Writing a newsletter
(aka ezine or e-zine) on a regular basis is a great way to keep
people returning to your website. Email marketing, as it is also
known, still works - despite the issues of spam. There are many
tools and resources that show you how to write a newsletter.
How to Write A
Newsletter (Publish an Ezine) to Get Site Visitors To Return (and More)!
How many visitors
to your site ever return?
Not as many
as you would like, I bet!
The thing is,
it's a lot easier and less time-consuming to promote your site to
people who have *already* visited. So how do you do that? Well,
you could:
Ask people
to bookmark your site;
Get people
to make your site their homepage (your site had better be good!);
Make your
site the next Yahoo! or Blogger or Hotmail (ideal, but not too
easy); or...
Publish
an ezine or newsletter!
Yes, publish
a newsletter (and get people to subscribe)!
Writing a newsletter
is the BEST WAY to stay in touch with site visitors and existing
customers.
At the very
least you can remind them about your website on a regular basis.
But, even better, you get a chance to develop trust between
your visitors and yourself.
And on the
faceless Internet, trust is everything!
Visit this website
Visit Dr.Mani
Sivasubramanian's Ezine Marketing Centre. Dr Mani's ezine
resource has plenty of free information on ezine publishing.
To quote from
the site, Ezine Marketing Centre lets you:
"Create
email newsletters, build huge opt in email lists and get advanced
ezine marketing tips, strategies and secrets right now. Create email
newsletters or ezines to promote your e-business and explode profits
- Advertising tips techniques secrets ebook for high profit email
list building, getting, buying tips and techniques to increase email
list profits..."
You get the
idea.
And, Dr Mani
sells plenty of information too, for those willing to invest money
(as well as time) into their ezine publishing efforts.
Then promote! promote!
promote!
As with your
website, you need to promote your newsletter and get people to
sign-up. By all means start with your friends and family, and
then try these legitimate methods (please don't send unsolicited
mail - SPAM wastes everyone's time!):
You MUST
promote your newsletter on your own site
Put the
newsletter sign-up form at the top left or top right of as many
of your pages as possible. Offer an incentive to sign-up, sell
the benefits of your newsletter (first notice of the next sale,
for instance, or chance to win something)
Use pop-up
windows to encourage sign-ups. A little bit controversial, this,
but pop-ups *do* increase subscriber sign-ups!
You CAN
announce your newsletter to the world
Join various
newsletter announcement mailing lists, follow their announcement
rules, and announce, announce, announce (There are loads of these
lists at https://www.topica.com .)
Okay, okay
your newsletter may be too humble for all this promotion, but at
the very least make it easy to sign-up on your website. Oh! One
other way of promoting your newsletter:
You SHOULD
make your newsletter a great read!
This is possibly
the most important aspect of publishing a newsletter. Here are a
few points to consider - try and make sure you:
Writing a newsletter
is a bit difficult not to do yourself, I admit.
What I mean
is that you can find many Perl/CGI scripts that allow you to run
a newsletter, including subscribe and unsubscribe functions, from
your own site. Subscribe Me Lite, written by CGI Script Center,
is probably the best free resource to do this. And you can
always do a search at CGI Resources:
You can find
out more about email publishing from the following excellent resources
(Available in the full version of this
article - request your copy below.) And you can find out the
difference between loyal
readers or subscribers here.
One last thing... don't
forget SPAM filters
I originally
wrote this article in 2001, when no-one had even heard of the expression
spam-filter. Now, to counter the un-relenting spam that we all receive,
spam-filters are everywhere.
What does
this mean to you, the budding newsletter publisher?
Well, it means
that you have to take great care now in what you write in your newsletter.
If you don't, your publishing efforts will be wasted as the spam-filters
will, wrongly, block your newsletter. And few of your subscribers
will read it.
So don't forget
the spam filters when you write your newsletter! Do a check to see
if you need to change any part of it, first, before you send your
mailing out.
Writing
a newsletter on a regular basis is a great way to keep people returning
to your website. There are many tools and resources that show
you how. And there are many sites that will publish your newsletter
for free (you can even find free content, for goodness sake).
Publish a
newsletter and get to know your site visitors - and then let them
get to know you! Be original, if you can, and do make sure your
ezine gets past the spam-filters.
Reminder: This
page is about how to write a newsletter or publish an e-zine -- please share this page!