How To Write A Newsletter

The first thing to think about is, why are you doing a newsletter? What's the aim? Is it to disseminate information? Is it to motivate people? Is it to influence them? Is it to promote your work? But your first aim is going to be, "How am I going to get people to actually read it"? And that brings us to the second point, which is, who is your reader? Are you sure you know who the reader is? And that could be tricky, because you could have a number of different readers. So the thing to do is decide who your primary reader is, and focus on them all the time that you're writing, and that way you'll get the tone and the language and the style right. The third tip is to look at what other people are doing.

Read newsletters, both print ones and on-line versions. Also, look at newspapers, particularly the tabloid press and the free papers. What do they do to grab the readers' attention and keep them reading? And I think you'll find almost always, the answers are always the same.

It's catchy headlines. It's short paragraphs, fairly short sentences, strong quotes, and human interest stories. Put in some really good pictures.

One charity that I worked with totally transformed their image by putting photographs of every single event along with a short catchy story in their newsletter. They weren't actually doing anything different, but the feedback was terrific and both their internal and their external image improved enormously as a result. And that also leads on to the fifth tip, which is, don't forget the visuals apart from the photographs.

The way your newsletter looks will influence the readers' choices about what to look at, in what order, what grabs their attention, and what doesn't. So try and make the layout, the presentation, as reader friendly as possible. Make your font hierarchies consistent.

Make it colorful, if you can at all. Put boxes around things. Put sidebars in, anything that will engage the eye and make it altogether more readable.

So if you do all those things, you'll end up promoting what you do, even if you don't do that in so many words. And that, of course, is one of the main aims of writing a newsletter in the first place. |The five simple tips outlined in this video tutorial are the basic keys to creating and maintaining a successful newsletter.

So listen carefully.