Join Tracy Hazzard on today’s Feed Your Brand Masterclass episode as she breaks down how you can promote and boost your podcast using LinkedIn Newsletter and Smart Links. You probably already have a LinkedIn account and connections, so why not make the most of it by turning it into an avenue to gain more traction for your website? Get all the tips and practical advice on how to do just that by tuning in to this episode!

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How To Promote Your Podcast Using LinkedIn Newsletter And Smart Links

Feed Your Brand Masterclass, that’s what we are occasionally doing. Sometimes masterclasses are longer than others. This one is not going to be super long but it’s very focused on a specific topic. We are focusing on how to promote your podcast using LinkedIn Newsletter and LinkedIn Smart Links. I’m going to call them advanced tactics on LinkedIn. These are not for newbies to LinkedIn. If you are brand new, and 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, and make sure you have a general posting schedule. All of that still needs to be in place running behind the scenes.

I had my LinkedIn for over a decade. I have well over 10,000, somewhere in there, followers or connections, which is what you call them on LinkedIn. Through that process, I nurture that all the time. I’m selective about who I accept as a connection request. They must either be a second or a group connection. I don’t do third connections. I don’t do random reach outs. I don’t accept them.

If they have anything promotional in their name or title, I don’t even accept them. I reject them outright. To understand how advanced a user I am, I check my LinkedIn twice a day, every single day, morning and evening. Mostly I’m checking my messages, not necessarily my posts. We do have a posting schedule that’s done by our social media team. That’s posting through, sometimes we used to use Buffer and MeetEdgar. We’ve used both of those before and now we use lately that dot-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. You want to pay attention to the things that are happening there. What we discovered when we were posting is that sometimes the posts had calls to action or click-out links. 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. When we did that, it wasn’t getting the click-through and the circulation. It wasn’t doing what we thought it would do.

If we did a post without a link out, it would get 3 to 5 times more views, comments engagement, and more push out from the LinkedIn system than it was if we added an external link. We could go and do one step further, which is we make a post. 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. You do have to have a premium subscription for LinkedIn and have the highest level of premium subscription. I believe that’s $149 or something like that. I’m going to show you where that is and how to turn that on. You are going to want to go to the blog post for this episode at Podetize.com or go to YouTube to Podetize’s channel and check out the video.

 

Once you have Sales Navigator, once you’ve signed up for it and you are 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. If you don’t have the top-level, the premium version, you won’t get the Smart Links. When you click on the Smart Links and you can see we have been doing this a while but we have somewhere we are loading them in. They are prepping for episodes that are coming or posts that are going to be happening because we do this way ahead of time.

Here’s where I’m going to get you. What we do is we create a new Smart Link. It’s super simple. We put the title that we want visible to recipients. I’m 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 put Podetize Feed Your Brand. We would add that and enable the recipient to download viewable files. If I put a PDF here, we could make them able to download it. Not just view it but download it. You click “Create.” I’m not going to click, “Create” here because we aren’t doing this one. I’m discarding it.

I’m going to give you one and show you what it looks like. It says, “This host will give you insider tips on how to make co-hosting fun and harmonious. This is Julie Logan.” It’s a podcast episode I did with her. It gives you all the details for how to reach that. The host will give you inside it. It’s going straight through if I were to click on that or in this case, I can’t do it from inside the Smart Link but once I’m outside of it, I can. It will click on it and share everything that’s on that page but it’s going to share it from within LinkedIn. If I copy the link, it says, “LinkedIn Smart-Links AHAQH and it’s got a bunch of things.

 

This is what it looks like. It’s giving me a page within LinkedIn that is showing this blog post that’s there. I can click out to that blog post but it sending them within LinkedIn to do it. I know this seems like an extra step and all of those things but LinkedIn loves this. Why? It’s because you are staying within LinkedIn. If I click on this, I go out to the post and I will be able to get to that. LinkedIn approves of this. What happens is that when somebody accesses it, he clicked on this for nineteen seconds.

When he clicked on it, he went out and then to the blog, I now know who. It’s not a random web address that went out and it came through my Google Analytics. I know who saw it on LinkedIn, clicked on it, and went to go use that. That’s why the smart link is so valuable. It’s like doing a referring URL but you are doing it within LinkedIn and LinkedIn is rewarding you for doing it. What does this look like?

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. I’m going to go to my profile on LinkedIn. I’m going to click down here and you are going to see, “Suggested for You Analytics Resources.” This is one thing that you want to make sure that your resource’s 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. It would be available to see newsletters and LinkedIn Live is available because the Creator Hub is available. You are going to want to know that, definitely turn that on. That’s going to make a difference. If I want to see any of my posts, I’m going to go down to activities. I’m going to see the posts that were created here. I know that this particular one was posted. It’s a 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 are no links. It’s down in the comments. It’s attached as a visual.

If I clicked on this, it’s going to take me to the newsletter. Here’s that LinkedIn link. There’s a video attached here that is a little video clip of Alexandra and Cody doing their Millennial episode. This is the link to the episode to learn more. Remember, this is what it looks like if I’m sharing the podcast episode. It doesn’t have the wide one. It happens to have a square. That’s how we share it. It sends them out to the link. This whole tracking is going on within the system. What happens is that these posts start to get more and more visibility.

Keep in mind that these were posted. They are relatively new in the process. That’s how it simply works. We are going to insert those links as if we had a Bitly link or any trackable tracking link. LinkedIn is doing all the tracking work for us. They are showing us exactly who’s seen it from our LinkedIn connection network. What is a LinkedIn Newsletter? I know Scott Carson created one. I’m going to go see Scott Carson’s newsletter. I’m going to go see Scott Carson. I’m going to go check out his post here. I’m going to see it here. He’s got podcast webinars, featured, and his activity.

Whatever you do when you post through LinkedIn, you want to do it consistently and constantly. Click To Tweet

Here we go. Here’s his WCN News and Notes Newsletter. I love it. This is his header for the news and notes newsletter. This is the article for it. He’s got his videos and the articles embedded here. He’s got a, “Pick up your copy and go do this.” That clicks out to Amazon. He’s got his podcast episodes, so he’s doing much more of a traditional-style newsletter. He’s getting visibility of it. Scott did this. He just started his newsletter and it has 1,922 subscribers. There you go.

This is a thing. 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. I’m going to go back to mine and I’m going to show you what mine looks like. Down here in the Resources Section, remember creator mode turns on. You’ve got your newsletter. That’s how you are going to find it but I’m going to want to go here and to my activity. This one is a newsletter item and this one is in the newsletter. This is a share of a newsletter item. Here’s the weekly newsletter. I have 981 subscribers. That doesn’t surprise me that I’m less than Scott because he has a much bigger list that he markets to.

He’s probably got 3 to 5 times more LinkedIn followers than I do. This makes good sense but 981 in a short time is great. I can see my subscribers. 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 and read it. I can see that it’s getting circulation when there are comments, or who’s doing it but more than that, LinkedIn sends me this message that says, “Someone is reading it at this moment in time.” I can do a little stalking and reach out to them in messaging, especially if they are not someone with that I’m already connected to.

 

I can reach out, message them and say, “Everyone, I saw that you were,” and I would be straightforward and honest because otherwise, it seems a little creepy. “I saw in my LinkedIn Newsletter, that LinkedIn told me that you were reading this article. I’m curious if you have any questions. Is there any way that I can support you on this particular topic?” It’s a great way to reach out to someone who has been on your hot list or someone you’ve 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 are making that happen. Mine is called, it keeps doing the same thing, Binge Factor Media, featuring articles. There we go. This gets you all the newsletter items in one place that I posted and you can see the differences. You see that what we are doing is we are reposting different types of articles that already appeared in Authority Magazine.

They are already out there. These are written articles. They are already completed. We copy and paste them into LinkedIn. Not doing anything new here. That’s 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.

LinkedIn is doing all the tracking for us. Click To Tweet

You are not seeing it as a referring URL or some iPhone, somewhere in the Midwest. You are not seeing it in that generalized way. You are not having to pixel someone and follow them all over the internet and serve them up. You are already connected to this person. It’s easier for you to go back, reach through LinkedIn and connect with them again.

“I saw you downloaded my PDF. I have an updated video version of it. I would love to send that to you. Can I send it to you in an email or do you prefer it here on LinkedIn?” Start a conversation with them. That’s great for you to be able to utilize the links, create the trackability, and use it to make deeper relationship connections. Layer in that, adding in the newsletter if you’ve got articles. I don’t recommend you post the entire blog post of your episode, your transcription blog posts. What we do here are shortened articles.

If you do that, you might want to use the description section, the early section, and the video, and do the shortened version of the podcast because these LinkedIn Newsletters are not super long reads, 600, 800 words, probably, under 1,000 is where I would stay with them. If you are not writing articles elsewhere, you are not doing what we call seed articles, and the method that I’m doing, that’s okay. Use your descriptive paragraph. Use the video version of your podcasts because LinkedIn is not great at layering a podcast player. They don’t have one of their own.

 

The only way to do it is to layer it in like a video. If you’ve got an audio gram or the video put that in there, you can use your short clip if you want your 30-second to the 1-minute clip. 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 or the full-length blog post that has everything on it.

That way you are tracking who’s reading it, who’s clicking through, and who’s interested in this particular topic. Over time, the views start to build up. You start to figure out what’s working and what’s not working, “What areas are useful to you.” The subscriber numbers, you are going to get a boost from the moment you start it. LinkedIn says to all of your followers, “They have a newsletter.”

For the majority of your followers that are on LinkedIn because there are a lot of followers who don’t go on LinkedIn every day, every week but that’s a great way for you to get more visibility with your own subscriber base, your own connection base. You get that boost hit from the moment you start the newsletter, and you will see it build week over week.

You will start to see them build. We started Tom’s that way. He got 700 in his first week. I can go check it out and we will look it up. I will post that in the blog post for this episode for Feed Your Brand on the Podetize.com website. Try some advanced tactics on LinkedIn. Smart Links the newsletter, make sure you have everything in place, and refer back to this if you are 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 reading. We will be back with more great episodes from the rest of our team. I will be back with another masterclass.

 

Important Links

• LinkedIn – Tracy Hazzard
• Buffer
• MeetEdgar
• Podetize – YouTube