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

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.