Newsletter Tutorial:
Developing Your Concept

Home > Promote > Newsletters

By Peter Cooper

The first major step in developing a newsletter is deciding its concept. This includes thinking about the topic or subject area, what skills and experience you can bring to that topic, who your potential audience is, and how you plan to benefit from the newsletter.

Topic or Subject Area

This is usually the simplest part of developing your concept. If you're reading this article you probably already have a subject area in mind. For example, if you're out in the garden planting bulbs and clipping trees all summer long, you may want to start a newsletter packed with articles and tips about gardening.

If you really want to start a newsletter but you can't think of a topic, then look at your hobbies and spheres of interest. Sometimes the best topics are things that are easily overlooked. You might be a proficient French speaker and visit the country often. You could start a newsletter for English speaking people who are also Francophiles and want to learn recipes, travelling tips, and interesting places to go.

Once you've chosen the topic, you may want to consider a particular niche. You might want to create a gardening newsletter but feel rather small when you learn there's thousands of gardening newsletters already. If you're particularly interested in growing tobacco, planting bulbs, or felling trees then these are niche areas you could focus on and become respected in.

Skills and Experience

The skills and experience you can bring to your newsletter are closely related to the chosen topic or subject area. To continue our gardening example, it would be silly of you to start a newsletter about gardening if you had never planted a tree or dug a hole in your life!

Of course, there are exceptions. Some people with a very minimal knowledge of a subject have started projects which have become very fruitful (excuse the gardening pun). However, it is essential that you are interested enough in the topic to keep the newsletter going, or that it is general enough that other people will be willing to provide the content for you to format.

Potential Audience

A newsletter is pointless unless it has an audience, and we'll be covering how to promote your newsletter in a later section. Before you start to develop your newsletter, however, you need to consider the target market or potential audience it could have.

You need to think carefully about who your audience could be. If we use the gardening example once more then you might say mostly older people would be interested, over 30 years old, for example. However, if you were starting a newsletter in the young gardeners' niche, then your audience is totally different. The same goes for any topic. Your chosen niche may totally change the demographics of your audience as compared to the general subject.

The reason why specifically targeting your newsletter at a certain audience is important is down to content, which we're going to discuss in the next installment of this feature. If the audience for a general gardening newsletter is for over 30s, then the language you use needs to reflect this. Likewise, with younger gardeners, the language needs to reflect them too.

If your newsletter will be dealing with a technical subject, such as Web design, this is also an important consideration. Are you focused at beginners or experts? Your language and use of terminology needs to change with your audience.

The Benefits of your Newsletter

Not many of us do things for free for the sheer sake of doing it. There's usually a reason or motivation for most of the things we do, whether it's to make us money, help us feel good, or to find answers to questions we have.

The last two choices don't really need to be explained. If you want to run a newsletter to pass some time or to help others, and in return feel good, then you don't need to deliberate over your concept so much.

If you want to use your newsletter to build up your reputation and become an authority figure on a particular subject, you just need to target the market in which you want to achieve this. You know the relevant contacts in your industry better than we do, so the best idea is to target these people as your potential audience.

One area where you have to think very carefully about your concept and audience, however, is when you want to make money from your newsletter.

Making Money From a Newsletter

A lot of people start newsletters to make money. There are some people making large amounts of money each month from just running a newsletter! You could too.

The way to make money out of a newsletter is to sell advertising space in it each week/month. The rates you charge will be dependent on the amount of subscribers you have, your topic area, and your audience. Now you can see why your audience is so important to define. They're the ones who will be helping you make money!

Let's try an example to highlight how these factors affect the amount of money you'll make. If you run a newsletter dedicated to a 'joke a day' and you have 10000 subscribers and you also have a newsletter which provides sales professionals with advice and tips which has 5000 subscribers, which will make more money each month? Probably the latter.

Why? It has less subscribers but the audience is more focused (sales professionals) and they are more likely to respond to ads in your newsletter which are targeted towards their profession. The 'joke a day' list will be an entire melting pot of people and advertisers won't be able to target their ads to them. As such, the targeted niche newsletter will earn you more in advertising per subscriber than the wide-appeal one.

However, I am not saying that wide-appeal newsletters are bad. You just need to have more subscribers to them than with a niche newsletter. If you can make $500 a month from 1000 niche subscribers, it may take 10000 untargeted subscribers to make the same.

What's the lesson in making money with your newsletter? Think carefully about your niche and potential audience demographic!

Concept Checklist

Now that you've considered most of the concept issues of your newsletter, run through our checklist until you're satisfied that you've considered all of the different angles.

Part 1

Part 3