Start Your e-Newsletter

Steven D. Strauss is one of the country's leading small business experts. The senior USATODAY.com small business columnist and he recently interviewed Eric Groves, the senior VP of worldwide development for Constant Contact.
Constant Contact has perfected relationship marketing and assists small businesses with e-mails, e-newsletters, and other online marketing tools.
Steven Strauss cites “according to Groves, the real secret to connecting online is to create content that engages your audience, that helps them solve problems, and that is interesting and useful.

And, he says, by offering that content as part of a consistent e-newsletter, you not only get permission from your customers to check in with them regularly, but also, they often end up forwarding the e-newsletter on to their network so that you also get some free word-of-mouth advertising.

As Groves says, the important thing is to offer content that people like. Usually, the best
e-newsletter content offers ideas that help the reader.

The actual process of creating your e-newsletter is fairly straight-forward:
- Come up with a great name.
For instance, their free e-newsletter is called Small Business Success Secrets!

- Create your content: You don't have to be a great writer, but you do have to offer something of value. Draft some short articles that both shares your expertise and which you think your customers would find interesting.

- Get them to opt-in: Have a link on your homepage where people can sign up by giving you their email address.

- Create a template: The easiest way to draft and send an e-newsletter is by having a great provider. What you want is a service, i.e. Constant Contact that will give you customizable templates, easy to use tools, database management, the ability to track open rates, and the like.

- Blast it!”

The above was copied from the article by Steven Stauss. You may want to consider an
e-newsletter blasted to your sphere of influence on a regular basis. This would be especially effective with your LinkedIn contact list. Although Constant Contact is selling a service, an e-newsletter idea has merit which can easily be managed once the template has been created. Using current software, this networking tool can be managed without the need for a service group.