Search
Recommended Products
Related Links


 

 

Informative Articles

21 Free or Low-cost ways to Promote your On-line business
After developing my product, having not much in my cookie jar to spend on promotion, I researched and found a lot of very effective promotional ideas that brought me success with my personalized cartoon business. 1) In the beginning... ...

FRIDGE Magnet Marketing... "stickiness strategies."
FRIDGE Magnet Marketing... "stickiness strategies." "As much as things change they stay the same." As an OFFline marketer it's interesting to observe a trend emerging on the web. What's this trend? Well, what's now happening is that highly...

Go With Quality Over Quantity And Your Business Will Prosper
In the early days of developing my home business, I went for the numbers instead of focusing on targeting prospects. It took me a while to appreciate the importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for the big numbers (quantity). ...

Make Money Online: Work from the Comfort of Your Own Home
Copyright 2005 Harley Darby With so many ways to make money online, what is the best way to work from the comfort of your own home without breaking a sweat? To make money online requires skill and patience. This article will reveal the...

The New State Of The Art Method For Making Money With Joint Ventures
If you are anything like me, you spend a lot of time researching joint ventures and going through the chore of analysing all the joint venture proposals you get on a daily basis in your inbox. I've often wondered if there was an easier way to find...

 
Writing Newsletters Online: How to Get it Right

A strange thing has been happening to newsletters online.

They have been turning into either a) promotional emails or b) web pages delivered by email.

I’m sure you know what I mean. Go back a couple of years and you could look forward to receiving your favorite newsletter in the knowledge that the newsletter itself would contain some great content...something you could read and enjoy, or learn from.

You could open the newsletter in your email and read it, from beginning to end. There were articles, reviews or just personal rant...well written and interesting.

In short, there was real value, right there in the newsletter.

These newsletters, where significant value lies in the body of the newsletter itself, are becoming harder and harder to find.

Instead, more and more companies and organizations are using their ‘newsletters’ as a promotional ploy to drive you to pages on their sites.

In one way, it’s understandable. As anyone with a newsletter knows, if you have one or two links to your site in the newsletter, your site traffic really spikes on the days you send out the newsletter.

When you see that, it’s tempting to optimize the entire newsletter – its format and content – as a means to drive additional traffic and generate more sales.

As a result, you now see numerous newsletters where an article is not included in its entirety. You simply get a teaser and a link to a page on their site. Or else you get a ‘newsletter’ that looks


just like the site interface, with all the various navigation links and promotional messages included.

This may be great if you want to maximize the traffic to your site each time you send out a newsletter. But there is a catch.

The catch is, if there is less value in your newsletter itself, your subscribers will quickly begin to become bored with it. After all, with a zillion other promotional emails cluttering our inboxes – why pay special attention to a ‘newsletter’ that is simply another sales pitch?

The real value of a newsletter that contains valuable content is long-term. You’ll get more word-of-mouth, you’ll get higher open-rates, and you’ll get long-term readers who look forward to your newsletter, for years ahead.

Is there a compromise? Sure there is. A valuable newsletter doesn’t need to be text-only without a single link, or devoid of any promotional elements.

Just make sure that every newsletter contains some valuable content, in its entirety. Give people a real reason to look forward to receiving it, opening it and reading it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author and speaker. You can access all his newsletter articles on writing for the web at his www.ExcessVoice.com site. You'll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at www.FreelanceWritingSuccess.com