Hello everyone!

I love this time of year, and Thanksgiving in particular, as it is one of the few times that my family is all together – for at least a day! My daughters will be coming home from college and my two sons and in-laws will also be here for a great day of family, food and fun!

I wanted to take a moment and wish you and your family a safe and happy Thanksgiving. If you are readers of my ezine (www.newsletterpower.com) you learned last Thursday that I finally released my first book, Newsletter Secrets Revealed – How to Use Newsletters to Make Your Profits Soar. The response has been great and I appreciate your many kind words, truly! If you have not yet ordered a copy, you can do so at www.newslettersecretsrevealed.com (makes a great holiday gift!!)        

See you next week.

Hello everyone! Recently I mentioned that I was making the final edits to my new book, Newsletter Secrets Revealed – How to Use Newsletters to Make Your Profits Soar, and that I was also assembling some awesome bonus items. Well – the wait is over! This truly one of a kind book is finished and I will be announcing it first to my loyal subscribers next Thursday – so watch for it!

I also want to let you know that I am going to be one of 30 entrepreneurs featured in the upcoming book, Dream, Inc. - Million Dollar Business Strategies from 30 Successful Philadelphia-Area Entrepreneurs. This book will be out in early January 2008.

There are many important pieces to a great newsletter that gets results. Right at the top of the list is the use of powerful attention-grabbing headlines.

Here are a couple ideas to use in your newsletter. 

Make your headline a startling, interesting, or provocative comment. Geico’s “Fifteen minutes could save your fifteen percent on car insurance” is an example. So is “Europe on $5 per day” and “At 60 miles per hour, the loudest sound in a new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.” 

Make your headline a question. The classic “Do you make these common mistakes in spelling?” is a good example.  

Use your headline to tell your readers who your piece is for. Engineers stop for headlines with the word “engineer” in them. Managers pay attention to headlines with the word “manager.” 

Promise a benefit in your headline. What’s a benefit? It’s a promise to make your reader rich or famous or powerful or loved or just to make things easier. It’s a promise that things will be different.  

Emotional, news, and promise words can make headlines better. Emotional words include “darling,” “love,” “excited,” “joyful,” “proud,” etc. News headlines announce something “new” or “revolutionary.”  And words such as “original,” “biggest,” “top-rated,” “museum-quality,” “profit,” and, of course, “free” are promise words. This might seem like a lot of extra work, but trust me – a great headline can mean the difference between getting your article read or not read.   Enjoy your weekend!

Hello and happy Friday to you! I hope that everyone had a great Halloween. My wife, Stephanie, and I attended a Halloween party and despite my predictable kicking and screaming about the costume, we had a great time. This year, however, I am determined not to eat all of the left over candy.

I’ll wait until Thanksgiving before starting the typical holiday weight gain!

I hope you enjoy today’s short, but VERY IMPORTANT message on newsletters. People today are bombarded with messages and information competing for attention.

Think about how you open your mail.  The odds are pretty good that you do it near a wastebasket. You zip through the pile of mail, flipping most of the envelopes into the wastebasket unopened.  Then you look at what’s left and you decide, “What am I going to read?”

I’ve done some research on this so I can tell you that if you’re like most people you’ll start to answer that question by figuring out how long it will take to read each piece. The magic threshold is ten minutes or less. You read things that you think will take less than ten minutes and give you value. You set everything else aside to read later. For many of us, “later” never comes. That’s how your customers work. They cull out what they think will be interesting and helpful from the mounds of incoming information.