Substack Creators Turn to LinkedIn for Lead Generation
Substack Creators are figuring out LinkedIn lead-gen for their Substack Newsletter monetization
Hey Guys,
This is just a quick note. I’m going to just state the obvious in case you were not aware.
Substack creators have got the LinkedIn bug in how they attract free subscriptions. This as LinkedIn claims its building more Creator Economy facilitation. Substack creators are increasingly creating LinkedIn long-form posts (200 to 300 words) and even Newsletters.
This as they also build “company profiles” for their Substack Newsletters. Linkedin is hiring more news editors and more editors are becoming “creator managers”. This as Microsoft is pushing towards developing its own Creator Economy as it has invested heavily in gaming as well.
In early 2022, I’m noticing a lot more buzz on LinkedIn from some of Substack’s top writers.
LinkedIn provides Substack Creators with a legit marketing funnel that’s more effective to attract free subscribers, and convert free to paid subscribers.
This is due to the fact that LinkedIn offers more CTR, higher click-through rates, and a higher conversation of free subscribers to paid subscribers (due to the quality of the audience) from LinkedIn than networks like Twitter and Reddit.
On LinkedIn mobile App, you can even see how many “impressions” you have gotten in the last year, in a recent analytics upgrade.
Reddit - Top of Funnel (most views)
Twitter - Mid-funnel
LinkedIn - More conversion bottom of funnel.
How this works is when LinkedIn users notice a Substack users (like those featured on Substack’s leaderboards) have social proof, they immediately buy into the quality of their Newsletters.
This means the few Substack Newsletter Creators lucky enough to be on Leaderboards in the various categories (only a few in 2022), get augmented conversions due to the social-proof incentive.
The Power of LinkedIn Posts
LinkedIn has boosted Posts with a creator mode you can opt-in to where it shows in hashtags what you post about. Since attention on mobile has lowered how much app users and news readers are willing to read, they provide glance content that can convert new readers.
The best Substack Creators on LinkedIn use long-form posts (with easy to read) text that covers their article Newsletter topics and is consistent to their Newsletter’s themes. Others share curated links related to their space from sources from the web.
Many of the Creators have also created Newsletter on LinkedIn to diversify their audience. LinkedIn has a good diversification of reach to audiences in other countries that Substack might not have yet.
LinkedIn can be an even more powerful lead generation tool for Newsletters that offer real value to professionals, job seekers, B2B insights or salary insights. When it comes to B2B activities LinkedIn can fuel subscriptions in a very lucrative way depending on the interest in the topic of the Newsletter.
Another time I’ll go over what some of the Substack Creators are doing in this regard. The cool think about LinkedIn now is the super-follow notification bell where you are more likely to notice a notification.
While political content and journalists active on Twitter claim it has the most synergy with Substack, this actually isn’t the case for most of us who have Newsletters that intersect more with a general audience. For clickthrough rates and conversation rates, LinkedIn’s audience is of a much higher quality. Linkedin is also about 2.5x as big as Twitter in terms of users.
What do you think of LinkedIn lead-gen for your Substack Newsletter? Have you noticed how to create posts that trend?
For Tips and tricks check out: (I’ll continue to post more here as I see them)
As with the case with Creators who have found their sweetspot for subscription-conversion, a LinkedIn post can be a powerful lead-gen tactic to get new subscribers for those who can leverage mostly premium posts.
Here is an example by Gergely the top Technology Newsletter: (he links to a LinkedIn Corporate account named after his Newsletter). With huge pay jumps in software engineering, people will easily pay for the advice to potentially make life-altering money.
The problem with many Substack writers is they fail to create a marketing funnel. For instance, they neglect one or more of these. To succeed on Substack isn’t about being a good writer, it’s about having an actual sales strategy.
The majority of writers online don’t understand what the Creator Economy actually is. They didn’t grow up with vlogs, podcasts, video game streaming and the sentiment based algorithmic web.