Creating Your Business Opportunity 2

What does it take to start a money-making newsletter?

To publish a successful newsletter you need to start out with a very clear focus of who your potential customers are and what kind of information you can provide for them that is different from what they are now getting from other sources. Once you know the focus you will need to decide:

• What is your income model for the newsletter? How will it produce income? Will you make money by selling subscriptions, by selling display or classified advertisements, or by giving the newsletter away free in order to build a mailing list of individuals who will buy some other product or service you sell?
• Who will write the articles for each issue? Will you do the writing yourself? Pay freelancers to write? Hire a writer? Will you have enough information to publish regularly and keep readers interested?
• How will you publish the newsletter? Will it be published in print and mailed conventionally, or will it be published electronically?
• Will you typeset it and print it yourself? Or will you need to outsource one or both of those functions?
• Will it need to be formatted for use on a web page or in email? If so, can you do the html formatting on your own? Or will you need to outsource one or both of those functions?
• How long will the newsletter be? Subscription newsletters will need to be long enough to make readers feel they are getting their money's worth, but not so long you have difficulty filling them with useful content each month. You'll want to consider postage costs in your planning if you'll be mailing a printed newsletter to subscribers. For emailed newsletters (sometimes called ezines), you'll want to consider the amount of text that's comfortable to read on a computer screen. In most cases, articles are easier to read on a computer screen if they are under 1,000 words in length. If the articles are longer, they should be broken up into a series of shorter pages for the computer reading.
• Will you take advertising? Your answer to this question will affect the subscription price and may have an effect on the length, design, and shipping weight of your newsletter. One good way to accept advertising without changing your page design in printed newsletters is to include inserts from advertisers in your newsletter. The cost of the insert could be set to cover your mailing costs.
• How will you market the newsletter? How do you plan to get subscribers? Will you advertise? Will you do direct mailings? Will you buy ads on Google and Overture, or in other people's online newsletters or websites? Will you post samples of the newsletter on a web site? What will marketing cost? Could you publish and continue marketing if you got less than 1 percent response to your initial marketing efforts? Even though your newsletter may be the best around in your field and you target your market carefully, your response could be as low as 1 percent or even lower.
• What will you charge for subscriptions? If you will be selling subscriptions to the newsletter, the price you charge should be set based on your costs, the exclusivity of the information, and your target customers' ability and willingness to pay for that information. If you provide industry information that businesses can't get easily elsewhere you will be able to command much higher fees than you would if you were selling a newsletter on cost-cutting for consumers.
• How many subscriptions will you need to break even? How many to make a profit on all your costs? Don't forget to figure in the costs of marketing, postage, phone calls, Internet access, and web development, along with your other costs. You need realistic figures to determine pricing—and whether or not to proceed with the publication.
• How much time are you willing to devote to the newsletter? Unless you have money to hire people to write, edit, typeset, and design the publication, the newsletter is likely to consume every spare minute of your time. Are you willing to devote that kind of energy to it?
• How much turnaround time do you need to allow? If you will be mailing your newsletter, remember to determine how much time it will take from when you write and do layouts for a newsletter until you can get it printed, folded, mailed, and actually delivered to the reader.
• Can you afford to market and publish the newsletter for months without a profit? Be realistic. Work out all the figures before deciding whether to go ahead with the project. Remember, marketing will have to be an ongoing effort, not a one-time event.
• Do you have the skills to do any writing, editing, layout, design, or web pages you plan? Computer equipment greatly simplifies some of these chores but only if you have the basic writing, editing, and production skills plus experience using a computer, page-layout (desktop publishing) and/or web design software. If you don't have this background, the going will be rough.
• Do you have a method for tracking subscribers and expiration dates, printing labels, and mailing renewals? You should have all those details worked out in advance. Don't wait to figure out how to use your database until subscriptions start coming in. Get it all set up in advance or have someone who is experienced do it for you.
       

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