Archive for March 27th, 2012

One of the things that has been playing on my mind for the last couple of years has been newsletters.   I have read many books, read many blogs and heard many presenters talk about how a newsletter can keep you in a customers/prospects mind.   Yes, it all sounds great, but why would anybody want to read a newsletter about my small insignificant company?  I mean, ‘breaking news – we have a new pot plant’ just seemed so ridiculous.  Yet people go on and on about having a newsletter.

Last week I had a breakthrough, thanks to a fellow freelancer who I met at a technical seminar.  Over lunch we got chatting about freelancing, about the time drain that is ‘social media’ and then about newsletters.   He said that newsletters had generated a lot of business for him – so I asked what he did.

Newsletters – Are not about News
The advice I received was that newsletters are not in fact about news.  He agreed that nobody really cares about you, or your company or your products, or your services, or the new office pot plant.  None of this does anything for them.  In a word, it’s not useful.

What he did was to turn it into something which delivered value – but didn’t try to sell.   Having your name. company name and company logo in front of people on a regular basis is enough to keep you in their mind.  He let the constant contact keep his name in everybody’s in tray, but added value to make sure the emails were opened.

So what was his technique?

Share your knowledge on what you do
Its as simple as that.  Don’t have a newsletter full of your latest projects – just have a newsletter full of your latest tips.  Create from what you know and do.

If you create databases, have regular updates on new functions you have created, clever SQL scripts for doing calculations, or methods of moving databases.  If you are a coder or web designer, have a newsletter with CSS examples, or useful subroutines or functions.   Provide value to make sure your newsletter is opened every time – and maybe even shared with other people.

It’s a small piece of the Puzzle
Now it may seem that by having a newsletter with a subroutine or function or other bit of code may be giving stuff away for free – and your right, it is just that – free work.  But, the bit you give away is a tiny, insignificant, but useful single part of the whole puzzle.   That routine may be useful to an old customer or future prospect, but because it’s so small, they cannot complete the whole jigsaw with just that one piece – they still need somebody to create the whole thing and put it together.

A useful technique is to make sure that when you do send out useful stuff in your newsletters, you include comment lines in any example functions and procedures to show what it does, how it works, and make sure to include your name, company and contact details (web URL, email and phone number).   That way, if it does add value, your details are always on hand should they look to expand their project and need your assistance (or your details are in the code at their office if they just cut and paste the code you send out).

After all, the whole point of a newsletter is to keep your name and contact details in front of your old contacts and future prospects.

How to get Four times the value
The other technique that I learned (from a 2^nd freelancer who joined in our conversation) was to get multiple value from each entry – by reuse.

I have written in the past about my technique of storing useful new techniques and functions I create in Evernote so I can use them in future projects – well this reuse idea just expands for the newsletter.

When I am working on a customer project and I develop a new useful function (say a SQL function to turn a date into a financial month and/or year), I copy that to Evernote for future use.  But now what I do is I also turn this into a quick newsletter for my contact list – it doesn’t have to be a long letter (in fact the shorter, the better) – I just explain what it is, how it works, and include the function.  Another free newsletter is created.

Then what I do, is I take the exact same newsletter text, and post it on my company blog web site – so it adds value and search ability to my web site.

One bit of created script or function (for a customer project that I am already being paid for) is then used 4 times – on the project, into Evernote for future projects, into my newsletter, and then on my company blog.  Maximum value for minimum effort.  Perfect.

Next time, I am going to talk about how I get names on my newsletter list, and what software I use.