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WRITING A GREAT ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER

In this world, there are definitely 2 types of electronic newsletters. One type grabs the readers and actively (usually dramatically) improves your sales, while the other languishes on a screen for only a matter of seconds before it heads straight for the trash bin.

Now, you want an electronic newsletter that will act as a great marketing tool for you and that will seriously raise your sales. Most companies who have good electronic newsletters attest that the increased sales arising from the newsletter are actually the final step in terms of the newsletter development.

The world of sales is like a pyramid with a staircase to the top. You climb each step with your customers, and then when you get towards the top, your sales simply start to take off. But before you start scribing your electronic newsletter, you need to be aware of its purpose.

AIMS OF AN ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER

Writing an electronic newsletter is not just about reaching your customers and potential customers. There is a whole lot more to it than that. In fact, a great electronic newsletter will achieve the following without you even having to try too hard:

1. Establish and/or consolidate your brand or service.

2. Determine that you are a leader in your field.

3. Prove that your company is one that has integrity and commitment, and is an authority.

4. Demonstrate your professionalism and knowledge.

5. Increase your presence on the Internet with associated, hidden benefits.

6. Create a trusting relationship between your customers/potential customers and yourself.

7. Bring customers to you!

Now with all of those benefits, it is easy to simply stop reading now, rush off, and create your own newsletter, and then sit back, waiting for all of the good things to happen. Now, here is the bad news: if you don’t write a great electronic newsletter, but one that is simply average and lacks any proper, appropriate content and graphics, then your newsletter will demonstrate that your company is not very professional, hasn’t taken the time to learn how to create a good/great newsletter, and as a result, make customers wonder why they should use your company? They would prefer to go to a company that shows them some respect!

HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT FOR YOUR READERS

Although we usually talk about ‘Have a little respect’ when it comes to your customers, you need to have not just a ‘little’ respect, you need to have a lot of respect for your readers and potential readers; otherwise, your newsletter will simply be thrown into the trash bin and not be read. People have busy lives. We all have to work hard, to cope with changing, and often, quite difficult times. This means that people’s time is precious, so they will make or find the time to read good quality material that is relevant and of interest to them, but they will not make any time available to read a newsletter that fails to address them appropriately. This is why respect is so important when it comes to your readers.

Know Your Readers

Knowing your readers shows them respect. All you have to do is to take a little time to know who they are, what is of interest to them, and what will reach them directly. One fundamental error that is often made is to use an electronic newsletter as a platform for views or as a mouthpiece, serving only the writer and not the reader. But your readers are not dumb; they will soon pick up on this and press that delete key before they have finished the first paragraph. So you have to get to know them. Now this may seem like an impossible challenge; if you want to send your electronic newsletter out to hundreds, if not thousands, of customers, then how can you possibly ‘know’ them?

Well, you don’t have to know their birthdays or what they like to eat at Thanksgiving, but what you do need to know is what will interest them.

What kind of information are they looking for? Do they need to have legal updates? Is there any legislation that may impact on their businesses or lives that you need to be telling them about?

You also need to consider what they will appreciate in terms of how you and your business can help them. Are there any hidden benefits to using your business? Can you solve some of the complexities of life for them? Are there any direct benefits that your particular style of business can bring to them?

Only when you know your readers and can have a good understanding of what they want are you in a position to start thinking about the style and the content of your electronic newsletter. True, this can be a daunting task, but if you are struggling with it, then enlist the help of a friend/colleague who can ensure that you are on the right track: remember that two heads are always better than one!

CHOOSING THE STYLE OF YOUR NEWSLETTER

The style and look of your newsletter is important and one that should not be overlooked. Basically, your style needs to reflect the fact that this is a professional document, not some high school newsletter (many of which actually look pretty professional now).

You need to establish a corporate style in the newsletter, no matter how small your business actually is. Each newsletter needs to be set out in the same style, be written in the same style and have the same format. This ensures that the identity of the newsletter starts to emerge, so that when it pops up in someone’s inbox, they immediately recognize it as a ‘good read’ and will open it. If you write using different logos, graphics that change dramatically, and so on, then your newsletter may never ever be opened. The trick is to stay consistent!

Graphics:

Graphics are really important when it comes to your newsletters. Many writers of electronic newsletters have taken the time to get to know and directly target their readers, have written content that is professional, relevant and interesting, but let themselves down by using clip-art-type graphics that are simply not sophisticated enough for today’s market.

Graphics are important because they can highlight your point, break up a page of text that may seem too heavy and dull otherwise, and simply brighten up a page. But using cheap, rudimentary graphics can simply ‘dumb down’ your newsletter and make it seem cheap. It is far better to use some pictures or images that are more professional looking, even if they cost a few dollars. Yet there is another danger with graphics: if you use a lot of images at a high resolution, then your electronic newsletter can start to become really big. So big in fact that people will delete it rather than bother to read it, so try to keep your electronic newsletter to a realistic size, some 1-2 megabytes maximum. If you get up to 5-6 megabytes or bigger, then people may simply view it as too big and send it to the electronic trash can, no matter how good your content is.

Layout:

Always place the most important information at the start of your electronic newsletter. So have a title for your first article that really grabs people’s attention. Make sure it is short enough for them to be able to se it before opening your mail; therefore, keep it brief.

Your first page should also contain certain important information, such as your contact details, as well as an option to stop subscribing to the newsletter. Now doesn’t that seem strange? You want people to read your fantastic electronic newsletter, don’t you? So why on Earth would you want to make it really easy for them to stop subscribing to it?

Well, if you show that you are really laid back about someone unsubscribing to your newsletter, then you have not just shown that you respect your readers, you also show that you think that the content of your newsletter is of worth; you have made it easy to unsubscribe because you know that people will not do this, that your newsletter is worth reading!

Obviously, there may be some people who feel that they don’t want to read your newsletter and may indeed unsubscribe, but do not have a faint heart. It is definitely worth taking the risk and being confident. So let them unsubscribe if they don’t want to read it; after all it is their loss, isn’t it?

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WHY A BLOG CAN GENERATE LEADS

A blog is a fantastic tool. Think of it as a tool, a tool you can use to get leads to any type of business you may have.

Blogs are tools that need to be in use regularly to keep them working for you. They do not do the work for you, but they do help you to accomplish some of the hardest aspects of your job: getting leads and getting sales from them.

No matter what you may be selling or promoting, a blog is a tool to enable you to get those leads. Since there are millions of potential customers available to you online, you likely want to attract as many of them as possible to your website, where you can promote your product or service and get sales.

Websites can be difficult to manage and they often leave the customer with an impersonal feel. Here are a few problems with websites, in general:

Most websites are not changing

The home page gives great information and the rest of the pages help to sell the item. This is usually a good thing, but can keep search engines at bay and limit the personality of the website.

Websites make it difficult for you to communicate with your readers

You can only communicate through email, rather than the easy and helpful communication of comments.

Websites can only be bookmarked so many times

One time on each page is not enough to help with most social ranking.

Websites are expensive

Yes, expensive to manage - especially if you plan to have many pages of content available to the consumer.

For many, blogs are more enjoyable and even easier to manage than a standard website

Even if you do not know any HTML, you can run your own blog.

For all of these reasons, it is often a good decision to incorporate the use of a blog to help you with lead generation. Any type of business can use a blog. You can even start out with a free blog, one that you do not have to invest any money in whatsoever.

HOW TO GET STARTED

If you have never used a blog in the past, it may be best to start a free blog from one of the popular blogging resources available online. The two more popular options are Blogger.com and WordPress.com Both of these are very easy to use and they allow you to get started literally in minutes. Later, you can invest in paid blogging programs once you learn a bit about how to use them and how to personalize them for your business.

The benefits of blogging are many. Keep these things in mind when you set out to establish your blog.

Blogging gives you constant new pages that search engines like Google love. This is a fantastic reason to incorporate a blog into your business because it is an easy way to get regular search engine ranking benefits that websites often keep limiting.

While blogging is easy enough to do, keep in mind that it does take a regular commitment. If you do not have the ability or time to manage your blog, there is help available. Many professional bloggers ghost write blogs for individuals. You can hire someone to do this type of work rather inexpensively.

Communicating through a blog is essential. It is a much less formal way of speaking to others, and it does require a lot of commitment on your part. Not only do you need to keep posts going, but you also have to keep the dialogue going too! This can be rather difficult to do in some respects. Getting to chat with consumers is not something many people like to do.

Now that you know a few of the important aspects of blogging, it is time to get it in place. Once you have registered your blog and you have established a web presence for it (depending on the method you will be blogging on, you may need to have hosting set up) it is time to start posting.

What will you talk about? To generate leads to your website, you will want to create blog posts that somehow, even indirectly, relate back to your website's topic and overall goals. For example, let us say you have a website selling dog products. Your blog should be dog (or at least pet) related.

When you do this, you display your skills in this way and you establish yourself as an expert in the field. Do you need to be an expert to get sales and traffic? In most cases, the answer to this is yes simply because people look for people they can count on to buy from. If you are not an expert, why would they want to buy from you?

Start planning a few posts!

HOW TO DRIVE TRAFFIC WITH A BLOG

With your blog in place, the next step in the process is simple: get traffic to the blog so that you can move the traffic to your website. If people get to your blog, they are already highly targeted leads. When they get to your website, they are often times ready to buy. This is, of course, only if you can get traffic to the blog. Here are some of the most important ways to increase traffic to your blog, and in exchange, get traffic to your website where you are selling or promoting items.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Throughout your blog, you will need to invest in search engine optimization. This does not have to be labor intensive, hard to do or something you have to research extensively to get right. Like any other website, a blog needs to have the most appropriate keywords placed throughout it, so that search engines can find the site and rank it appropriately.

Keywords are the words you (and those interested in your topic) are most likely to type into a search engine to get to your website. These words most accurately describe your website's topic. To learn which words are most appropriate, use a free keyword research tool to help you. These are available throughout the web, including at Google's website and WordTracker.com.

Type in a few words associated with your website. In our earlier example of dog products, your may have keywords like: dog accessories, dog clothing, dog training, dog collars, pet clothing, house training dogs, and so on. You will receive words that people most often punch into the search engine when they are looking at this information. It is essential to have appropriate keywords throughout your website since this helps Google and other search engines to find your website and to rank it well.

HOW TO USE KEYWORDS

Once you know what these keywords are, what do you do with them? Here are some ways you will want to include keywords in your blog to attract search engines appropriately.

Use keywords in each of the blog posts you put up. Keywords should not have overuse in any post. Try to keep keywords under 2 or 3 percent of any post.

Use a keyword in the title of each blog post: this is key to search engine ranking!

Try to incorporate a keyword in the first 90 characters of the blog post you are writing.

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SECRETS TO RESPONSIVE LISTS

Every online marketer understands that the best way to generate sales is to have a large email list of subscribers. After they build that list, however, many marketers begin to recognize that the list is large, but it doesn't function to create sales. That's because it wasn't built with the idea of creating a responsive list, and instead focused on quantity instead of quality.

The time to start building the right type of list is just as you get started, but even if you've already got a list, you can still tweak your business processes to get a better response after the fact.

PAY ATTENTION TO HOW YOU CREATE THAT LIST

The biggest secret isn't that you need a huge number of people on the list, but that you want a better conversion of subscribers to customers. You can do this by paying attention to how you are creating the list, how you are marketing it, and what is actually happening when you send out an offer. Here are some basic things you should know about a responsive mailing list.

Buying email addresses doesn't work

For the most part, you can buy thousands of emails on another person's contact list and still generate very poor sales. The secret to creating a good list is to build one up naturally and organically so that people have a good relationship with you and your business.

Single opt-ins can be fooled

You may put out an opt-in list and be congratulating yourself on the number of sign-ups, that is, until you find out many are fakes or generated by online bots. Learn how to use a double opt-in strategy to build a better list.

Targeted demographics are better than niches Demographics tell you the reasons why people buy, while niches just assume everyone on your list is interested. You will have better luck by understanding the psychology of your list, rather than just relying on categoric niches, for email marketing.

Automate what you can

There are plenty of products and services to help streamline your online business. There's no reason why you should be struggling with responding to each and every email, unless there is some reason for personally responding. Learning about the technologies and tools available can save you valuable time and increase your bottom line.

People do have a price

It's up to you to figure out what that price is. It may be that they are willing to subscribe if you give them a free short report. It might be that they will do it to enter a contest. It might be that they will reply to an email when they see a savings in a product they like or when they get your personal attention. Pay attention and do what works for you.

ORGANIC IS BETTER

Organic, or naturally occurring lists, generally are quite a bit more responsive than lists created by buying email addresses from other marketers. The reasons for this are that bought lists can contain a number of bad email addresses or contain people on them who are getting so much email from other marketers, that they ignore everything as spam. One last reason, and the biggest reason, to use organic lists is that you can be liable for sending email to an address that hasn't opted in to having their email published.

When you build your own organic lists, you know that the person has specifically requested to subscribe to your list and are genuinely interested in either you or your business.

WAYS TO CREATE ORGANIC LISTS

In this age of social networking, you will find that it isn't as hard as it used to be to create an organic list. People are networking more and more online, and all you need to figure out is how to put the power of the Internet at your fingertips. Don't just put an opt-in form on your website and expect that using that simple action will generate a large organic list for you. People will still have to find your site, and if your traffic is low, this can be a major stumbling block. The solution is to not just advertise your opt-in on your site, but to do it elsewhere where traffic that is interested in your niche congregates. That's where social networking comes into play.

Get in the habit of building an online presence on various social networking sites. You will have to post a profile and start networking with people on these sites to hook into potential customers. Once you have them interested in either who you are or some common interests (related to what you market), you can start posting updates or links to things that you want to promote to get traffic from these sites back to your opt-in offers.

PLACES TO NETWORK ONLINE

www.facebook.com

Facebook has a very crisp, business-like interface that helps you to maintain a more professional image for your profile. Join groups, network with likeminded people, or even advertise within Facebook. It's a great way to find demographics very quickly.

www.twitter.com

For people who don't have enough time to put up a full profile, just hop onto Twitter. Using 140 characters in each update, you can build up a quick following without too much time involved.

www.linkedin.com

This is more of a business directory, but also a great place to network.

DEMOGRAPHICS ARE KEY

Internet marketers will tell you that when you go to set up a website or online business, you have to pick a hot niche. That is completely true, as without a hot niche, you have less chance of generating enough traffic to make good sales.

However, when you go to market that niche via email lists, you will find that you will need to market to demographics more than to a niche. In other words, you will want to focus on getting up close and personal with your prospective buyers, instead of just assuming that they want to buy your products because they signed up to your list.

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

Demographics are typically segregated into a few marketing categories: gender, age, income bracket, ethnicity, and education level. Of course, you can set up any number of demographic variables to help you market to your niche, but these are pretty standard. Just knowing several of these demographics about who is visiting your site can substantially help you to increase the responsiveness of your list. How? The trick is to send emails that talk personally to a specific group's needs and provides that demographic with solutions to the problems that they see day to day.

For instance, say you are marketing laptops. You want a demographic of college-aged students or business professionals who require this piece of equipment. You may also find that they need to be within a specific income bracket. You can put up surveys on your site and reward people for identifying who they are and what demographic they fall into. After that, you take that information and you set up different lists.

The one with college-aged students gets emails on how laptops can help them to complete assignments in between class or to take their studies with them anywhere. The email that goes to business people may target people who are in their cars (like real estate agents) or who spend a lot of time travelling for business. In that case, the biggest benefit is that it will increase their work productivity as they get the essentials of their business travel done.

SPLIT YOUR MAILING LISTS INTO DEMOGRAPHICS

Once you start to figure out why people are buying, you can start to separate people into different mailing lists, according to their demographics. You can set up one list for 18- to 25-year olds and another for those over 30.

Next time you want to send out a promotion for a particular product or service, you will have a good idea what psychological triggers work best with either list.

TECHNOLOGY TO TRACK RESPONSIVENESS

Once you start building mailing lists for marketing purposes, you will find that there are tools and services out there to help simplify the process. There's no reason why you have to learn how to build a responsive mailing list from scratch when you can use the tools and services provided by others. Just make sure that they are simplifying your life and not complicating it. Here are some tools or services that can help you do just that, while encouraging your subscribers to be more responsive.

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HOW EFFECTIVE SALES PAGES WORK

For those Internet marketers who have steady traffic coming to their websites but lack sales, it may be in the delivery where the problem exists. A sales page is the medium you can use to convert visitors into paying customers.

It is common for many Internet marketers to struggle at this point. They have worked hard to build up their traffic and they feel that that should be enough. The problem is, people are still too easily able to leave the website. They have not learned what is in it for them. A sales page can help you to do this.

There are several ways to use a sales page. One of the most effective methods is to develop one page for each product you are selling on your website. For example, if you have four different eBooks you are promoting, you could develop a sales page for each one. When visitors get to your website, they are able to follow links to get to the sales page of the eBook they are interested in.

You can also create sales pages that work as landing pages in that visitors will come directly to this page in order to learn more about the product or products you are offering, and hopefully, purchase them.

There are several key benefits to using sales pages:

1. They have a sales message that is usually frowned upon when used on most other forms of Internet marketing, especially in social marketing areas.

2. They present your product in a direct way. People know what the product is.

3. They aid you in letting the customer know what is in it for them. People want to know what they are getting from your product before they buy.

4. They give specific detail of what is included in the product or service that you are offering. These details will win the readers of the sales page over.

5. They ask for the sale: do not forget this part!

DOING THE WRITING?

Most people cringe at the idea of writing sales copy. Most people do not have the ability to write this type of copy without first learning how to do so. You have several options.

You can invest the time needed to learn how to write sales pages. This is highly recommended if you will be writing many of them. The good news is that there are many resources available both online and offline that can help you to learn this skill. Tutorials online are specifically helpful since they are designed to help you learn how to write sales copy for the Web in particular.

Another option you have is to hire someone to do the work for you. Professional copywriters for the Web are readily available. You will need to pay a decent amount of money for their services, but this can help to make the process a bit easier.

DOING IT JUST ONE TIME

One thing to keep in mind when you have multiple products to offer on your website is that you can create a basic template of a sales page to use and then customize it for each of the products you have. For example, the structure, the pictures, and even some of the headlines can remain the same from one product to the next. The difference is simply in the wording.

Customizing pages in this method is actually quite easy to do. With some basic copywriting skills, you will be well on your way to developing sales pages that convert traffic.

WRITING YOUR OWN

Let's assume that you have a decent understanding of what sales copy is. You understand that this is the type of content that is designed to sell the product or service you are selling. Whereas on other areas of your website you will be using a non-sales tone, this is the location where you need to sell.

There is no reason not to write your own sales copy once you understand what it is. Take some time to review quality sales pages at other websites online. You can even search some of your competitors’ websites to get an idea of what is available. The question to ask yourself: Does this page convince you to buy the product or service? Now, learn what it takes to write the best sales pages for Internet marketing.

COMPONENTS OF EFFECTIVE SALES PAGES

As you set out to write a sales page for Internet marketing businesses you may own, keep in mind that every page is different. From one company to the next, you will find differences. However, most contain a similar structure.

In this section, we discuss what is called the components of effective sales pages, or the parts that make them up. While you do have some leeway in what you include and in the layout of the page, the most effective pages have several key aspects to them.

Even if you hire a professional copywriter to do this work or you do the work yourself, it is important to check over the final piece to make sure that it delivers in these areas. Writing a long, rambling page is not going to win over your readers any more than a long-winded sales person wins you over at the local car dealership!

THE HEADLINES

Headlines are a bit more complex than you may think. They are actually comprised of various types of headlines.

An initial headline, called a pre-headline, is used to attract your target market. This headline is specifically able to tell your readers that you have something that they want and need.

A secondary headline is the main headline. This headline is an important part of your sales page. It should be in larger font than anything else on the page. You do not want anything else on your sales page to pull away from this main headline.

Specifically, the main headline is designed to tell the reader what the main benefit you are offering is.

The third headline is an optional one. It is in a smaller font, located under the main headline. The goal of it is to give some clarification to the main headline or to elaborate on it when it is necessary to do so. Not every sales page needs to have this type of headline, and if it is over used, it can detract from the main headline.

When writing headlines of any type, keep them concise and to the point. There is little benefit to long-winded headlines. People just will not read them if they are too drawn out. You want the headline to grab the attention of the reader and pull them in to what you have to offer.

THE INTRODUCTION

The introduction is a key component in your Internet marketing sales page. The fact is, if you cannot grab them now, they will not continue on, and most likely, will never buy from you. Therefore, your introduction needs to count and you should spend time on it.

The first few sentences have to find a way to pull at the heartstrings of your reader. You want them to grab the attention of the reader and make them say, "Wait…I need to read this…"

The introduction is not a hard sell. At this point, you want to draw them further into the sales page content so that you can show them why what you have to offer is the best product to solve their problem.

To write the introduction, keep in mind what your product provides to the reader. Do not list that here. Rather, consider what type of emotion or result the product has to offer to the visitor. In the copy coming, you will showcase what your product is, so at this point, you do not need to mention it. Rather, you want to present your case for why it is valuable.

Choose wording that shows the reader the benefits of your product or service. You want to describe how they will feel when they own it. You want to tell them how it will help to improve their life.