How To Promote Your Podcast Using LinkedIn Newsletter And Smart Links

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works Today. Get ready to finish Feed your Brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone, welcome to our Feed your Brand masterclass and that's what we are occasionally doing now. Sometimes masterclasses are longer than others. This one's not going to be super long, but it's very focused on a really specific topic. So we're focusing today on how to promote your podcast using LinkedIn newsletter and and LinkedIn smart links. So those are both aspects kind of, I'm going to call them advanced tactics in LinkedIn. These are not for the newbies to LinkedIn. If you're just brand new, you've never used LinkedIn before. Don't start with this. Start getting used to LinkedIn. Get yourself making connections, figure out how it works. Make sure you have a general posting schedule, like all of that still needs to be in place. Running behind the scenes so just to explain how I've had my LinkedIn for over a decade, I have well over, I don't know, 8, 10,000 somewhere in their followers or connections, which is what you call them in LinkedIn. And through that process I nurture that all the time. And I'm really selective about who I accept as a connection request. They must either be a first or a second or a group connection. I don't do third connections, I don't do random reach outs, I don't accept them. And if they have anything promotional in their name title, I just, I don't even accept them. I reject them outright. And so just to understand how advanced user I am, I check my LinkedIn twice a day, every single day, morning and evening. And mostly I'm checking my messages, not necessarily my post. And we do have a posting schedule that's done by our social media team that's posting through. Sometimes we used to use buffer meet egger. We've used both of those before and now we use lately AI, which is quite expensive, but it has different reasons for us doing it. Whatever you do when you post through LinkedIn, you want to do it consistently and constantly and you want to pay attention to the things that are happening there. And what we discovered when we were posting is that sometimes the posts had calls to action or click out links, right? I wanted to share a PDF with them, I wanted to share my podcast with them, I wanted to share a link out for them. And when we did that, it wasn't getting the click through, it wasn't getting the circulation, it wasn't doing what we thought it would do. So if we did a post without a link out, it would get three to five times more views, comments, engagement, more push out from the LinkedIn system than it was if we added an external link. Now we could go and do one step further, which is we make a post and we put that link in the comments, which we do. And that's a good way to go.

Here's what we discovered. There's something called smart links. Now, you do have to be a member of LinkedIn Navigator. So you do have to have a Premium subscription for LinkedIn and you have to have the highest level of premium subscription. So I believe that's $149 or something like that. So I'm going to show you where that is and how to turn that on. So I'm going to share my screen. So if you're listening to this on the podcast, you're going to want to see screenshots. You're going to want to go to the blog post for this episode@potatoes.com or you're going to want to go to YouTube to poditize this channel and check out the video. So once you have Sales Navigator, once you've signed up for it and you're in it and you have it, you can see there's a menu up at the top. Smart links won't appear if you have the wrong level of LinkedIn Navigator. So if you don't have the top level, the premium version, then you won't get this Smart links. But when you click on the smart links and you can see we have a lot. We've been doing this a while, but we have some where we are just loading them in. They're prepping for episodes that are coming or posts that are going to be happening because we do this way ahead of time. So here's where I'm going to get you. So what we do is we create a new smart link. Super simple. We put the title that we want visible to recipients. I'm just going to copy and paste the title we have here. This is the title for this episode. You can add the content which is the file or the website. In this case, I'm going to just put potatoes Feed your brand boy, I can't spell today. Feed your brand or I can't type, maybe that's more of the case. And then we would just add that we can enable the recipient to download viewable files. So if I put a PDF here, we could make them able to download it. Not just view it, but download it. And then you click Create. I'm not going to click Create here because we aren't doing this one. I'm just discard it. But this is what it looks like. So I'm going to give you one and show you what it looks like. So it says this host will give you insider tips on how to make co hosting fun and harmonious. This is Julie Loken. It's a podcast episode I did with her and it gives you all the details for how to reach that. It's the host will give you inside it and it's going straight through. If I were to click on that or in this case and I can't do it from inside the smartlink, but once I'm outside of it, I can. It'll click on it and it'll share everything that's on that page, but it's going to share it from within LinkedIn. So if I copy the link, you can see this is the LinkedIn link. It says LinkedIn Smart Dash links a H, a Q H. And it's got a bunch of things. This is what it looks like. So it's giving me a page within LinkedIn that is showing this blog post that's there and I can click out to that blog post, but it's sending them within LinkedIn to do it. And I know this seems like an extra step and all of those things, but LinkedIn loves this. They love this. Why? Because you're staying within LinkedIn. So now if I click on this, I go out to the post and I'll be able to get to that. So LinkedIn just really approves of this. And so what happens is, is that when somebody accesses it, right, he clicked on this for 19 seconds and when he clicked on it, he went out and then to the blog. I now know actually who. It's not just a person, a random web address that went out and it came through my Google Analytics. I actually know who saw it on LinkedIn and who clicked on it and who went to go use that. And so that's why the smart link is so valuable. It's like doing a referring URL, but you're doing it within LinkedIn and LinkedIn is rewarding you for doing it. So what does this look like? So I'm going to show you. And first off, you also, as we were going to Talk about the LinkedIn newsletter, I'm going to show you this because it's in the same place. So I'm going to go to my profile on LinkedIn and I'm going to click down here and you're going to see suggested for you analytics resources. This is one thing that you want to make sure. Make sure in your resources creator mode is turned on. It will show here, but it will say off. You can turn this on. It doesn't have anything to do with what you paid for LinkedIn. You can turn it on. You go here you. It would be available. So see newsletters and LinkedIn Live is available because the creator hub is available. So you're going to want to know that. Definitely turn that on. That's going to make a difference. And so if I want to see any of my posts, I'm going to go down to activities, right? And I'm going to see the posts that were created here. So I know that this one, this one particular one was just posted a day ago. So it's relatively new post, but it's posted, it has Mark Hirschberg, who is my guest on there, it has a quote from him and you can see there's no links in here. It's down in the comments. And so actually it's not. It's because it's right here. Sorry. It's attached as a visual. And so if I clicked on this, it's going to take me to the newsletter. So let me find another one that's not a newsletter for you. That would be find one that's not a newsletter. But this. Okay, this one I believe has one. Yep. So here's that LinkedIn link. So there's a video attached here that is a little video clip of Alexandra and Cody doing their millennial episode. And this is the link to the episode to learn more. Remember, this is what it looks like. So now this is what it looks like. If I'm sharing the podcast episode is it doesn't have the wide one, it happens to have the square. That's just how we share it and it sends them out to the link. So this whole tracking is going on within the system and what happens is, is post start to get more and more visibility. Now keep in mind that these were just posted, so they're relatively new in the process. And so that's how it simply works is we're going to insert those links as if we had a bitly link as if we had any kind of trackable tracking link. But LinkedIn is doing all the tracking work for us and they're showing us exactly who's seen it from our LinkedIn connection network.

So what is a LinkedIn newsletter? And so let's see, if I go home here and I scroll down, I might see somebody's newsletter. You know what? I know Scott Carson just created one. So I'm going to go see Scott Carson's newsletter. I'm going to go see Scott Carson and I'm going to go check out his post here and I'm going to see within here he's got podcast webinars featured his activity. This might be one. Right? Let's check this one out and see if it's one of his newsletters. Oh, nope, it's a video. Let's see if I can find it. One that's actually shows me it's an article probably. Let's see. Yep, here we go. His is WCN News & Notes newsletter. Love it. This is his header for the news and notes newsletter and this is the article for it. And he's got his videos embedded in here, he's got the articles embedded in here. He's gotta pick up your copy and go do this and that clicks out to Amazon. And he's got his podcast episodes. So he's doing much more of a traditional style newsletter and he's getting visibility of it. Now Scott just did this like a week ago. He just started his newsletter and look at the, I think it was maybe a week and a half ago. 1921 subscribers, right. And I'm going to make it 1922 subscribers, right. So there you go, this is a thing. And on his end he can see his subscribers, he knows who's subscribing to it, he can see who's interacting, he can watch who's reading the newsletter at any given time. And so I'm going to go back to mine and I'm going to show you what mine looks like. So again, down here in the resources section, remember creator mode turns on. You've got your newsletter. That's how you're going to find it. But I'm going to want to go here and I'm going to want to go to my activity and I am going to this one we said was a newsletter. So this one's a newsletter item and this one's in the newsletter. So this is a share of a newsletter item. So here's the weekly newsletter. I have 981 subscribers and that doesn't surprise me that I'm less than Scott because he has a much bigger list that he markets to. And so he's probably got like three to five times more LinkedIn followers than I do. So this makes really good sense. But 981 is, in a really short period of time is great. So I can see my subscribers, See, I can see all of them here. I can check them out, I know who they are. I can see that this one was published. I can see who watched it, who read it. I can see that it's getting circulation. I can see when there are comments, I can see who's doing it. But More than that, LinkedIn sends me this message that says someone's reading it at this moment in time. So I can do a little stalking and I can reach out to them in messaging, especially if they're not someone that I'm already connected to. I can reach out and message them and say, hey, hey everyone. You know, I saw that you were and I would be really straightforward and honest because otherwise it seems a little creepy. I saw in my LinkedIn newsletter, LinkedIn told me that you were reading this article and I'm curious if you have any questions and is there any way that I can support you on this particular topic? Great way to reach out to someone who's been on your hot list of someone you wanted to connect with. Maybe you've wanted them as a client, you've wanted to have a follow up phone call with them and now you're making that happen. So mine's called it just keeps doing the same thing, Binge factor media featuring articles. There we go. And so this just gets you all the newsletter items in one place that I posted. And you can kind of see the differences. And you see that what we're doing is we're actually reposting. We're reposting different types of articles that already appeared on Authority magazine. And so they're already out there. These are written articles, they're already completed. We just copy and we paste them into LinkedIn. So really not doing anything new here. So that's just the simple, straightforward way to look at using smart links to stay within LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn rewards that and it's creating a trackable link. But that trackable link is more valuable to you because you know exactly who it is. You're not seeing it as a referring URL or some iPhone somewhere in the Midwest. You're not seeing it in that generalized way. And you're not having to pixel someone and follow them all over the Internet and serve them up. You actually are already connected to this person, so it's easier for you to go back, reach through LinkedIn, connect out to them again.

Hey, I saw you downloaded my PDF. I have an updated video version of it. I'd love to send that to you. Can I send it to you in email or do you prefer it here in LinkedIn and just start a conversation with them? So that's really, really great for you to be able to utilize the links, create the trackability, and then use it to make deeper relationship connections, then layer in that adding in the newsletter. If you've got articles now, I don't recommend you post your entire blog post of your episode, your transcription blog post. What we do here are shortened articles. So if you do that, you might want to just use the description section, the early section and the video and do just sort of the shortened version of the podcast. Because these LinkedIn newsletters are not super long reads 600, 800 words, probably, you know, under a thousand is where I'd stay with them. So if you're not writing articles elsewhere, you're not doing what we call seed articles and you're not doing the method that I'm doing. That's okay. Use your descriptive paragraph, use the video version of your podcast. Because layering in LinkedIn's not great at layering in a, a podcast player. They don't have one of their own. And so the only way to do it is to really layer it in like a video. And so if you've got an audiogram or the video, put that in there. You can use your short clip if you want, like your 30 second to one minute clip, or you can use the whole entire thing there, or you can do like we did and then put the link in, use the shortened version and then link out to the full length video that or the full length blog post that has everything on it. And that way you're tracking who's actually reading it, who's clicking through, who's interested in this particular topic. And so over time, the views start to build up the topics, you start to figure out what's working and what's not working. Like what areas are useful to you, but the subscriber numbers are, you're going to get a boost from the moment you start it because LinkedIn says to all of your followers, hey, they have a newsletter. And so for the majority of your followers that are actually on LinkedIn, because there's a lot of followers who don't go on LinkedIn every day, every week. But that's a really great way for you to get more visibility with your own subscriber base, right? Your own connection base. And you get that boost hit from the moment you start the newsletter, and then you'll see it build week over week. You'll start to see them build. We started Tom's that way. He got 700 in his first week and I'm not really sure where he is right now, but I can go check it out and we'll look it up and I'll post that in the blog post for this episode for Feed your brand on the productize.com website. So try some advanced tactics on LinkedIn smart links, the newsletter. Make sure you have everything in place and refer back to this video if you're having trouble and need that walkthrough of where turning on creator mode is or where the Smart Links tab is in the LinkedIn Navigator. Thanks everyone for listening. This is Tracy Hazard on Feed your Brand and we'll be back with more great episodes from the rest of our team. And I'll be back with another masterclass in about a.

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