The Reference Magazine

Here’s the bottom line when it comes to advertising your website on the Internet: it’s expensive.  Because this is so you have to be creative and find a way to advertise cheaply, or for free.  One of the cheaper ways of advertising your website is through the use of a newsletter.

What? You’re not very good at writing.  No big deal.  If you don’t want to do the work yourself there is a large pool of freelance writers dieing to get some work, as well as some experience.  You should have no trouble at all finding one who will do the work for you at a very affordable price.  However you decide to go about having the letter written, make sure and follow a few guidelines.

Distribute the letter regularly

It is important that you choose one day a month on which the newsletter needs to be finished and emailed to customers.  If you only send the newsletter out whenever you feel like it or whenever you remember to, you’re running the risk of alienating your customers.  Many customers will look at this inconsistency as disorganization within your business, or even a desperate ploy for money.  Once a month should be frequent enough, but make sure and stay consistent.

Have a purpose

You need to make sure that there is a purpose behind your newsletter.  Your purpose could be just about anything, such as a sale, a promotion, a contest, any changes within the company, etc…make sure there is something.  The first time you send out a newsletter with nothing interesting to say will be the last time anybody bothers to read it.

It will also be a good idea to make sure that the writing is easy to read and to understand.  Writing for newsletters, especially electronic ones, is much different than the formal writing most people learn in school.  Newsletter writing has to be short and concise; the paragraphs should be no more than a few sentences long.  People don’t want to have to spend a long time reading a newsletter, so make sure yours can be read in less than five minutes.

Content ideas

Within your newsletter you can include reviews of the products you sell and testimonials.  You can discuss upcoming products that your customers might want to check out, as well as provide reviews of them.  You can also publish special holiday addition newsletters during the holiday season which will be a great boost to your revenue.

Writing a newsletter, or having one written, for you business is beneficial because it allows you to stay in close contact with your customers, reminding them of your business while not making them feel burdened by a hard sell approach.  It will take you a while to buildup the customer base you need in order to produce one, but if you make sure and request an email address from customers when they make a purchase on your website, you’ll have a big enough list quick enough to justify publishing a newsletter.  It will be one of the cheaper forms of advertising that you won’t soon forget.