Big event energy meets scrappy growth hacks as Jay Schwedelson and Daniel Murray swap notes on pulling off virtual conferences and squeezing real results out of LinkedIn newsletters. From blindfold karaoke judged by Nick Lachey to the one move that drove 700 plus registrations in a week, this Bathroom Break packs more than a few stealable plays.

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Follow Daniel on LinkedIn and check out The Marketing Millennials podcast for sharp, no-fluff marketing insights. Subscribe to Ari Murray’s newsletter at gotomillions.co for sharp, actionable marketing insights.

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Best Moments:

(01:03) Six-seven is over and Jay’s bracing for his Nov 6–7 virtual conference while trying not to lose it

(01:34) Blindfold karaoke with Nick Lachey judging and Jay cramming My Heart Will Go On in the car

(03:00) The LinkedIn newsletter launch mistake to avoid and the timing tweak that flips results

(04:53) The step-by-step to start a LinkedIn newsletter and why 150 followers is enough to beat the feed

(06:29) How a newsletter-as-registration blast got flagged by LinkedIn and what not to copy

(08:24) Why newsletters can include all the links you want and still hit inboxes with ~25% opens and 700–800 signups

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Check out Jay’s YOUTUBE Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@schwedelson

Check out Jay’s TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@schwedelson

Check Out Jay's INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jayschwedelson/

Daniel Murray: Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break, that extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marking tips or use the bathroom or both, but I

Jay Schwedelson: don't recommend. But that's your choice. This collab is gonna be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schon from the Do This Not That podcast and subject line.com.

Jay Schwedelson: Each episode in this series, we are gonna go over with tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

Daniel Murray: We are back with another episode of Bathroom Break. I am here with. The J Schon. And I'm Daniel Murray, and I wanna know there's a trend that's going around and you are in the know of six or seven, and I know something else is six or seven that's coming up.

Daniel Murray: What's coming up in six or seven that you're planning for on the sixth and 7th of November? Well, first of all,

Jay Schwedelson: six seven's over. All right? I mean, the fact that we are talking about it means it's very, very, very over. So let's skip that. There's this thing called Group seven. If you don't know that, you can look that up and still be cool, but so my giant.

Jay Schwedelson: Virtual conferences on November 6th and seventh in a few days. And I'm actually losing my mind. I need this thing to just happen already. 'cause it's, I I, I'm losing it.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. Jay, Jay has this tendency of taking a million things on and then, uh, losing his mind. Well, I'll

Jay Schwedelson: give you an example. Okay. Let tell you, like things I'm working on right now for the event that's coming up.

Jay Schwedelson: So we're doing a karaoke this No, look, karaoke. So the contestants are gonna be blindfolded. I'm gonna be one of them. And then we have Nick Leche. From 98 degrees in love is blind judging the singing. And so there's, there's gonna be, I think four singers and I think there's a four different songs that we are gonna spin a wheel and then whatever song it lands on.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm gonna have a bandana covering my eyes and everybody attending. Virtually the thousands of people are gonna see the words, but I won't have the words. So I'm trying to memorize these four songs. So like one of the songs, for example, is Celine Dion. My Heart Will Go On, you know? Oh, that's Titanic. That's a high

Daniel Murray: catch song right there.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, it's like. Near far, wherever. You know, oh

Daniel Murray: my car, you gonna see this live. You're gonna see this live. Everybody.

Jay Schwedelson: The last week, I'm in my car seeing this crap.

Daniel Murray: I can imagine people just like, what is this guy doing?

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. What ridiculous. Anyway, you gotta be there. So, um, speaking of being there, Daniel just had his big conference called Marketing Land and he did a marketing tactic that we're gonna break down, um, that I think everybody should be doing.

Jay Schwedelson: So Daniel, what did you do that's an underrate under the radar tactic to really generate awareness for the event that you just put on?

Daniel Murray: I don't even think it's an event in general. I and Jay, to be honest, has been telling me this for four years to get on this. Um, but. We officially launched a LinkedIn newsletter, and I wanted to say that I wouldn't say it replaces having an actual email list, and I'm not gonna go say, ever say that because emails are, um, golden.

Daniel Murray: But what we did is, and I'll tell you like the pros and cons of what happened is we decided to launch a LinkedIn newsletter to drive subscribers and. Mark Millennials has a lot of followers on this page. So I was like, okay, what happens when you launch a LinkedIn newsletter? It goes out to all everybody who follows the page or if you, if your own, if you do it on your own page, it goes on to all your followers.

Daniel Murray: So if you have a personal page, it goes all your followers and it says, subscribe to the newsletter. So when I, the minute I launched it, I started getting subscribers rolling in. But I'll tell you the biggest mistake that I made because I was like, okay, I'm. Subscriber's gonna roll in. I'm gonna post the newsletter and it's gonna get sent to everybody, but what I realized is that the best tactic to do is wait until the subscribers come and then send the first newsletter.

Daniel Murray: So I was waiting and looking at my metrics and looking, why has there no been zero emails sent for this? And this tactic, and we got some subscribers, but it was just from people who looked at the article not looking at the actual news that getting sent the newsletter. So it was a flop at first, but then I I, I was like, Hey, could we just send another newsletter the next week right before the event?

Daniel Murray: And then I saw LinkedIn sent. The newsletter to 80, 90% of the list and we, we drove over seven, 800 registrations from the, just doing that.

Jay Schwedelson: So let me just break that down a little further with what we're talking about, and I'm gonna give you Daniel's stuff, but it also applies if you're really small, you could do this on your personal page.

Jay Schwedelson: You only need at least 150 followers or connections. And on your company page, you can do the same thing. And this is. This is the only thing in social media that beats the algorithm. 'cause what Daniel's talking about is when you launch a LinkedIn newsletter, the way you do it is you go to start a new post and you click, there's a button that says write article on like the right hand side.

Jay Schwedelson: When you do that, there's another button that says Start a newsletter. When you click start a newsletter, they ask you to name the newsletter, whatever. And as soon as you. Do that and you, you set it up, it will then send out a notification to every single person that you are connected with or that follows you or your company page saying, do you wanna subscribe?

Jay Schwedelson: Now Daniel has a sizable audience, so his marketing millennial says like 1.2 million or whatever followers. So how many subscribers did you get? Kind of like over those first week or two

Daniel Murray: we got. I think it was around 12 to 15% of the subs like the base. So if you are doing this for yourself, you probably will get 15.

Daniel Murray: He tried to launch a new, a new tactic, and you've been doing this a lot too. I saw that you do this on your, your talk recently. You've been doing this, steal this tactic. Thing where I got in trouble. You do a new tactic and you just tell people this is your tactic you're doing

Jay Schwedelson: right. Um, but so I did, I did, I got in trouble with this.

Jay Schwedelson: So what Daniel's talking about when he launches LinkedIn newsletter, and by the way, every time Daniel now publishes his LinkedIn newsletter for free on LinkedIn's dime, it doesn't just get posted on his. Feed on his market. Millennials feed an email goes out from LinkedIn and it's the newsletter as if it was a regular email newsletter, and it goes right to the inbox.

Jay Schwedelson: It has like a hundred percent deliverability of the inbox. If you're not taking your same content that you're sending out with your regular newsletter, business, consumer, whatever, uh, or any offers. Stick them in a LinkedIn newsletter, start it. Uh, because you don't even need to keep publishing it. It just keeps adding new subscribers.

Jay Schwedelson: But I got in trouble with LinkedIn. They actually reached out to me and I had to like undo stuff, which was wild. So, um, because I basically, it's kind of like a hack to beat the algorithm that if you, if you, and you could launch multiple LinkedIn newsletters, you don't need to just have one on your personal page or your company page.

Jay Schwedelson: So I was like, you know what? It. I wanted to get a lot of people registering for my, my Guru conference. I said, I have an idea. What if I launch a new newsletter and basically it's, it's a newsletter that all it is is register for the conference. And when I, I was saying in my head when I do that, it's gonna notify every single person that I'm connected to or that follows me, uh, with this notification about my conference.

Jay Schwedelson: I go, this is great. So I did that and I put this. Big thing on LinkedIn, steal this tactic. And I launched the newsletter purely as a subscription offer for guru conference. And then I would say within about, I was very impressed. Within about 45 minutes, I got a note for someone from some important person on LinkedIn saying, dude.

Jay Schwedelson: You can't do that. That's not a good use of our community. You're not doing the right thing. That's not what it's there for. Bad. And I was like, uhoh, I didn't wanna go to LinkedIn jail because I'm really never trying to do bad stuff. I just thought I was like being smart. So, um, don't do that.

Daniel Murray: I'll also add one other thing.

Daniel Murray: LinkedIn is very anti links like in your posts. You have to do cer certain tactics to get a link in a post to drive people off. But in a LinkedIn newsletter, you can add as many links as you want and they still send the email. To all these people, and I'll give you some stats. Uh, it's probably gonna end up being a little more than this, but for example, the email had a 25% open rate, which is pretty good for something that's not coming from your, your name, a personal name.

Daniel Murray: It came, comes from LinkedIn. Um, so 25% operate on your list for free as a marketing tactic to just show that you have good content. Thought leadership is pretty. And if you wanna jace's copy and patient newsletter, I think you should give like. Samples in these newsletter, like little tastes of what you do in your, your full size content.

Daniel Murray: So you could say, here's a cool stat from this, this blog post that we wrote. Here's a good cool thing that we do here. And get people to come off that newsletter to what you're doing. But you can give them all, it's still valuable to give them good tidbits in that newsletter that drive them to your stuff.

Daniel Murray: Um, so have a plan to get people. Out of that newsletter to your stuff. But I think it's a, a tactic that you should probably steal any, any type of business that you wanna just keep aware that your, with your followers and if you, it's a low live way to start a newsletter before you want to actually start a newsletter, an actual email newsletter.

Daniel Murray: 'cause when you start an email newsletter, you really have to go. Commit hard. Yeah. To grow that. And the

Jay Schwedelson: other thing I'll throw out there, I think people sleep on is the email address that you give LinkedIn is like the one you're never gonna change. It's the one that you really care about. 'cause you're, you don't wanna have to change that.

Jay Schwedelson: Right. Especially for anybody out there that's business to business. Primarily the email address that you have in your database is gonna be somebody's corporate domain. This allows your newsletter actually go to their personal domain, uh, email address, because that's what they have with LinkedIn. So it's just another way to hit people at the exact right place.

Jay Schwedelson: That's a very, very hard email address to get access to.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. I mean, you don't phy physically get the email address, but you get in that No. Right, right. That, that real estate, and I think, yeah. The goal of marketing in general is to find that under price, real estate, get into places where. You other people can get into or are harder to get into.

Daniel Murray: Yeah, and LinkedIn newsletter is a way to get into a place where it's harder normally to get your email. So you have two now avenues. You could do your regular emails and a LinkedIn newsletter and get in the inbox in two different ways. And now you have two different ways of fighting for space in a high realiz and it's coming from LinkedIn.

Daniel Murray: So if you don't have high domain authority or high. Like brand awareness. LinkedIn definitely has high brand awareness, so you might get even a higher up rate if you, they don't know who you are from a LinkedIn send.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, so before we wrap up here, Daniel, you did your big event and Daniel like.

Jay Schwedelson: Thousands of people. This thing exhausting the event ends. Do you just collapse? Do you like go to bed at eight o'clock last night or are you like, you feel so energized, you go out in Miami and you rage, you go to all the clubs? No, I,

Daniel Murray: the minute the event end, I slapped my computer and I did not open Slack and like people were slacking me.

Daniel Murray: I was, but there's this whole thing at my event where there was this inside joke that about like. People giving nuggets and like they kept like nuggets saying like McDonald's nuggets, nuggets, nuggets, nuggets. And then at the end everybody's like, I love Nugget Land. And it was just like this whole like I think next Sure.

Daniel Murray: I'm gonna launch a Nugget land. Uh, yeah. I like it. I'll go. I was like, McDonald's, if you're hearing this, please sponsor us. We we throwing out some marketing nuggets. Please.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, they have marketing nuggets. That's what you need. Yeah, I like it. Uh, well I don't think we had any marketing nuggets here today, but whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: Listen, everybody go and follow the Marketing Millennial show. It is incredible. Give Daniel a great review and if you're hearing this before guru conference, go guru conference.com. It's free, it's virtual. You could hear me sing. What a cell later, Daniel. Come on man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, while he's still in there. This is Jay. Check out my podcast. Do this, not that for marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing, and I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Daniel Murray: Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Marking Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series.

Daniel Murray: It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marking tips that we just spew out, and it could be anything from email subject line to any marking tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a, a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. He's out later.