Everywhere I look, people seem to be offering emailed newsletters. But small business owners who are looking to marketing their business online want to know: “Is it right for me?”

Emailed newsletters (sometimes called autoresponders or ezines, but which we’ll just call “newsletters” here) offer a number of advantages and disadvantages and we’ll talk about them in this blog so that you can make an informed decision:

THE ADVANTAGES

• A newsletter is a great way to capture the contact information of prospects who are not yet ready to become clients (but who you don’t want to lose touch with).
• A newsletter allows you to position yourself as an expert in front of your prospects and customers.
• A newsletter gives you a chance to have your voice in front of a targeted audience who has ASKED to hear from you.
• A newsletter is a way to continue selling your products or services (because newsletters are sometimes saved or because they are sent to other people.
• A newsletter can drive traffic to your site or even earn you additional revenue (through the sale of advertising).
• A newsletter allows you to track what your readers are reading (and therefore what they are interested in).

THE DISADVANTAGES

• A newsletter is a lot of work with relentless deadlines that you don’t want to miss.
• There are a lot of ways to do a newsletter incorrectly and only a few ways to do it correctly.
• A newsletter takes investment (i.e. in autoresponder software like http://aweber.com or http://constantcontact.com).
• A newsletter can take just as much effort to develop, brand, and build an audience as any other type of effort (especially if you don’t have the initial traffic to your website).

SOME OTHER THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW

Before you create your newsletter, you need to first decide what the purpose of the newsletter will be. For example, do you want to drive traffic to your site? Do you want to position yourself as an expert? Do you want to pitch your products or services? Without a clear idea of you’re your newsletter’s purpose is, your effort will fall flat. However, when you do know what the purpose of your newsletter is, the format of your newsletter is so much clearer.

Once you’ve decided what you want the purpose of your newsletter to be, you’ll then need to decide on the frequency you want to distribute the newsletter for. Then, create a list of topics that will last you for a year. That’s right, an entire year. You might do less, and that’s certainly your choice, but by brainstorming a year’s worth of topics you’ll have a good idea if you can sustain the content for that long.

Once you’ve written out your topics for an entire year, you should write at least 2 month’s worth of newsletters first. (You might try to write one month’s worth of newsletters but it will go by fast!). In fact, if you can write an entire quarter of newsletters, you’ll be far better off!

There is so much more to say about newsletters but we’ll start here and come back to the topic in a future post.

photo credit: Sleeteye