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Getting help on writing my newsletter

Posted by admin on April 4, 2011 in advice on writing my newsletter

Most of you will already know that I absolutely LOVE newsletters. Use them properly and they’ll propel your online and offline marketing further than almost any other technique.

I’ve seen entire businesses established and grow based around a newsletter seeking to educate, inform and of course entice sales for their owners :-)

And I’ve provided help on writing and producing newsletters to literally thousands of people throughout the year. Sometimes in person and often through my award-winning classic How To Write A Newsletter toolkit.

But now I’m after your advice…. ?

I’ve been thinking for a while that a Forum dedicated to those of us who love Newsletters, who write Newsletter and who want to share help and advice for Newsletter editors and publishers might be a very cool edition to this blog.

However, before embarking on such a project – the How To Write A Newsletter Forum – I wanted to get your take on my idea.

Would it be helpful? Would people appreciate having a place to come to discuss newsletters in all their forms and glory?

Let me know what you think and before you know it there could be a Forum dedicated to the humble newsletter and connected to this blog.

Best wishes
Michael Green

P.S. If you’d like to create your own newsletter for whatever purpose then why not check out my How To Write A Newsletter toolkit today.  Filled with newsletter templates, copyright free articles, the ‘How To’ Newsletter Manual and much more besides. You’ll have your newsletter done in no time with this excellent Newsletter toolkit which you’ll find right here.

 
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Should I use an autoresponder to send my newsletter?

Posted by admin on March 14, 2011 in Using an autoresponder to mail out my newsletter

One of the great online innovations after the past ten years has been the success of so called “autoresponders” to send out information at predetermined intervals.

But should you use an autoresponder to mail out your newsletter too?

Autoresponders initially did little more than sending a robot reply to an email

In their early form autoresponders were simply a direct response means of getting some information into your potential customers hands. They worked like this…

You read an ad in a newspaper or magazine and rather than visiting a website to find out more about the product – back in those days browsers and web connections weren’t all that great and Facebook had yet to be invented – you were instead encouraged to use your email client to send a blank message to a specific address.

It worked like this…

Want to find out more about how to create your own product? Send a blank email to createproducts@aweber.com

This would cause the autoresponder to respond by firing back an email to the senders address. And the owner of that autoresponder would fill the email with information about their product.  Simple.

But it wasn’t long before things got more interesting

The most obvious advance was when the autoresponder programmers realized that they could also provide further follow-up.  So after a day or so the person enquiring would receive a further message telling them more about the product that they’d enquired about and encouraging some follow-up action.  And then, in a few days another message.

You’ll be familiar with all of this, but where do regular emailed newsletters (sometimes know as Ezines) fit into the autoresponder world?

A modern autoresponder is an ideal way of delivering your newsletter

The answer is that an autoresponder can be a very neat way of delivering your newsletter. And there are many advantages of using this technology compared to say a program on your own PC to distribute your newsletter.

Off the top of my head I would use an autoresponder to send out a newsletter because:

  1. You won’t need to devote the computer time to sending out your newsletter because it’s sent from a third-party server.
  2. You won’t need to maintain a newsletter email list. Remove those who want to be unsubscribed and add new additions.
  3. You don’t need your PC to be left on while your newsletter is being mailed out.
  4. You can established pre-set moments for your newsletter to be distributed. Say a week in advance. While you’re out having fun!
  5. You can easily link your autoresponder newsletter to a website where someone can read about your business in more detail.

And actually, that final point sums up what you’re doing here. This newsletter article, which happens to be about using an autoresponder to send out my newsletter, is itself both sent by an autoresponder and also on a website.

Now at you might be wondering which combination of autoresponder and website works the best for sending out a newsletter?

My answer is WordPress.org combined with the best of the autoresponders which is called aWeber.com.

Nowadays aWeber.com is the market leading autoresponder. It’s been built with loving care by its own Tom Kultzer. I’ve seen it develop over many years to achieve a reputation from reliability, technical support and most importantly of all – very reliable delivery of your newsletters.

Combining the autoresponder with your blog means that you can write a new post – like the one you’re reading – and then have it automatically mailed out at a time of your choosing via aWeber.com.  And helpfully aWeber even provide a video to show how to set the whole thing.

So the answer is that you can and should use an autoresponder to mail out your newsletter. I strongly recommend using aWeber and if you’d like to learn more about How To Write A Newsletter then be sure to pick up my newsletter toolkit at http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com today.

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How to make a newsletter really interesting

Posted by admin on March 7, 2011 in advice on writing my newsletter

Okay, let’s be honest. Rather a lot of newsletters are published more in the interest of the organization writing it than the reader.

It’s a stark reality that too many newsletter editors think about their own interests and… well… rather forget about what their readers might be interested in hearing about.

Now that’s a pity because at its best your newsletter should grip your reader. So I thought a couple of tips on how to make a newsletter really interesting might just help.

Too many newsletters fail to really grip the reader.

Avoid acronyms and industry speak:

Too many newsletters are crammed full of industry acronyms making them almost impenetrable to the outsider.  Whatever else you do, avoid the TLA’s (that’s Three Letter Abrevations ;-) . They just confuse the casual reader and turn them off.

Don’t get too deep:

There’s a place for detailed imparting of knowledge, but that’s rarely in your newsletter.  So keep it top level rather than detailed. Most people want to pick up a newsletter and have a casual read. If they want to do a PHD in your subject then they’ll do that elsewhere.

Invite others to respond:

Rather than your newsletter being all about YOU and your organization, get your readers to contribute. That’s the most sure-fire way of knowing that you’ve gripped your reader. Why else would they respond and get involved.

There are many other tips to making your newsletter really interesting.

Naturally this is just the tip of the iceberg and so if you want to write a newsletter that really captivates your audience then pick up a copy of my How To Write A Newsletter toolkit. It’s crammed full of ideas, tips, advice and suggestions for making your newsletter the best in its field.

You can pick up a copy of my award winning newsletter here http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com

 
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Advice on writing my newsletter

Posted by admin on February 23, 2011 in advice on writing my newsletter

From my own site analytics I can also see that getting “advice on writing my newsletter” is one of the most popular phrases typed in.

So I’m proud to present some simple pieces of advice on writing a newsletter that I know will help speed the creation of your next publication.

What I need is “advice on writing my newsletter”


  • DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE:
    The most important advice is to be absolutely clear about who you are writing a newsletter for?  The worst kind of newsletters are those that ramble from one subject to another, without really having a clear sense of priority or audience.


  • INVOLVE YOUR READERS:
    One of the best pieces of advice on making your newsletter a success is to grab the attention of your readership by involving them in your publication. “Next week we’ll be talking to one reader who has found a new way to do such and such”… or … “Our search will continue for the subscriber who can best provide an answer to this question…”  You get the idea.


  • DON’T AGONIZE OVER IT:
    If you’re the perfectionist type then perhaps you spend too long on each edition of your newsletter. So some top newsletter advice is to get on with it and try to prevent yourself getting bogged down in small details which might not much matter.  Now I’m not encouraging you to take a slap-dash approach – all I’m saying is that it’s too easy to get tied up over some minor point and miss your publication deadline.


  • MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A NEWSLETTER PUBLICATION DEADLINE:
    It’s very easy to tell your reader that you’ll be publishing a monthly newsletter, but to then fail to actually write it. Or perhaps simply fail to publish your newsletter on time!  So make a point of deciding on your publication schedule and frequency and then sticking with it. One good piece of newsletter advice is to work back from the publication date in order that you can get everything done in good time.


In fairness there are a half a dozen more top tips and advice for writing a newsletter, but I can’t fit everything into this blog post.

Advice on where to find great newsletter templates which you can use off-the-shelf or where to find newsletter articles are all examples of the advice you’ll find in my own How To Write A Newsletter Toolkit which you can find here.

So for much more advice on writing newsletters go ahead and check out my classic Newsletter toolkit at http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com now.

 
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Best way to publish a Newsletter online

Posted by admin on February 13, 2011 in Publish a newsletter online

Let’s assume you’ve decided to publish a newsletter online. Good choice. Lower production costs. And easy to distribute.

But how will you ensure your newsletter will actually get read?

One of the problems with online publishing (as opposed to physically placing a newsletter in the hands of your reader) is that you need to ensure that the recipient actually bothers to open the message containing your newsletter. It’s almost as if there is an extra hurdle that they must overcome first.

Today I’m going to look at things you can do to ensure that your electronic newsletter actually gets read and noticed:

  1. Resist creating a traditional Desktop Published newsletter which you simply then turn into a PDF and attach to an e-mail.The problem with this approach is that you are expecting your reader to do something additional in order to read your newsletter. You’re asking them to double-click and open your newsletter in Adobe PDF reader. And unfortunately this can act as a barrier. It is therefore better to ensure that once your prospective reader receives your e-mail they can read the newsletter instantly.


  2. Focus on the content, not the fancy layout. Hey I love great design, but the reality is that Newsletters can easily get caught in spam filters when being sent via e-mail.I therefore strongly recommend using a relatively plain newsletter layout. So for example, this newsletter is about as flashy as you should go. But for reference I frequently also send newsletters in boring old plain text as well, because the spam filters are much less likely to prevent them from being received and therefore read.


  3. Reduce the number of clicks. The fewer additional movements required in order to read the contents of your newsletter, the better. You’ll notice with this newsletter you start to read the story within the initial e-mail. With luck you are sufficiently hooked to click through to the actual content of this newsletter article on my blog. The principle that no one has to click more than once in order to read the content is therefore very important to the success of your newsletter.


Now maybe that you’ve arrived at this article not via my e-mail newsletter, but because you were searching the Internet and came across this online newsletter advice. This is in fact an important principle of publishing and electronic newsletter.

In effect, as a published, you want to have two bites of the cherry. The first is that you e-mail out your newsletter (just as I e-mailed out this newsletter article to those on my mailing list). The second is that some people will come across your article when searching for the solution to a problem, but this can only happen if in addition to e-mailing out your newsletter you posted online as I have done here.

Getting the format of your online newsletter right is likely to be just as important as its content. After all if no one is reading your e-mail and newsletter then there’s no point in publishing it in the first place. I’m Michael green and I have over 25 years experience in writing newsletter articles for all manner of businesses and organisations. You can share in my experience and use it to your own advantage by getting hold of a copy of my best selling How to Writing Newsletter Toolkit here.

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How To Write A Newsletter For Your Church, Synagogue or Mosque

Posted by admin on February 5, 2011 in Church newsletters

One thing is for sure, there’s no better way to bring your faith community together than to write a newsletter to tell the whole congregation what’s going on.

So learning how to write a newsletter for your church, synagogue, mosque or any other faith based group can be an enormously rewarding activity.

Based on my twenty years of newsletter writing experience, I’ve pulled together some of my top tips:

Include a “who’s who” of your community

Obviously you might start with your church leader (rabbi, etc) but you should then widen out your “who’s who” section to include other leading members of the community. This section will work to keep everyone informed about the various roles people take on. I also tend to find that the individuals who you are profiling enjoy it because the congregation then has a better idea who to contact. Your newsletter can remind people about these various positions periodically or in every edition.

Welcome ‘New Members’ in your church newsletter

Everyone likes to feel welcome and you can ensure that your community knows about the various comings and goings by including these details in your church newsletter.

So a “New Members” section, which might also combine those who are leaving your community too, will always go down well in your newsletter.

Fundraising and event update

Most faith communities need to raise money in order to pay for the upkeep of their building and ensure activities continue to run smoothly. One of the things that your church newsletter can be excellent for is to assist in the process of fundraising.

So use your newsletter to write about upcoming events and provide feedback and reports on those which have taken place. Everyone will enjoy being kept up to date and you will enjoy larger participation by your community too.

Get your congregation writing newsletter articles

Once your newsletter is up and running it will be a lot easier to maintain and a lot more interesting to read if more members of the community are involved.

So actively seek contributions from the membership by way of articles, special newsletter features and guest columns.

This will keep your readers involved and will help your community grow.

If you’d like more ideas about How To Write A Newsletter For Your Church, Synagogue or Mosque then check out my newsletter toolkit at http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com

Inside I’ve packed my years of experience in producing newsletters for faith groups like yours and have included my favorite newsletter templates, copyright free articles to get you started and my personal “How To” manual which will show you everything you need to know about How To Write A Newsletter for your church or faith group.  Find it all here.

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Writing A Newsletter For Your Business

Posted by admin on January 29, 2011 in Writing A Newsletter For Your Business

Newsletters are written for all sorts of reasons, but I tend to think that those written to help promote your business can be amongst the most effective.

Businesses usually do hard sell, but writing a newsletter for business can be soft sell

For the most part businesses tend to churn out hard sell material like leaflets and brochures and you can understand why – most business people consider it necessary to sell their products and services very hard.

But there’s another side of marketing which sometimes gets less attention. It’s the softer more opinion forming approach. And it’s precisely what you get when you write a regular business newsletter.

Your business in softer focus by writing a newsletter which creates a good climate of opinion

My tip is to write a newsletter for your business and fill it with useful nuggets of information. Nothing too heavy. The kind of newsletter that you can pick up and read the sections that interest you in just two or three minutes.

Use your business newsletter writing to both educate and inform your reader. But rarely use it to outright SELL!

Think of your business newsletter as a brand builder

For many years I wrote a business newsletter for a particular business, but my rule was 80/20.  I’d use 80% of the space to talk about anything but that business and just 20% to focus on their products and service.

As you can imagine this approach initially raised a few eye-brows amongst the senior executives who wanted to get out there and SELL…SELL…SELL!

And yet over time I won them round. And the reason is that it genuinely worked.

Their sales execs would start returning from meetings and saying, “It was amazing, I’d barely stepped through the door, but the client said that they felt like they already new our company and the services we had to offer.”

What was happening here wasn’t odd at all. For several months and even years before hand these very same prospective clients had been receiving a newsletter that I’d been writing for this business audience. And when our sales guys got in there the soon-to-be client was already half on board.

Write your business newsletter as a door opener

And so you can see that learning how to write a business newsletter can provide a great boost to anyone’s business.

For many more tips and advice on writing a business newsletter check out my How To Write A Newsletter toolkit at http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com today.

This is where you’ll find great advice on Writing A Newsletter For Your Business including templates, articles and a complete ‘How To’ manual.

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Tips to Write a Newsletter

Posted by admin on January 23, 2011 in Write a newsletter

Writing a newsletter can be a terrific way to communicate with your audience, but to make your newsletter truly readable there are a few hints and tips that are well worth bearing in mind.

Know who you are writing the newsletter for?

I think that newsletters work best when you have a very clear idea about who you are writing the newsletter for. So when you sit down to write a newsletter think to yourself – “Who is my audience?”.

As an example let’s just assume you’re writing a newsletter for your Tennis Club. I want you to actually imagine the kind of person who might be reading your newsletter. We already know a few things about them…

  • Your newsletter reader is probably sportier than average – or wants to be.
  • Do they already have advanced knowledge of Tennis or are they newbie?
  • And so on…

Once you’ve defined who your readership is then writing your newsletter will be a lot more straightforward.

Remember you are narrow-casting

What does this mean? Well, unlike other forms of media, newsletters are typically designed for a particular interest group. A sub-section of the general population who are particularly interested or perhaps even expert in your subject matter.

Everything you write in your newsletter should therefore reflect this reality. You’re writing for a bunch of people who may already have a bit or a lot of knowledge and that will mean that your newsletter writing style should reflect this fact.

You don’t need a huge list of newsletter subscribers

I know… this sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but the truth is that 100 highly targeted readers could be more important to you than 1,000 less focused individuals.

Now for your particular market and newsletter those numbers might be wrong. Perhaps you need to have a base readership of 1,000 or even 10,000 to make your newsletter worthwhile – but the basic principle still applies.

In my experience of producing newsletters of all different types and formats across a wide range of sectors, it’s always the quality of your subscriber or distribution list which proves more important than the quantity.

The tips above are just a starting point and there are of course many other considerations involved in learning to write a newsletter. How should you distribute the newsletter? What technology are you going to use to write your newsletter? And so on…

I get into all of this in much more detail in my award-winning How To Write A Newsletter toolkit. Containing classic advice on writing a newsletter this toolkit is designed for you whether you’re writing a newsletter for business or pleasure. You can get more information and pick up a copy at http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com

 
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Fastest Ways to Create A Newsletter

Posted by admin on January 16, 2011 in Fast ways to create a newsletter, Newsletter content

Today I’m going to focus on the fastest ways to create a newsletter from scratch.

Get yourself a decent template

The most obvious thing to say is that if you’re trying to produce your newsletter quickly that’s going to be a lot easier if you already have a off-the-shelf newsletter layout template to use.

This applies equally whether you’re producing your newsletter online or offline. And obviously you will need different types of templates, depending on your final medium for distribution.  Be in no doubt – if you want your newsletter done quickly then working from a ready-made newsletter template will speed things up dramatically.

Have your newsletter content ready to go before you start to layout your newsletter

This might sound like motherhood and apple pie, but I’m always amazed by how many people start work on their newsletter in the full knowledge that they don’t have anywhere near enough articles to fill it.

So rather than trying to put your newsletter together without all material to hand, work to gather the content first. By getting organised in advance you’ll find that you can concentrate on the production of your newsletter much more easily.

What I’m encouraging is for you to group your newsletter work. First gather your article content, next start to lay it out… and so on.

Plan ahead by more than one edition at a time

I previously talked about how you can combine various different methods to ensure that other people help you to work on the content of your newsletter. This is smart because it will provide you with a kind of flexibility that you need to ensure that each edition can be ready well in advance.

And if you need to then you can always swap one article out for another, thereby removing any delay that might otherwise be caused to your newsletter’s production.

Theme each edition of your newsletter

Rather than having each edition of your newsletter tackle a bunch of random subjects, a faster way to create your newsletter is to theme each edition around a  narrower subject.

So for example, if your newsletter is generically about fly-fishing, then you might promise a ‘special edition’ which focuses on fly-fishing rods (in particular).

Plan ahead and get inspired

I’m always on the lookout for subjects or articles that I think will fit neatly within the various newsletters I produce. By thinking ahead I always find the actual production ends up to be pretty straightforward. So be on the lookout, even when you’re not specifically in newsletter production mode.

For tons of other ideas about how to create a newsletter quickly go ahead and check out my how to write a newsletter toolkit here. Inside you’ll find tips, hints and secrets to enable even the most experienced newsletter editor create their newsletter faster. I don’t assume any previous newsletter editing experience and so this toolkit is ideal for newbie to expert. Click here to check it out now.

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How to get someone else to write your newsletter for you without charge!

Posted by admin on January 9, 2011 in Newsletter content

One of the greatest challenges that prevents people from publishing a regular business enhancing newsletter is… you guessed it… CONTENT.

Let’s be honest, you might be able to churn out issue one and two, but after that you might start to need a little extra help. In short, it becomes more than a little tedious to be the editor, sub-editor, designer, publisher and the ONLY contributor!

So what if there was a method of getting others to contribute without you having to do all the hard work?

Actually that’s precisely what I recommend and today I want to give you a few tips to help this happen for you:


  1. Ask people to contribute an article. Yep, I know, you’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked. Right?  Well there might just be another way to approach them.  For example, most people respond better to a deadline then they do to a generic request – so don’t just say could you come up with an article.Ask them to tell you what it will be about and critically agree a delivery time. That way they’ll be much more likely to get it done.


  2. Remind them that they agreed to contribute as the deadline approaches. I run a blog which has people from various different departments in a single company contribute. In the old days I used to struggle to get them to meet our deadlines, even when the time scale had been agreed in advance.Using Outlook I wrote each of them two emails. The first reminded them that they’d agreed to contribute an article for X date. The second nudged them a couple of days before the deadline. I set up these emails for three months in advance, but used the handy Delay Delivery function in Outlook (you’ll find it under Options / Delay Delivery).  Then I forgot about it. But they didn’t and sure enough we went three months with fresh articles being posted bang on time.


  3. Record someone chatting to you about something that comes naturally to them. This is a great way to create an article when someone might otherwise be too busy to write it themselves. Approach someone who you would like to have contribute to your newsletter and ask if you can record a conversation with them.  It’s an idea to give them a list of questions that you plan to ask.Next simply transcribe the conversation and boil it down into your newsletter article. Instant’ish content that you won’t have to have created personally from scratch. Some of the best articles I’ve ever written were actually produced in this way – because the person that I was interviewing was relaxed and simply answering questions on a subject that was completely natural to them.


  4. Here’s an additional tip if you do record audio. You don’t need to even be the person to transcribe the 30 minute recording in order to turn it into an interview. Instead you can hire someone – who may well be on the other side of the world – to transcribe the whole thing for you and for next to nothing. Seriously, this type of service will often cost you no more than a few dollar and you can hire a freelancer via sites like www.peopleperhour.com or www.Elance.com You can handle the whole transaction online via one of these websites. Send them your audio file and receive the finished product back via email, ready to drop straight into your next addition of your newsletter.


Needless to say there are dozens of other ways to dramatically speed up your newsletter content production. Like the method that involves getting permanent contributors to join in just for the fun of it – this really works well. So if you’d like to find out more about making your newsletter run on auto-pilot then it’s a good idea to pick up a copy of my award-winning How To Write A Newsletter toolkit.


This newsletter toolkit contains loads of neat ways to ensure that your newsletter becomes a roaring success.  Making sure that you always have high quality content available at the drop of a hat is just one of the many secrets.


Find out more about using the How To Write A Newsletter toolkit for your newsletter production here.

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