I was already writing one
I recently started a monthly email newsletter of my own. Since I was putting it together anyway, I figured I would also post it in the newsletter area on LinkedIn and see whether anybody followed it there.
It was a small extra step. The same content, one more place to publish it. I expected a handful of subscribers to start. Instead the number jumped in the first day.
LinkedIn invites your whole network
Here is what is going on. When you publish the first edition of a LinkedIn newsletter, LinkedIn invites your connections and followers to subscribe. Its help page on newsletters says that each time you publish the first article in a new newsletter, all of your followers are invited to subscribe to it.
I have over 10,000 connections. So a single first edition put an invitation in front of a very large group of people at once. That is the reach. It has very little to do with the writing, at least on day one.
The invitations keep coming after launch too. LinkedIn's newsletter FAQ says that when someone starts following a member who has a newsletter, LinkedIn automatically sends them a notification inviting them to subscribe.
Every edition goes to subscribers
After that first round, LinkedIn doesn't message your entire network every time. It notifies the people who subscribed. According to the same FAQ, subscribers get push, in app and email notifications whenever a new edition comes out, though LinkedIn avoids sending the same alert on more than one channel.
That matters more than it sounds. A normal post depends on the feed deciding to show it. A newsletter edition shows up as a notification, and often in the inbox, for everyone who opted in.
People actually subscribe to these
This isn't a fringe feature. In October 2023 LinkedIn reported more than 450 million newsletter subscriptions globally, up three times from the year before. In August 2024 it said there were over 184,000 newsletters on the platform, with a 59 percent increase in people publishing newsletter articles over the prior year and a 47 percent rise in engagement with them.
Those numbers tell me professionals are willing to say yes to a newsletter from someone they know. The invite does the heavy lifting. What you write is what keeps them.
If you already write a newsletter, post it there too
I'm new to this, and I'll learn more as I send more editions. But if you already put out an email newsletter, adding it to LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways I have found to reach more people. You have done the writing. LinkedIn handles the invitations.
If you want to talk about LinkedIn business development or fractional leadership, book a networking chat.