Make Regular Content and Newsletter Happen

Your ability to succeed as an organization or company these days may depend on your ability — and willingness — to engage people on social media. That means getting everyone on your team active in creating fresh and interesting content, then picking the best of it to enhance your regular newsletter.

Put out a newsletter people actually read

Once your organization or company has determined that it could benefit from having a monthly electronic newsletter (e-letter) — you want more "leads" or donations, or you want to engage better with your customers or patrons — you need to create one that people will actually read.

Focus

First, rather than employ the scattershot approach — describing random events, interviewing the nearest staffer, restating your organizational mission in its entirety — focus your content each issue. Decide whether your current missive will emphasis events, products, people, your company — or the future. Schedule a rotating set of themes you can cycle through (the easier approach), or come up with a focus for each release (a little more difficult).

Balance

"Buy, buy, buy!" all the time just won't work. Best to mix in big doses of educational (or entertaining) content. Experts say your e-letter content should be 90% educational and only 10% promotional. That's so you keep people reading each issue — a major plus.

Unless you really do have some big, exciting news about your product or service, go lightly on the promo. Give 'em interesting, relevant, timely information with a light sprinkling of selling words.

Creativity

Make your email subject lines new and interesting each month; bring them in and make them click. Give your readers incentive to open each specific issue that very moment. The same old subject headings arriving in their inbox each month bores them silly.

Wake them up with a BANG!

Make Content Creation Everybody's Job

The best way to get creative, and give your e-letter editor quality content to pick from for each issue, is for everyone in your organization or company to get involved in creating exciting content. Your very success, individually and organizationally, depends on being engaging and relevant online.

You have a range of talents and commitment levels where you work, with differing levels of interest in creating content regularly. To succeed, everybody in your organization needs to be focused on creating content. It's just a fact of the age we live in.

Your first trick, apart from outlining the array of content types you want to create, is to match types with individuals in your group. Figure out who might best create . .

• Blog articles
• Tweets
• Memes
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Surveys, quizzes, contests

Some may not enjoy writing so much; are they good with a camera? or recording audio? Those who have the least time or energy to commit might offer to provide regular surveys or quizzes for your social media visitors. Somebody might spend all month dreaming up next month's contest. The results of these make excellent newsletter material.

Schedule a content creation workshop

Get everybody involved in content creation. Call you team together and outline what's involved. Create a “content calendar”. Become a regular engine of fresh and fun content for your organization. Then pick the very best content from the regular stream to use in your monthly newsletter.

Ask Michael J. Farrand about organizing regular content creation and publishing a newsletter.

SOURCES: "10 Tips for Creating an E-Newsletter People Actually Read" Hubspot; "Why Content Creation Is Everyone’s Job" by John Jantsch.