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The platform that I relied on to build my brand, my business, and my reputation slowly stopped responding to me. 

Post after post, the stuff that always worked just… didn't. 

Some posts tanked with less than 100 views. Others had “meh” performance for 12 hours then exploded overnight. 

I was confused, frustrated, even a little betrayed. I genuinely wondered if I should go try X.

Instead of getting mad (again), I got curious. 

I decided to demolish my LinkedIn strategy and rebuild it from the ground up. I documented the entire thing and published The New Rules of LinkedIn. 

But that’s not all I did. 

While cleaning up my profile, I rediscovered my LinkedIn newsletter — which had over 30,000 subscribers! 

I started it back when I ran Gong Labs, its LinkedIn newsletter lived on my profile. When I left the company, it came with me (since it’s hosted on my profile after all). 

First order of business: I renamed it Content Strategy Reeder. I figured I would repurpose my Saturday newsletter there. So I did, but only for a couple weeks. I never really committed. I got busy with (insert any excuse here). It did… fine. Then it fizzled out. 

But a few conversations with folks at LinkedIn gave me a hunch that newsletters are about to get a lot more love. I can't prove it, but I always trust my gut. Plus, the LLM visibility is a perk.

So I decided to run a test. 

So I spun it back up and committed to one lane: LinkedIn growth.

I intentionally picked a very SEO-friendly, obvious title. LinkedIn Growth. LinkedIn content about LinkedIn. It's in my wheelhouse, it's part of my service offer, and it's a proven market. I know people want to grow on LinkedIn.

The second rule: no net-new content. This would be a repurposing engine, fed entirely by things I'd already written for my content vault and the Saturday Reeder.

I wanted to answer three questions:

That's why every issue carried a free lead magnet. I wanted to test that type of offer before I ever put a paid one in front of this crowd.

I didn’t have high expectations.

But it was a low-lift experiment with no downside. So why not test it?

Three months, June 21 to September 20. Ten issues total.

I opened with three warm-up issues every couple of weeks. Then in August I went weekly with a series documenting my own LinkedIn rebuild in public. Two more issues went out in September.

Here's what I tracked:

Ten issues – everything repurposed.

The header image credit goes to Kristin, my Chief of Staff, who leveled them up every round. The photos of me took under 60 seconds at a shoot before I grabbed the kids and left. Least amount of work for the biggest upside I've had all year.

For example… (queue quirky YouTube face)

What worked best:

The scary part first.

Launch day, I lost 21 subscribers. The next issue, I lost 45. Every launch day was net negative. Show that chart to a non-marketing exec and they'd pull the cord.

But I knew who was leaving. The Gong Labs crowd, basically saying, "Nah, dude, I signed up for data-backed sales insights, not your LinkedIn journey." Fair enough.

Two days after launch, +53. The tailwind always showed up after the drop, and the churn leveled out faster than I expected.

The scoreboard:

Compared to what I expected, which was basically nothing, that's a win.

But the number that blew my mind wasn't on the LinkedIn dashboard.

Roughly 17–18k of my 32,960 subscribers get every issue sent to their inbox. That's INSANE, and it's so unique. It's the only way I can email people from LinkedIn. I don't own the email addresses, but it's the next best thing. There's no other way to get your LinkedIn content into someone's inbox.

A LinkedIn newsletter is the closest thing to an email list you can build without ever asking for an email address.

I also realized I'm sitting on a legit marketing distribution opportunity. And now I have a new channel for sponsored ad inventory. Win-win. 

And now that the lead magnet’s been tested, I’m going to create new LinkedIn guides and tools every few weeks. Next up: a LinkedIn post grading tool that gives you recommendations on how to make your content grab attention.  

You probably aren’t sitting on a sleepy LinkedIn newsletter with 30,000 subs. 

But it might be worth starting one. 

Because historically, LinkedIn has sent a one-time invite to your connections and followers when you publish your first issue. That launch blast is your biggest subscriber moment, so make issue one count.

Before you go hunting for the next shiny channel, ask yourself three questions:

Then give it time. My analytics didn’t look great when I relaunched. But two weeks later, it looked like a new channel.

This summer I thought LinkedIn had stopped working for me. Turns out there was a ton of upside right in front of me.

Chances are, yours is right in front of you too. Go find it.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

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Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

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