The Magic of Newsletters

Newsletters are priceless for so many reasons - some obvious and some not. First, the obvious reasons.

When you sustain a valuable dialogue with your prospects and customers, you stay connected and available for whatever opportunity may materialize. Nobody knows where the next great business opportunity is going to come from. It could come from a partner, a friend, a business acquaintance, someone who was just forwarded your newsletter, an ancient customer, someone looking over the shoulder of the person reading your newsletter, a prospect. so many different possibilities. Newsletters keep you in the game and in the minds of whoever your audience may be.

Newsletters show your audience the mind-set, personality, needs and aspirations of your organization. In formal marketing communications, you may not have the flexibility to do this due to various creative and bureaucratic constraints. It's much easier to just come out and say things in a newsletter. When your customers and prospects know "where you're coming from" it brings their guard down a little and lets them feel like they're not engaging a big sterile corporation.

When you write newsletters that provide valuable information, the readers learn more about your business, and you do, too! No matter what business you're in, creating a newsletter is an exercise in understanding the value of your business and finding ways to communicate that to your audience. It's another way to get your marketing brain chugging along. Writing reinforces the things you learn.

I could go on, but I won't because I want to get to the not so obvious reasons for writing newsletters. I just read about these hot ideas in...you guessed it...another newsletter. When you write newsletters and archive them on your site, you raise your rank in search engines. The key words in each story you write are "spidered" by search engines and those pages contribute to your rank. If you write about things that are critical to your business, the page will show up when those key words are entered into Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, MSN, etc. Other sites will link to your newsletter archives, too, and that helps boost your overall ranking. And, since your site it constantly adding new information, you'll get another swift kick up the ladder. Search engines like "fresh" sites, and the ones that add content get spidered more frequently. I'm going to start making Web pages of my newsletters ASAP.

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