How to Build and Manage a Newsletter

Every Internet business needs its own newsletter. The extremely low cost and ease of producing your own e-zine makes it a marketing tool you can't afford to miss.

"But I'm not a writer!" you say.

No problem, there are dozens of top writers who would LOVE for you to use their articles.

"But I'm not a whiz with a word processor!"

No problem. The best e-zines are simple ones that look good in any e-mail program.

"But I don't have any subscribers!"

Don't worry. There are easy ways to quickly build your newsletter's audience. You will be surprised at how fast you can get 200, 800, 1,000, 4,000 subscribers. Many of these regular readers are virtually guaranteed to become your best customers.

Write your own articles. It is easier than it sounds. Top freelance writer Gary Christensen says to simply write a page of instructions that someone else can follow. "Take something you know how to do," Gary says, "and write down a step-by-step method for getting it done." You've probably already done that for employees, fellow workers, or friends.

Now all you have to do it write your ideas in short sentences and plain words. You don't have to write like a great novelist. Just write the way you talk. You can have someone else look over your one page article and make suggestions. Co-workers, the English teacher down the street, your cousin the journalism student, your spouse--all make great make-shift editors for your newsletter.

If writing just isn't your thing, try telling your information to someone else and have them write it. If all else fails, Kevin Nunley will write your article for $175 (he ghost writes many of the articles used by some of the Net's top experts). Get articles from other writers--FREE!

Most professional writers on the Internet do not get a penny for their articles. Instead, they let editors use the articles for free. Each article contains a short ad for the author at the bottom. Writers use this free ad space to promote their own products and services.

Feel free to use Kevin's articles posted at http://DrNunley.com and http://BizGuru.com/. As you surf the Net, look for articles you like. Shoot the writer a quick e-mail asking if it is ok for you to reprint their article. Major magazines usually have a reprint office. You can get permission to reprint their articles for a very small fee.

No one can copyright ideas. There is nothing wrong with finding a good article and re-writing the information in your own words. Frankly, that is how most professional writers work (it's called research!). It is also a good idea to include a question and answer section in your newsletter. Print a question that customers often ask along with yourself answering the question. This is a good service for readers and presents you as an expert. This helps readers to feel like they know you.

Personal trust-building is important to getting sales online. How to format your e-zine. There are an endless number of ways to design your e-zine, but here is the most common and perhaps the most successful. Keep lines about as long as these. Many email programs break up lines longer than 65 characters giving your newsletter a messy unreadable look. Put a hard carriage return at the end of each line (press enter at the end of each line). This lets your copy stay intact on email readers that don't recognize wrapped lines.

Save your e-mail newsletter as a plain text file (DOS text and ASCII are both fine). It's too early in the game to save your newsletter in html as many of your subscribers don't have email programs that read html. We get several newsletters like this that appear as just a bunch of nonsense code. They probably look terrific in their publisher's email reader, but they fall apart completely in ours.

Keep your newsletter short, one to three pages is fine. Anything longer than five pages will usually arrive as an attachment to your subscribers on AOL. Unless your subscriber is unusually dedicated to reading your every issue, they will probably delete your newsletter without downloading the attachment. Many of your subscribers are already getting several e-zines, as many as 30 or 40 per week. They appreciate it if your e- zine is short with articles that get to the point.

How to get subscribers for your newsletter. You can get a large number of your subscribers by putting a sign-up box on your web site. In fact, it is a very good idea to put a small place to sign up for your e-zine on every page of your web site. We have built our newsletter list to many thousands over a short period of time simply by having a sign-up box on the front page of our site.

You can get the code for your own sign-up box free at http://www.freedback.com/. You can get hundreds of new subscribers FAST by registering your newsletter with these e-zine search engines and databases. The E-ZineZ Search Engine: The search engine exclusively for sites publishing E-Zines. http://www.e-zinez.com The John Labovitz's E-Zine List http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/submit.html The Directory of Ezines from Lifestyles Publishing http://www.lifestylespub.com eZINESearch http://www.ezinesearch.com The List http://www.liszt.com Also take advantage of one of the Net's oldest free announcement services: The New List at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/new-list/

Things you can do NOW: Use your favorite word processor to put together a "dummy" version of your newsletter. This newsletter template can help you quickly put together future issues. We find that we can delete last week's articles, paste in this week's articles, and have our newsletter on its way to subscribers in less than 15 minutes. Right now! Add an offer to subscribe to your newsletter on all your other sales materials, in all your print ads, and on your voice mail message.

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COMING NEXT in Lesson #7: "Select Your Products and Target Your Market" What sells well on the Internet? Are there different ways to sell different products and services? How can I find the best products to sell on the Internet? How can I position my current products and services to sell on the Internet? We will answer all these questions and more in the next lesson.

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