Productive Newsletters
How to create and publish productive and effective newsletters

What comes to mind first when you think about publishing your own newsletter or ezine?

For most of us, content enjoys top of mind status. As a professional newsletter publisher for more than a decade, the question I hear most often goes something like this, “What should I write about in my newsletter?”

It’s a good question, and an important one. There’s no doubt content merits your attention.

But, don’t let the importance of content blind you to strategy, especially if you’re just getting started with a newsletter or ezine.

Strategy First
Strategy, you see, is the big newsletter secret. It’s the articulated purpose that ensures you direct your publication to the right people, and for the right reasons. Get the strategy right, and the rest — including content — should fall into place automatically. Miss the strategy, and you’ll be forever frustrated, trying to get the parts right without knowing what the whole looks like.

If you’re not sure what strategy means, take a look at some of the many online sites that discuss it. I found a number of them by doing a couple of quick search engine searches, using the keyword phrase “business AND strategy” (without the quotation marks).

Expect some confusion after reading more than a couple of articles, since everyone has his or her own definition of strategy, and how it should be developed. Still, after you read at least a few of them, you’ll begin to sense a common core, one you can appreciate as you develop your own strategies.

Generally speaking, strategy means putting together the big plan. What am I trying to accomplish? What do I have to do achieve my objectives?

Newsletter Strategy

For a newsletter publisher, there are three key elements to strategy:

• choice of medium
• publishing objectives, and
• reader needs.

Choice of medium: Before starting, asking yourself this question: “Should I use a newsletter, or would another medium (ads in newspapers or direct mail, for example) be better? Think hard about the amount of time and money you would invest in your newsletter, versus the amount of time and money you would put into some other communication vehicle.

Publishing objectives: A newsletter will cost you time and money. What do you expect to get out it? Will you get a return on this investment? The best way to get a return, of course, is to select a few well-defined and achievable objectives and then focus intently on achieving them

Reader needs: Readers won’t look at your newsletter more than once if you don’t provide some information they find helpful, entertaining, or otherwise relevant. And, don’t forget credible; these must be subjects on which strangers believe you have some expertise or meaningful experience.

After Strategy…
Once you’ve worked out a strategy, then you can turn to tactics. In the case of newsletters, this involves:

• selecting subjects (content)
• how you will present that content
• how often to publish
• how many words or pages to publish.

If you’ve done a good job on your strategy, you’ll find it much easier to make these tactical decisions. Much easier to make the right decisions, too!

Finally, a word of warning: Developing a strategy, especially one that?s well thought out, can be time consuming and difficult. But, it’s always worthwhile. And, you may find it as enjoyable a creative challenge as writing and designing.

Technorati Tags: newsletter, newsletter content, strategy

Need a newsletter name? Know how to get it? In this article, we’ll look at a process for establishing a newsletter name, and because we’re using a process, rather than guessing, we should come up with a more effective name. And when I say more effective name, I mean a name that will help your newsletter get a better response.

As the title suggests, we’re going to work backward to find a newsletter name. We do that by starting with our objectives and working back from there.

For example, when I started a newsletter about business communication, I started with three objectives, and from those objectives came a newsletter name that worked well.

The first objective for the newsletter was to brand myself as an expert, or at least someone you could trust to provide good information about business communication. That’s how my last name “Abbott” ended up in the newsletter name (and it doesn’t hurt to have a last name that starts with the letter ‘A’ either).

The second objective was to connect my name with the subject matter, business communication. Now, these are a couple of long words for a newsletter name, especially ‘communication’ so I decided to use just one of them. And, for my purposes, ‘communication’ seemed more descriptive than just plain ‘business’.

Third, I wanted the newsletter to be read, so subscribers should know when my message arrived at their inbox that this was a newsletter and not spam of some kind. As a result, I thought it would be a good idea to get newsletter into the name. Another possibility was the word ‘ezine’ (a word often used for electronic newsletters); however, that seemed a bit esoteric. And, again, since length of the overall newsletter name was important, I decided to shorter ‘newsletter’ to ‘letter’ which saves a few letters.

Altogether, then, the name came out as “Abbott’s Communication Letter” and it worked well. It delivered on all my objectives, and I didn’t second-guess myself at all about the newsletter name at any time during the six years I published it.

It certainly beats the old fashioned way of guessing at what might be a good newsletter name, such as picking something like a company name and then adding something rather pedestrian like “Gazette”.

In summary, picking a newsletter name should be a process, rather than a shot in the dark. By focusing on your objectives, and working backward from them, you should be able to find a newsletter name that contributes to your overall goal of getting readers to respond in some way.

Technorati Tags: name, newsletter, newsletter name

After spending years in the newsletter and communication business, I know anyone can create a newsletter, but to create a newsletter that gets results and lasts (most die after just a few issues), you’ll need take the following seven steps.

1. Identify exactly what you want readers to do - before you create a newsletter. Do you want them to do something, to think something, or act in a certain way? The more specific, the better. One way to make this process easier is to ask the following two questions: “Do I want change or do I want reinforcement?” and “Do I want to influence thoughts or actions?” So, change or reinforce, thoughts or actions? Think through the four possibilities these two questions raise, and you should find it easy to identify and state your objective.

2. Describe your audience. In some cases this will be easy, but nevertheless, write down some description of the audience before you create a newsletter. In many cases, when you have discretion about the audience, you’ll face a trade-off between audience size and audience response. Generally speaking, the more focused your audience, the better the response. Finding the right balance between size and response can be a challenge when you create a newsletter.

3. Identify topics. Now that you have identified an audience and what you want members of it to do, you should also have a good idea about what subjects to include as you create a newsletter. For a detailed look at content strategies, read, Some content will get the response you want, some won’t. Here’s how to choose the right stuff…

4. Write and lay out your newsletter. Now, here’s what you started out to do, right? To create a newsletter by writing and laying it out, whether it’s electronic or printed? Great, but don’t skip the first three steps, because if you start here, at Step 4, your chances of failure are high.

5. Proofread, check, proofread, check. To get readers to respond, you need credibility and to get credibility, you must have a ‘clean’ newsletter, one without mistakes, misspellings, and other glitches. Spellcheck is one obvious solution. And if you can, get someone else to read your newsletter; even the best of us can overlook our own mistakes when we create a newsletter.

6. Print/mail/distribute. An obvious step to be sure, but there’s another element I’d like you to consider in the ‘create a newsletter’ process: How many readers actually read, or at least opened, your newsletter? The ratio of read newsletters to distributed newsletters will be key to getting the response you want. If you distribute your newsletter on or through the Internet, some services now offer reports on ‘open rates’ which will tell you what percentage of your readers actually opened your newsletter.

7. Evaluate. The final step, as we create a newsletter, is to evaluate the results. We started it with the aim of getting someone to do something. Did that happen? Did we get a positive return for the time and money invested? Without some kind of feedback or evaluation, it’s impossible to know if the newsletter was worth the effort.

Summing up, we’ve looked at seven critical steps to take when we create a newsletter. If we follow them, we should have a publication that amply rewards us. I know it’s tempting to jump in and just start writing or designing, but to create a newsletter without going through each step is to start one that likely will not get the response you want and not last beyond the first few issues.

Technorati Tags: communication, create a newsletter, newsletters