Embrace every opportunity to promote your insights.
Imagine someone heard about your business or nonprofit organization yesterday. Naturally, they visited your website to learn more about you.
As the reader scans the home page . . . Look! A popup window appears; it asks her to subscribe to your newsletter by entering her email address.
The site visitor has only begun an acquaintance with you. How does she know she wants to receive your newsletter?
Help her connect with you by posting your most recent newsletter issue on your website. When you feature it there, she will:
- learn what is new at the company or organization;
- gain insights into trends in your sector;
- read about a client success story.
Now she has a basis for deciding to subscribe.
A potential subscriber who signs up in July may want to read the issues dating back to March, or perhaps even earlier, before submitting her email address to hear from you monthly.
When your previous newsletters are not accessible on your website, you’re actually hiding content valuable to your site visitors.
How does that gap promote your business and solicit new subscribers?
Recently, I visited the website of a Public Relations professional; within a minute, I was invited to subscribe to her newsletter. Even though no issue was available for review, I signed up. I had read some informative articles she had published elsewhere and thought her newsletter would be worthwhile.
Next, I emailed this colleague to ask why her newsletter was not on the website. Here is the reply:
I don’t keep an archive, as the newsletter content is exclusive. If anyone can access it, I don’t know if there’d be an incentive to sign up.
With all due respect, why does this writer think non-subscribers will remember to re-visit her website month after month?
You may have noticed my approach is the complete antithesis of exclusive content:
- all newsletters are posted on my website;
- related content from previous newsletters is cross-referenced and linked;
- teasers of the discussion are actively promoted on social media (see below);
- a link to the newsletter section of the website makes it easy to read prior issues.
For the other writer, only those who signed up for the newsletter at inception will be able to read the entire run of issues.
This is an enormous missed opportunity for these reasons:
- Posting your newsletters on your website, and making all that content accessible, will engage readers, clients, referral sources and collaborators more deeply.
- Your newsletters court potential customers and induce them to subscribe.
- Posting is easy to do and can even help boost SEO, with the addition of new content every month.
Note also the opportunity to cite and link to the articles you have published in industry magazines, media outlets and elsewhere, as well as news stories where you are quoted.
Don’t lock up your insights in a vault where only a select few will see them.
Don’t scatter your thought leadership articles to the winds of chance.
Turn your website into a library with ALL your published work.
This Month’s Tip
Use several social media platforms, relevant to your target audiences, to promote the content of your email newsletter, now that you have posted it on your company’s or nonprofit’s website:
- put a one-sentence summary and a link to that page of the website as an update on your LinkedIn profile;
- tweet a question, to which your newsletter is the answer, with its website link on X (Twitter) and re-post it multiple times;
- ask that question in a LinkedIn discussion group and post the website link;
- post a teaser with the link on your company or nonprofit’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages;
- put the newsletter link on your website in your email signature.
Helen may be a loyal subscriber, but that does not mean she reads every issue of every newsletter that arrives to her Inbox. Your subscribers’ attention waxes and wanes. By posting links to your newsletter on LinkedIn and other social media platforms, you give your current subscribers (and potential readers) two opportunities:
- you increase the likelihood that they will encounter and read your timely ideas;
- you make it easy for them to share your insights on those same platforms.
Contact
Ready to distribute your current newsletter to a wider audience? Contact me at Janet@JanetLFalk.com , set an appointment here or call me at 212.677.5770, to post and promote your newsletter. Let’s open up the archive of all your writing so more people can read your terrific ideas.
And, if you do not have a newsletter, let’s discuss why you should have one and how to launch it.
Click here to read prior issues of this newsletter.
Click here to subscribe to this monthly newsletter and make sure you don’t miss the next issue.