Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major change in the way you

look at the purpose of your newsletter

My opinion is that some publishers, and more especially email publishers,

they are the sellers first and the publishers second. That means they see making sales like

the primary purpose of publishing an ezine or newsletter. We all hope that our

publications will achieve that goal, but it should not be the primary purpose of

your publication. Instead, your post should focus on providing quality content.

the highest quality that establishes your credibility. you do it showing

your readers who know what they are doing, who are, dare I use the word, a

expert – a true expert – in his field.

This means that you should write as much as possible. If I

Realize that writing articles is hard work and takes a lot of time. that’s why we

the publishers use third-party articles. but don’t just post any article that

to receive. Use some discrimination. Only wear items that complement yours

content, which are appropriate for the focus of your own newsletter. and whatever

If you do, don’t just post the article as-is. Write a short introduction

Give your readers their own thoughts on the article. remember, you want

establish your reputation, your credibility, not someone else’s.

The received wisdom is that newsletters should be used to promote your own

products and services. If you look at the vast majority of email newsletters,

that’s exactly what the editors seem to think is the purpose of their

Newsletter. In most newsletters, including many well-known ones,

You can hardly find the content among all the advertising. these editors seem

feel the need to push your advertising in the face. However, let’s see

what should serve as a model for all online publishers: your local newspaper.

Most newspapers do not fill every page of their publications with so many ads.

it can’t find the items. Most of the good ones tend to have a separate

advertising section. And the ads that do appear in the content sections are

presented in such a way that they do not interfere with the presentation of the

news. How long do you think your local newspaper would keep its subscribers if

overloaded news pages with ads? It is time for online publishers to change the

way we think. We need to move away from the newsletter-as-a-vehicle-for-advertising

model and switch to a newsletter model as a vehicle for quality content. Effective

Direct desktop publishing requires a major change in the way you view the

design of your newsletter.

Email publishers tend to publish discrete numbers of their newsletters in a

regular hours. The most common schedule is once a week. Each number contains

all the information that the editor wants to communicate to his

subscribers for that week. There are a couple of drawbacks to that format,

beyond the basic problem that this publisher is using email as its delivery

system.

The first drawback is the length. With a couple of items and half a dozen or

classified ads, along with regular information such as welcome,

required disclaimers with email, unsubscribe information, etc., which makes

for a rather long message. Most Internet users simply do not read the messages of that

length.

Yes, I could send more frequent short messages, but that only aggravates

exponentially the problems associated with email delivery. The more often you

send an email to your subscribers, they are more likely to close it due to

a spam complaint.

By using a type of blog format, you don’t do discrete problems. rather post

an article or its advertising or editorial on a given day. let’s say in

On Monday, he posts an article on RSS publishing, then on Tuesday he posts an

editorial about the upcoming elections, on Wednesday you publish a couple of

classifieds, on Thursday you publish an article about Christmas advertising and about

On Friday you post some more announcements. Let’s say this is the same content as you

have published in a discrete number, except for the disclaimers and the header

– the things at the top that identify your newsletter, you don’t need

post the header because it is always there on your blog. You do not need

to include all email disclaimers because you are not using email. Stuff

such as banners and welcome messages can be integrated into the

overall layout of your weblog as a sidebar, so they are always there. Any

Going to your blog page will see them every time they visit.

Yes, even if you are using RSS as your delivery system for your

newsletter, your newsletter will have an HTML page as well as your readers

will visit each time they read a full article in your newsletter.

You see, the RSS feed will just carry the title as a link and the first

paragraph or two of your article, say the article about the RSS feed. each item

they will be listed separately in the same format. The RSS feed will hold up to

fifteen articles, the last fifteen articles you published. Any good RSS publishing system

it will configure all this for you and make all the necessary coding changes. Usually

You publish your article in HTML and the publishing system converts it to XML for you.

Doing everything manually is neither effective nor efficient, so I suggest you don’t do it.

that! The idea is to use RSS to make your life easier, not harder. more about these

systems later.

With the best publishing systems, you don’t even have to know much about HTML.

because they will allow you to publish your article as text and it will format the

line breaks for you. As long as you put a hard double jump at the end of each

paragraph of text, your article will look good. You can add bold or italics or

underline as necessary. But, the better your knowledge of HTML, the more creative you will be.

it may be in how your posts will look.

Also, if you have the necessary experience and tools, you can add graphics,

Flash, audio, video or anything else you want to animate your pages. Do not add

executable (EXE) files to your publications. That creates all sorts of problems for

its readers and is prohibited by most, if not all, publishing systems. Also if

add multimedia to your newsletter, I strongly recommend that you do so

that your reader can choose to see it or not. Not only is that courteous

to do, but it will also prevent you from blocking your reader’s account

computer. Although most people have fairly sophisticated computers these days,

there are still people who may not be able or want to see these

file types. Remember, your reader is in control here, not you.

Posting daily, which I consider the ideal schedule, can seem like a lot more

work, but really, once you get the hang of it, it really is less time

consume to do a big problem a week. Also, many email publishers have

redid text-based newsletters to avoid some of the filtering of

email that is going on. HTML email is often blocked or HTML is disabled

unless you specifically ask to see it.

Text newsletters are dull and boring. The Internet is a visual medium first and

major. Yes, it is for streaming content, but that content has to be

visually appealing to your readers. There is nothing attractive in a long text.

message using rows of unimaginative characters like #, @, * or others to test

to add some zest to all that text. If you want to keep your readers, yes,

provide them with a lot of great content, but also present that content in a way

that captures your imagination.

Finally, there is a very strong marketing reason for using a blog type of

Format. I’ll just mention it briefly here and explain it in detail in my next

RSS marketing blog.

You want new subscribers for your newsletter, right? That means you need to get

new people to see your newsletter, right? That means driving traffic to your

newsletter page, right? One of the best ways to do this is to make the search

engines like Google to crawl your newsletter every time you add a new item to

your blog. What would you say if I told you that there is a marketing tool that

could i do that? It’s called pinging weblogs.com… more on my next blog!