News Letters

When someone looks in on your Web site, find a way of holding their interest.

They found you - so you can find them and keep them. Invite them to take away a free newsletter. Once a month (or week, or fortnight) write up a newsletter and email it to those who have accepted your invitation to leave you their e-mail address.

This achieves 2 purposes. The first is that you have found a willing ear that you can spend the next few months convincing that you are the expert and the only source they need on your subject. The second is that they have invited you to stay in touch by leaving their e-mail. Sending unwanted e-mails to people is called "spamming" and is guaranteed to lose more goodwill than it gains.

Newsletters don't have to be many pages long. Shorter is better. A typical e-mail newsletters has evolved that consists of just a few paragraphs. Each paragraph carries a link to related material on the parent Web site. In other words, the newsletter's just a tease or intro to the main Web-based information.

Many organisations publish their e-mail encoded as an HTML newsletter. HTML comprises the mark up tags that make Web pages. Most modern e-mail clients will happily display this Web page inside their viewing windows.

At Netco we run an automated way of publishing these e-mail newsletters. We call it Broadcaster. By use of a password system you can publish attractive HTML e-mail newsletters as long as you know how to copy and paste text and click a button (www.broadcaster.co.nz).

The system will let you make up a demonstration newsletter and publish it to yourself.

Note that every item in these typical newsletters give only a tease and then link back to the relevant Web page where full detail is offered.

A well-written and regularly published newsletter may be enough to start a regular visitor stream to your site and that's why you went onto the Web in the first place.