Email has become one of the most powerful marketing tools in the world. It is instant, cheap and can reach any corner on this earth. Harnessing its power for your business could mean substantial gains and using it to send out a newsletter brings a variety of benefits.

• Regular contact with your customers 
• Promotion of your goods or service 
• Building trust between you, your company and your customer 
• Developing a brand name for your company through familiarity
• Potential financial return from advertising

• Privacy Policy 
• Harvesting and storing email addresses 
• Including an unsubscribe facility 
• Organising your group mailing
• Writing your newsletter 
• Sending out your newsletter

Email lists and junk mail have made many people wary of subscribing to anything these days. Be sure to include a privacy policy statement within your web site and have it linked from wherever you place the email subscription box.

Check out the privacy policies of sites you have visited and model you own on theirs. They are a reassurance to your visitors that the only reason you are collecting their email address is for your newsletter.

You can opt to collect your email addresses by setting up a box belonging to one of the email list companies like ListBot. I use this on the journeys part of my site, but only for forwarding email addresses to the organisation for whom I write another newsletter.

Free services require you to carry their ads so you have to decide if this is what you want. ListBot do the verification for you. The subscriber is sent an automated email that they must respond to before you get their address. This ensures that they genuinely subscribed themselves.

Or you can set up a miniature form with just the email field and it operates just like a contact form or guestbook. Be sure to put one on every page of your site. You never know which page your visitor is going to land on. The email arrives to you as an email. You will need to send a verification email and this can be set-up as an auto responder. 

Don't be tempted to try and get their 'full life's history'. Just get the details you need - email address and perhaps first and last name if you want to personalise their emailed newsletter. It really depends on your need for information but remember that the more you look for the fewer you will get to subscribe.

List your emails in a way that it is easy to transfer them over to your mailing software or in the early days add them to the list already there as they come in. You can set aside a page in 'notepad' or 'word' and do a document import into most group emailing software packages.

List your email address as one per line and try to arrange them in alphabetical order as this will make it easier to remove any invalid ones and avoid repetition.

There will be wrong email addresses and it can be time consuming weeding them out. Depending on the software programme you use you should get a list of invalid email addresses in your report once the mailing is gone out and then just delete them.

Let's hope you won't need this but always leave an opt out available. You can do this by asking subscribers to send a blank email with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line of their email. Or if you use a mailing list like ListBot there is an unsubscribe facility there.

Send an email acknowledging any request to unsubscribe, ensuring it has been done and thanking the person for the time they were with you.

You can send out your newsletter from your own mailing programme but be sure to use the BCC option as this hides all the other addresses. You just need to copy and paste your list of addresses to your clipboard if you use notepad or nominate the named file in 'my documents, if you use word and import into your address book by going to 'file' then 'import' and select the file. This will bring them all in together into the Address Book Files (*wab), arranged in alphabetical order.

You can use a professional list host, but prepared to pay both set-up fees and monthly fees, with a possible extra fee when your list exceeds 500 for some and 1,000 for others. Newsletter Mailing seems to offer fair good value and are reasonable.

There's a variety of emailing programmes available which give you complete control of your email list. I use Aureate and find it a good, reliable programme. You can learn more about it here:

Tell your readers about the latest happenings in your industry, about updates or new product lines, new services added to your company, share problems in your marketing or distribution where you found solutions that might interest them.

Make it personal and interesting as if you were writing a letter to a friend. Keep your sentences short and to the point and each paragraph to contain about 4-5 lines.

Set your text at 65 characters per line as this seems to be the best format for emails without skewing all over the place. Try to avoid using the HTML option in your email programme, use plain text instead. Not all email programmes are set up to receive HTML.

Try to avoid placing all your ads at the top of the email. Your header should include your company name or web site title, your URL, the issue and volume number of your newsletter and perhaps just one ad. Then a list of contents if you are running more than one article.

If this is the case, divide the articles with an ad or two and the remainder at the bottom. Don't forget to include the unsubscribe details at the bottom of each newsletter.

If you are telling your readers about updates of products or services and these are within your web site make sure you have the web site up to date too. Perhaps consider placing your newsletter as an article on your web site too. It will always be there as a source of reference for new site visitors and might act as an incentive for new subscribers to enlist.

If you need a bit of help putting it all together in a way that will hold your readers yet feel you don't have the writing skills to do so check out what Marlon Sanders has to offer. He gives some of the greatest advice I've come across for writing KILLER COPY .Hear what he has to say HERE.

Each of us has an area of expertise to be able to share with others. Perhaps you feel you don't have the skills to share that knowledge in written form and gain from it. Don't believe those doubts within. Check out Ken Evoy's site on 'Making Your Knowledge Sell' and he'll soon make you realise the inner potential you have and encourage you on the road to a successful 'writing career'.

Well, you're ready to role. Have you decided first how often you want to produce you newsletter? Starting off perhaps quarterly would be sufficient. It depends on the information you have to share. A weekly newsletter might put you under a good bit of pressure initially until you get into the swing of things.

Be prepared to spend a bit of time preparing your newsletter. The weekly one I write for Local Ireland, the Galway Gazette, takes me about 4 hours every Sunday!

Copy and paste it into whatever programme you are using, press the button and away you go. Then sit back and hope for an increase in site visits and after a while an increase in business - Good Luck.

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