A very long time ago, some random guy in the Denver airport was sitting by the big windows near me, and we started chatting about how I wanted to be a writer, and how my boyfriend and I were starting a company geared at helping people with disabilities travel more adventurously.
In just five short minutes I gained a lot from this stranger, who happened to be a business owner and journalist himself. His biggest advice was for us to start a newsletter. Others have told us the same thing many times since then, but this guy hit the nail on the head when he said, "You have to set yourself as the expert in your field," and added that by starting a newsletter, we'd get writing experience, as well as get the word out about our company and products.
That was late in 2004, and we had about 6 months into the research for our first guidebook Access Anything: Colorado. In March of 2005, our first newsletter appeared, on the headwind of the release of Colorado. I was still new to computer design, working on an old, slow computer at the time, and drafted the newsletter in Microsoft Word, then PDF'd it with Adobe Acrobat. For too many years this process stayed the same, and while it was frustrating at times working in Word (often if the photos were too big or there were hidden blocks I didn't delete it simply wouldn't PDF), the newsletter served its purpose.
In the first months, it got the word out about our guidebooks, products, and company, and the stranger was right. It gave us practice at writing, photography, and design; and soon it wasn't enough to just put our company's info in there, we started highlighting equipment, businesses, trips, newly adapted sports, locations for travel, expos we attended, and much, much more. The design changed slightly each year, and the page numbers increased- soon this 4-page document turned into a full 12-page publication!
But during that two year period, we struggled with a very important tool, the mailing list. Our list grew slowly, which is sometimes better. As we traveled the nation from expos to rehab centers, our list was only up to about 300 people, and we were still using Outlook and an add-on for it that helped manage the list better than Outlook could.
But even that wasn't enough after awhile- we were getting some bounce-backs, but worse, complaints they weren't receiving our newsletter. Outlook can apparently only email about 120 people at once, but never tells you otherwise, so you assume your list of 150 or more is getting emailed, but in actuality, they aren't. So after reviewing several options we narrowed our choices to two: Constant Contact and Aweber. Constant Contact is definitely more user-friendly, but is limited in many respects, and worse (to me at least) they nickel and dime you for everything. Your list is growing? $5 more a month for an extra 1000 names. You want to upload more than 5 pictures at once? Another $5. You need archival storage? Yep, $5 more.
But for just $19.95 a month, no matter how big our list, Aweber can provide the same service. Sign up and storage of your lists (or multiple ones), many templates to choose from, a helpful and reliable service staff, an affiliate/earning program, and now it even links in to Twitter. Finally, our list was hassle-free.
In the fall of 2008 I finally switched everything to Adobe; already proficient in Photoshop, I taught myself, quite painfully at times, how to switch to InDesign. There's a ton of help for Adobe on the web, so any issues or struggles I had, I searched there. The quality of the newsletter improved dramatically, and we had immediate positive feedback from our mailing list, which had grown from our initial 300 to now over 1000 readers. We changed its name to "The Traveler" and started spreading it even further with the addition of social media.
In 2009 we took the next step and added an advertising package to our website, which extended to the newsletter. Now not only did we have a great readership, our newsletter was finally making some money for us, and it only took four years.
One last point to make is frequency. We started out with a monthly newsletter, which was easy to keep up with when we had only 4-6 pages of content and not much writing else wise. Now we write for many magazines (whose editors initially used our newsletter as a writing sample!), two online databases, and our own 4 blogs, and have published two guidebooks. In addition to all the other work with camps and travel consulting that Access Anything does, we don't have as much time to put out a quality newsletter every month. We first backed it down to 6 issues a year, but now the newsletter is seasonal (4/yr), and perhaps that's a little too infrequent, but it's all we have time for.
What's the difference between a newsletter and a blog? Although I value the blog obviously, it can never take the place of a formal newsletter. It can be home to your events calendar, have regular sections, include a multitude of photos and links, and is a regular output of your company that your clients and network can have a piece of. They can print it- many rehab hospitals have told us they print ours for their reading rooms. They can forward it. And they don't have to read it every week. While blogs are great, they are often times overloaded with dribble and repetition, and are often too much to read every one.
Make sure your newsletter is of high quality both in writing and design to bring your clients back to it each month or season, and use it to get clients, credit, and a reputation in your industry!
Good luck!
In just five short minutes I gained a lot from this stranger, who happened to be a business owner and journalist himself. His biggest advice was for us to start a newsletter. Others have told us the same thing many times since then, but this guy hit the nail on the head when he said, "You have to set yourself as the expert in your field," and added that by starting a newsletter, we'd get writing experience, as well as get the word out about our company and products.
That was late in 2004, and we had about 6 months into the research for our first guidebook Access Anything: Colorado. In March of 2005, our first newsletter appeared, on the headwind of the release of Colorado. I was still new to computer design, working on an old, slow computer at the time, and drafted the newsletter in Microsoft Word, then PDF'd it with Adobe Acrobat. For too many years this process stayed the same, and while it was frustrating at times working in Word (often if the photos were too big or there were hidden blocks I didn't delete it simply wouldn't PDF), the newsletter served its purpose.
In the first months, it got the word out about our guidebooks, products, and company, and the stranger was right. It gave us practice at writing, photography, and design; and soon it wasn't enough to just put our company's info in there, we started highlighting equipment, businesses, trips, newly adapted sports, locations for travel, expos we attended, and much, much more. The design changed slightly each year, and the page numbers increased- soon this 4-page document turned into a full 12-page publication!But during that two year period, we struggled with a very important tool, the mailing list. Our list grew slowly, which is sometimes better. As we traveled the nation from expos to rehab centers, our list was only up to about 300 people, and we were still using Outlook and an add-on for it that helped manage the list better than Outlook could.
But even that wasn't enough after awhile- we were getting some bounce-backs, but worse, complaints they weren't receiving our newsletter. Outlook can apparently only email about 120 people at once, but never tells you otherwise, so you assume your list of 150 or more is getting emailed, but in actuality, they aren't. So after reviewing several options we narrowed our choices to two: Constant Contact and Aweber. Constant Contact is definitely more user-friendly, but is limited in many respects, and worse (to me at least) they nickel and dime you for everything. Your list is growing? $5 more a month for an extra 1000 names. You want to upload more than 5 pictures at once? Another $5. You need archival storage? Yep, $5 more.
But for just $19.95 a month, no matter how big our list, Aweber can provide the same service. Sign up and storage of your lists (or multiple ones), many templates to choose from, a helpful and reliable service staff, an affiliate/earning program, and now it even links in to Twitter. Finally, our list was hassle-free.
In the fall of 2008 I finally switched everything to Adobe; already proficient in Photoshop, I taught myself, quite painfully at times, how to switch to InDesign. There's a ton of help for Adobe on the web, so any issues or struggles I had, I searched there. The quality of the newsletter improved dramatically, and we had immediate positive feedback from our mailing list, which had grown from our initial 300 to now over 1000 readers. We changed its name to "The Traveler" and started spreading it even further with the addition of social media.
In 2009 we took the next step and added an advertising package to our website, which extended to the newsletter. Now not only did we have a great readership, our newsletter was finally making some money for us, and it only took four years.
One last point to make is frequency. We started out with a monthly newsletter, which was easy to keep up with when we had only 4-6 pages of content and not much writing else wise. Now we write for many magazines (whose editors initially used our newsletter as a writing sample!), two online databases, and our own 4 blogs, and have published two guidebooks. In addition to all the other work with camps and travel consulting that Access Anything does, we don't have as much time to put out a quality newsletter every month. We first backed it down to 6 issues a year, but now the newsletter is seasonal (4/yr), and perhaps that's a little too infrequent, but it's all we have time for.
What's the difference between a newsletter and a blog? Although I value the blog obviously, it can never take the place of a formal newsletter. It can be home to your events calendar, have regular sections, include a multitude of photos and links, and is a regular output of your company that your clients and network can have a piece of. They can print it- many rehab hospitals have told us they print ours for their reading rooms. They can forward it. And they don't have to read it every week. While blogs are great, they are often times overloaded with dribble and repetition, and are often too much to read every one.
Make sure your newsletter is of high quality both in writing and design to bring your clients back to it each month or season, and use it to get clients, credit, and a reputation in your industry!
Good luck!
Comments
Post a Comment