?
Maybe something, yeah, easily. Yeah, easily. And that’s one of the things I found: it’s really not worth the effort to spend a day actually talking to someone, trying to get into a conversation with someone. That’s where I want to spend my time — talking to the customer, getting into a conversation. I call it value discovery. I’m trying to figure out what is it they value. John Vincent talks about one of his wants as a value — you really want to get in there and understand value, and then how values change, because people found it valuable last week, you go back and talk to them and find out they don’t find the same things valuable the next week. That’s an opportunity I don’t want to miss every time.
Oh, okay, so now you think about it that way — so that’s where I want to spend my time. But the newsletters are a great way to reach people, and they work with the comment. You’re already in the conversation because you added a comment — you were in a conversation, you were looking at someone’s post, you were in a forum, and you’ve actually found someone that didn’t try to sell you something, and you commented on that. They had a question and you commented on it, they had a thought — “hey, this is what I’m thinking” — and you commented on it. You’re in the conversation now. How do you leverage that? Take it and say, okay, now I’m going to put it into an article. It had legs before — maybe I got 40 or 50 on the comment, but that was someone else’s group. Now let me take that comment, turn it into an article, and send it out to my people and see if they feel the same way. If they do, now I’ve got something I can run with.
Oh, very cool. So it’s a great example of you taking what’s working in terms of social proof, and then validating that it’s worth your time to even spend the 20 minutes to write an article on it. But now, once you write the article, you’re tapping into LinkedIn’s social platform and their reach.
Yeah, there are people who are not putting up websites anymore — they are just doing LinkedIn, especially if you’re in a referral business. LinkedIn provides you everything you need: someone refers someone to you, they can get on LinkedIn, they can see your profile, they can see what you’ve done, they can see what other people think about what you’ve done, and they call, and now let’s do some business. So LinkedIn is where the people are who want to hire you. If you’ve got a title, you’re on LinkedIn — showing up every day maybe not, but you’re there, and there are ways to get to people on LinkedIn.
I never used to write articles before Jasper. I’m curious — how long did it take you to come up with articles and such on LinkedIn before you were using Jasper? Can you tell us a little bit about where your process is at now versus how it changed in your own content production?
I just — let’s just say I dreaded it. I was like, man, this is such a time sink, because consistency is a thing, and LinkedIn is different than most social sites because people on LinkedIn don’t want to hear from you three or four times a day. If you do that, then they will turn you off — you can say “don’t send me this person’s content.” It’s very specifically all about the customer, LinkedIn’s customer. But you don’t want to spend a lot of time, because you can contact people daily and you can contact a hundred people a week, but you’ll actually reach more people with the newsletter, being smarter with what we’re spending our time on.
And then, like you said, I think you hit the nail on the head with it’s about the relationships and the conversations you’re having one-on-one to find out where are people’s values at, where do you need to provide more value, more content, improve your service, bring your service to people. Really cool example — again, use case — and thank you so much, Zachary, for sharing that with us here, and everyone, at the AI Author Scale with AI Summit.