Chapter 7 - Creating Newsletters That Sell & Inform

Running you own free Newsletter or Ezine can bring huge benefits to your website and profits. Newsletters are one of the most important components for you to drive traffic to your website and build your online business.

The popularity of these newsletters is based on the need for information. The main reason people are online is because they want and need information and that is exactly what newsletters provide. Newsletters are mostly delivered via email, some however are delivered as HTML pages. Newsletters which are delivered as HTML pages still utilize email, as the webmaster will email subscribers notifying them that a new issue is ready.

There are many advantages of starting your own newsletter, however newsletters do require a bit of work to get started and maintain so they may not be for everyone.

The two main advantages are being able to maintain regular contact, and being able to build a relationship with your subscribers.

Newsletters allow you to maintain regular contact with your website visitors, this is vital to success, because rarely do people buy on there first visit, in fact people usually have to be exposed to an offer several times before they actually buy. A Newsletter allows you to keep the connection with your site visitors reminding them of how your product is suited for them.

Newsletters give you the "excuse" to send potential customers emails packed with articles and off course your sales message. Newsletters are great for building trust and relationships online, if your newsletter provides regular quality content which your subscribers can really use, they will begin to trust your opinion and also they will begin to feel that they know you. This is important as developing relationships is vital for any business.

The other, often overlooked, advantage of having a newsletter, is the income it can generate, not from selling your products and services but from selling advertising space in it. You do need a medium to large subscriber base before other businesses will be interested in advertising but this is not that hard to achieve, especially if it is regularly full of quality content. You can earn a few hundred every month just from ads if you play your cards rights.

Your online customers will eventually become your offline customers if they trust the information you regularly send them. Put simply, a newsletter is your way of helping people. If you help people online, eventually they will buy from you.

However, running your own newsletter involves considerable amount of work. It is vital that you regularly write a lot of quality content before your next send-out. Besides, ideally a newsletter should be sent out every week or at least every fortnight. This is not always easy. In fact it's never easy; the next thing that adds to your work load when it comes to newsletters is maintaining your email addresses. Many of the email addresses may be wrong. Maintaining a list of working email addresses is crucial.

7.1 Advantages of newsletters as a marketing tool

Just as in the olden days, trust builds relationships, and relationships build sales. Used properly, newsletters can help build business relationships based on trust. And the key word is trust--trustworthiness in content, subject lines, mailing lists, regularity, and ability to quickly subscribe and unsubscribe. Given below are some of the key advantages of newsletters:

Newsletters demonstrate value

Newsletters deliver valuable information that solves the day-to-day problems of readers, helps them stay on top of industry trends, and saves time by distilling practical information such as real-world best practices and industry advances from many sources.