Do you often struggle with what to write about in your monthly customer newsletter?  Well you’re not alone. We all suffer from writers block or blank screen syndrome occasionally. Relax, because I’m going to reveal a sure fire cure and this tip alone will give you enough content for two years!  Click the video to watch my newsletter marketing success tip!

Consistency is one of the most important ingredients of a successful newsletter. If you want to have a great newsletter, they must show up like clockwork every month, preferably the same day and never be late!

It’s important to understand that each newsletter should be filled with useful fun and informative content but being consistent trumps everything else, from the layout and color scheme to the quality of your content. One of the most common and worst mistakes in the newsletter business is inconsistency. Inconsistent newsletters can be seen as junk mail that no one wants to read and no one ever pays attention to.

In order to build a trusting relationship with your customers, your newsletters must be consistent. Knowing they can trust your newsletter to be on time goes leaps and bounds and does wonders for your business. You want your newsletter to be looked forward to, just like monthly magazines, and not received sporadically like other mail is.

Not only must your newsletter be sent the same time every month, they must be published every month. This allows you to get into the habit of making, writing, editing, and publishing the newsletter every month. Once you get into a rhythm, you will always be looking for good information and pictures and each time it will be quicker and easier to compose your newsletter.

This is also good for customer support, since it will get your customers used to receiving information from you every month and will start to look forward to reading it. Newsletters are also great to alert customers in advance of upcoming sales and special promotions. By the time your promotion actually arrives, your customers will be looking for it in their newsletters and this will increase the success of your promotion. Also, you can hand out your newsletters as flyers, telling people on the street about your great offers.

As stated before, consistency will always be the most important characteristic of your company newsletter. If you can remain consistent, you will build up a strong relationship with your customers that will increase business and bring new customers into your store.

Newsletter writing is a skill that once learned can reap huge dividend for your business. Many companies make the mistake of writing all about what I refer to as ‘work stuff’ – big mistake! Producing a newsletter that gets read requires you to write about what interests your customers, not you!

If your company newsletter informs, educates, and entertains your customers, with a special emphasis on entertains, your customers will read it month after month. If you give them a newsletter that focuses too much on your business, products, and services, they will not likely read it every month, and you will come to the conclusion that newsletters are not very effective.

So what makes good content for the “work stuff” part of your newsletter? Think about the questions your customers ask you. Those answers make great copy for your newsletter. Let’s say you have a chiropractic practice. Patients have heard about carpal tunnel syndrome and ask questions about it. Patients know that chiropractors deal with back pain, so they ask you all kinds of back pain questions when they come in the door. And if you’re a chiropractor, you get questions about general health issues like keeping kids healthy.

All of those questions and concerns can be turned into articles for your newsletter. Help your readers solve a problem. Answer their questions. Conversely, say you are an accountant. Each month you send a newsletter jammed with information—about tax laws or pending legislation that Congress is considering. As this accountant’s customer, would you read it? No! That’s what you pay your accountant for—to know the tax laws and follow his industry.

Don’t make your newsletter all about your business. No matter what business you’re in, you know your customers’ problems. You know the questions they ask. That’s what your newsletter should be about. The “other stuff” is so important, and so needed, it is the reason that I created what is my most popular product to date, Success Advantage 2.0.

Success Advantage 2.0 is my monthly ‘Done-for-You’ newsletter content and ready-to-use newsletter template program. To help people create and send their customer newsletters every month, I supply subscribers with at least twenty pages of my famous customer-loving content (the “other stuff”) covering a wide range of topics that they are free to use in their newsletters. I also provide subscribers with ready-to-use newsletter templates to remove the hassle of designing their newsletter. The newsletters are provided in MS Word so that they are quick and easy for anyone to edit. So, if you want to have your monthly newsletter about 90 percent ready to go even before you write a single word, go immediately to www.NoHassleNewsletters.com.

The secret to successful newsletter publishing is writing your newsletter correctly. When I speak live I often refer to this as ‘clean writing.’

Clean writing is writing that doesn’t call attention to itself. Clean writing is free of grammatical and spelling errors. Here are some tips on how to write clean copy. If you produce a customer or company newsletter I suggest following these five tips.

1. Write more than one draft. Professional writers almost always write more than one draft. Next, sleep on it, then when you come back to a piece, it’s easier to spot errors and rough phrases. It’s easier to see how to improve your work.

2. Use your spell check, but don’t make this your only spelling and grammar check. Spell-check programs are great, and you can even use them to improve your writing over time. But they can miss important things. Spell checking programs are excellent at finding words that are spelled incorrectly. But they can’t tell if a correctly spelled word is the word you meant or if it’s the right word for the situation.

3. Here’s a tip for Microsoft Word users. There’s a feature built into the grammar checking function that can help you improve your writing. Select the option that gives you readability statistics when you check spelling and grammar. Then every spell-check will give you two helpful statistics. 1) The Flesch Reading Ease Score gives you a measure of how easy your piece is to read. You want to make this number as high as possible. 2) The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measures readability in a different way. It computes the lowest grade level that can read your piece and easily understand it. You want to get this below 10 and usually above 6 for newsletter copy. Fortunately, one of the best ways to judge the quality and readability of your writing is also one of the easiest.

4. Read your writing out loud. This is a critically important strategy. Don’t read your newsletter articles on your monitor. Instead, print them out and then read it. Even better, have someone else read your piece out loud to you. Reading aloud calls attention to every rough spot and unnatural phrasing. You’ll instantly discover that the way you talk out loud is not necessarily how you write, and your copy will swiftly improve. I suggest doing this for everything you write.

5. Get someone else to edit and proofread your articles. When we look at our own writing, we usually see what we intended to write. We’re likely to skip over phrasing problems and not spot errors in word usage, spelling, and typos. There’s an expression in the information marketing world: “Good is good enough, get it out there.” I believe that. I don’t necessarily strive for perfection. I strive for doing the best job I can.

To be honest with you, I use an outside proofing company. I can send them anything. I can send them PDFs, Word documents, whatever. For a very, very reasonable fee, two English majors read over it then send it back with their comments and suggestions. It’s very cheap. I think it’s either $9 or $11 for a page, which is 500 words, very cheap. One of the hardest things in the world is to proofread your own stuff.

Again, the secret to successful newsletter publishing is writing your newsletter correctly. The reason for this is fairly simple; the newsletters that get read are the ones that produce results.