A Deep Dive Into Everything You Need To Know About LinkedIn™ Newsletters
I was one of the first people invited to create a LinkedIn™ Newsletter back in the summer of 2020, and have published over 200 of them since then. Here’s everything I have learned in those six years.
LinkedIn™ Newsletters are just LinkedIn™ articles that you promise to publish on a regular basis
The tacit agreement you have with LinkedIn™ is that you publish on a regular basis and in return, LinkedIn™ will notify your subscribers when you publish. I originally indicated I would publish every week when I started. After a while, due to my workload at the time, I dialed back to once every two weeks and even after doing that I would miss weeks every once in a while. I never heard anything back from LinkedIn™. There appears to be no regulation over how often you publish your Newsletter (I have since gone back to publishing weekly).
You have to start from scratch
While all of your connections and followers are notified the first time you publish, if they miss that notification they won’t know you are doing this. While my (then) eight thousand connections and followers were sent notifications when I published the first issue of my Newsletter, they were not subscribers and were not notified again.
Your title and the description of your Newsletter are critical
Your first issue is the only time LinkedIn™ will send these invitations, so you need to make the most of it.
The title and description you choose will either make it clear what your Newsletter will cover, and why it is in the prospective reader’s best interests to subscribe…or it won’t. And you have a lot of Newsletters to compete with.
I receive a dozen invitations to subscribe to new Newsletters every week, and that title and description are what I largely base my decision on.
Research I conducted in 2025 showed that the initial subscription rate for well named and described Newsletters was around 16%. In other words, one out of every six people that are notified should sign up for your Newsletter if you do a good job naming it and making clear what’s in it for your readers.
After that initial slew of subscribers, you will pick up people piecemeal
I don’t know this for a fact but I think the only way that you pick up subscribers after that initial push is for people to see your Newsletter and decide to subscribe to it. In particular, lots of comments will lead to more organic distribution of your Newsletters in people’s feeds, and the opportunity for more people to discover you.
When I first started there was not much competition – there were fewer Newsletter writers, and LinkedIn™ promoted Newsletters – and I was picking up sixty to eighty new subscribers a day. These days? Twenty to thirty a week is more the norm. There is just more competition as more and more people start Newsletters.
Your subscribers get notified when you publish – a huge advantage over other LinkedIn™ content
LinkedIn™ does this via push, in app or email notifications. I have had some people tell me they weren’t notified, but I suspect that is more the exception than the rule. These notifications are a huge advantage over other types of posts that rely on LinkedIn™’s distribution algorithms.
I have thirteen thousand connections and followers. If I publish a post or article, LinkedIn™ will place it in the feed of people that will appreciate it. This could be hundreds or even a thousand people. But if I publish a Newsletter, 100% of my subscribers – all 26,000 of them – will be notified. Not just “have an opportunity to see,” but to be notified.
Why would I ever publish a post on LinkedIn™ again? (I do post occasionally, mostly just to test different ideas, and how my posts do versus my newsletter.)
You can’t see which of your subscribers have read your content, or who has unsubscribed
And you can’t sort your subscribers into sub-lists or further segment them. My visibility into my subscribers is limited to being able to scroll through the list. For people that are used to all the tools you can use to parse your audience with an email Newsletter, this is frustrating. However, this also makes the Newsletter a “true” LinkedIn™ feature, which follows the typical LinkedIn™ formula: Good idea + just enough opaqueness to be irritating.
For each Newsletter, I can view the same statistics we would see for a post or article
The number of reactions, comments, reshares, saves and sends, along with the vague stats on top companies my readers came from, where they are located and their job titles. I wish LinkedIn™ would provide statistics that were more valuable. For example, I would love to be able to see how many of my readers are regular readers.
LinkedIn™ doesn’t really give you any tools to parse your subscribers. I can scroll through the list and that’s it.
Companies can publish Newsletters too
This is a huge opportunity, because once again, anyone who signs up gets notified. I think this feature revolutionizes LinkedIn™ company pages.
Take a company with 600 followers. They publish a company page post and the distribution it gets will be anemic. Maybe 25 impressions. But if they started a Newsletter, and received the 16% sign up rate I mentioned earlier, their 100 subscribers would all be notified. And they would still get the 25 impressions too.
Newsletter “views” are are not like regular views – they’re better
Readers have to click on it to read (view) the Newsletter. I call them better quality views as the click signals intent. Other views on LinkedIn™ – like videos or posts in the feed – are more like impressions than views.
For those types of content, someone on LinkedIn™ could have seen it, but you don’t know if they did or not
Newsletters you subscribe to are shown on your profile
It’s way down at the bottom where you have Groups you belong to, and Companies and People you follow listed.
One interesting facet of this feature is that, unlike Groups you belong to, you do not have the option of hiding individual Newsletters you subscribe to. LinkedIn™ makes it plain in the notice that if you are a subscriber, it will appear.
Okay, so what does this mean?
For us as Newsletter subscribers, there are a couple things to keep in mind.
To my thinking, similar to Groups, your Newsletter list can be viewed as a low key but tacit endorsement of the Newsletters you subscribe to. And your entire list is going to be public. So if you subscribe to a competitor’s Newsletter, that’s going to show up on your profile. This kind of makes me think of the old “People Also Viewed” sidebar, where people can often see who you compete with.
For sales people, the number of Newsletters someone subscribes to might be a good proxy for how active they are on LinkedIn™. This is something I watch, as more active people are more likely to respond to outreach messages.
For Newsletter writers, it’s a possible boon. If you have a thousand people subscribing to your Newsletter, that’s a thousand people listing your Newsletter on their profile.
And then there are the unknowns:
LinkedIn™ mentions that they are making Newsletter subscriptions visible, “including on profiles.” This prompts the question, where else are they going to show them?
Regardless of whether this is the case, you should review your list of Newsletters – you will find them under the “My Network” tab, in the column on the left – and decide if there are any Newsletters you would not like profile visitors to be seeing.
Don’t fall in love with your subscriber number
Because some of them are likely fake profiles. A few years ago I found a company that had hundreds of fake profiles attached to it. The reason I found them was in looking at my latest subscribers I found a dozen really creepy looking people who had all signed up in the past week.
You will leak subscribers
As with any Newsletter, this is normal. Whenever I publish my Newsletter, the first thing that happens is my subscriber number dips by ten or twelve people! My guess is those people get notified of my Newsletter, ask themselves why they signed up for it, and unsubscribe. And that’s fine. Pushing a button to subscribe is about as close to an impulse buy as you can get.
You will also lose subscribers when LinkedIn™ finds fake profiles of “people” who had subscribed and deletes them.
You should invite comments on your Newsletter
Comments help spread your Newsletter to new readers as whatever organic distribution you receive will largely be via people engaging with your Newsletter.
The second half of this recommendation is to set aside time to be available to respond to comments. I publish on Tuesday mornings, and I always make sure I will be around for two or three hours to respond to comments. If someone is going to take the time to read and comment, I want to be there to respond in a timely manner.
You can make your Newsletter one of your featured pieces of content on your profile
Take advantage of it, it’s a good way to get subscribers. Here is what it looks like. Notice that I have last week’s Newsletter on the left and a promo to sign up for the Newsletter on the right.
Invite new readers to subscribe
Make it part of your call to action at the end of each Newsletter – scroll back up and hit the Subscribe Button.
The length of your Newsletter is important. Then again maybe not
Yes it is: lengthier, in depth pieces (like this one) may be more likely to be favored as “expertise” by LLM’s.
No it isn’t: Just my opinion here, but with the proliferation of content and participative options on LinkedIn™ these days – events, posts, articles, video, Newsletters – people do not have time for a ten minute read. They will pass you by as too long, or save you and – maybe – read you later. Attention spans are short. Play to that fact. I think Newsletters that make one point, and do it succinctly, will be the long term winners.
So how do we reconcile being pulled in these two directions? Suggestion: experiment. Find what works for you in terms of the time you have to put in versus the results you get. Maybe a once a month in depth Newsletter is better than four weekly shorter ones.
Start slow and build momentum
From working with a lot of people on their Newsletters (both email Newsletters and LinkedIn™ ones), don’t publish that often to start with and don’t be too long winded.
Newsletters can take a lot of time and effort, and people can burn out or get stressed out meeting a weekly or biweekly “deadline.” I always suggest starting slowly, building confidence, building a routine you are comfortable with, and then increasing your frequency.
Whatever frequency you were thinking of starting with, cut it in half. Publishing a Newsletter every month and then going to two a month? That’s a good look. Publishing twice a month then starting to miss issues, then going to once a month? Not as good a look.
Missing the occasional edition of your Newsletter? Stuff happens, no problem. Missing lots of editions? You have likely overextended yourself.
Subscribe and read other Newsletters
You will get ideas from them. I looked at my list – as I said above, I now subscribe to ninety LinkedIn™ Newsletters – and between them it gives me surprising breadth and depth on the topics I am interested in.
Newsletters are a boon for LinkedIn™ content consumers
As a LinkedIn™ user, Newsletters are the feature that truly allows me to curate and create a feed of content from the people I truly want to follow and whose content I want to be aware of. Having that ability would make me want to invest more time on LinkedIn™ and also get me more involved. I don’t think I am the only person who feels this way.
I have had no problem with including hashtags in my Newsletters
I have watched all the angst and mud slinging the past couple years over hashtags with great amusement. I have included hashtags on my Newsletters for five years. I don’t use hashtags on my regular posts. Guess what the difference is in LinkedIn™’s distribution of my posts? Zero. No difference.
It doesn’t prove anything one way or another, but I would note that every week when I go to schedule my Newsletter, LinkedIn™ asks me to tell my network what this Newsletter is about by adding hashtags.
I have had no problems with adding links either
I have promoted my email Newsletter with a link in every issue for five plus years, all through the hundreds of articles advising “links will hurt you”, which seemed to include everybody but me. Including links has never had an adverse impact on my Newsletter, at least that I can see.
My Newsletter gets the same reach as my posts
No better, no worse. My Newsletter appears to be treated the same as any other content.
Summary
I want you to think of all the angst you have read over the past year about the way the algorithms have changed LinkedIn™, of how content doesn’t get the reach it used to. And what if I told you that there was a way you could ignore all that and get your content in front of the people that want to see it every time.
That is what a LinkedIn™ Newsletter is. If I write and publish a post, I may get 500 hundred impressions. If I publish a newsletter, I still get the 500 impressions, plus all my subscribers get notified.
In my opinion, Newsletters are the best form of content that you can use on LinkedIn™. And it’s not even close.
Of course, I would be remiss if I closed without asking: What has your experience been with Newsletters? What would you add to this list?
