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.

If you regularly publish a newsletter, the way that you write your newsletter is critical. Someone who picks up your monthly customer newsletter should be able to get the key points in any of your articles just by scanning.

Use simple subheads to highlight key points. If you have more than one key point in your text, you can use more than one subhead.  Use boldface to call attention to important words and phrases. Notice how your eye naturally is drawn to the boldfaced word in this paragraph. You want to stop a scanner dead in their tracks.

Because if a scanner scanning the newsletter doesn’t stop and read the articles, it’s not likely they’re going to get a lot out of it. The whole idea is you want them to read the newsletter.

There are also devices you can use to increase readability. Charts often make concepts clear. Bulleted lists are great for summarizing key points and make newsletters crisp, clear, and easy to read. I use all of these techniques when I design my Success Advantage No Hassle ‘done-for-you’ Newsletters.

The Secret to Selecting Typefaces

Headlines and body copy are the way that text is presented to the reader. You want your design to be both professional looking and readable. Start by fully understanding the following important terms.

A typeface is a style of type. This line is in a typeface called Times New Roman.

There are two basic kinds of typefaces that you’ll see in great newsletters.

1) There are “serif faces,” like Times New Roman. A “serif” is the little curl or footing on the letters. A book face is a typeface with both serifs and shading. Times New Roman is a book face.

2) There are also “sans-serif” typefaces. That means that there are no serifs on the letters. Arial, the typeface being used in this sentence, is a sans-serif typeface.

A font is the rendition of a letter or word in a typeface. This is Times New Roman 10-point font. Point is the size of the type. This is Times New Roman 10-point Bold.

Right now you’re probably thinking, “What does that have to do with me and my newsletter?” But this is important, so stay with me.

Pick up a major newspaper and look at it. You’ll notice that the newspapers all use similar typefaces. They use sans-serif typefaces for headlines. They use book faces for body copy. You should too. Sans-serif typefaces are good for headlines. The eye finds it easy to stop at the end of a line. Book faces are good for body copy. They encourage the eye to keep moving.

Read more about design techniques and strategies, and get some easy to use newsletter checklists in my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – the Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life! It is available at Amazon.com or my Web site, www.TheNewsletterGuru.com.

Remember, newsletter writing is the most important part of great customer newsletters!