Company newsletters can be an amazingly successful marketing technique. Whether you want to up-sell or cross-sell, establish your brand or establish your authority, or simply reach a wider market, a newsletter can do job for you. You just have to make sure you write it right.

Television, radio, and print advertising are often too expensive for many businesses to justify – especially small businesses. Fortunately, there is an alternative. Today’s internet and email technologies make company newsletters a very inexpensive, yet surprisingly effective, form of advertising. When it comes to newsletters, big companies and small are finally competing on a level playing field.

So what is an email newsletter? An emailed newsletter serves much same purpose as a traditional company newsletter. Think of it as a short newspaper – but instead of relating to a town, city or country, it relates to your business. You can include articles on new products or services, awards, recent success stories and case studies, promotions, specials, share price rises, company events, research… And if it’s a quiet month, you can simply write articles that might help your customers out.

10 Steps to Success Follow 10 simple rules of thumb, and you’ll soon be writing great newsletters and reaping rewards…

If you are an aspiring writer, or you simply want to augment your professional qualifications by publishing material related to your field of expertise, listen up. Here are a few tips that will help ingratiate you in hearts and minds of editors. Once you’ve established a positive rapport with an editor, you may find publication to be an excellent outlet for your work – and if you’re good enough – you may be invited to submit more work.

1. Editors prefer e-mail correspondence above all else – especially when submitting query letters and final articles. If you e-mail a story, make sure to paste it into body of e-mail, just in case conversion of an attached file does not go smoothly. E-mailing correspondence and articles means editor can cut and paste it into publication, without having to retype. Digital delivery saves editor lots of time.

2. If you promise an editor something – an article, a short bio, or a high resolution photo – make sure you deliver it. Always follow through with your promises, and that editor will remember you as reliable.

3. Before submitting a story, remember to fact check accuracy of dates and spelling of places, names, and geographic locations. Most editors will revise your work even further, because that’s their job – to make work even better. But few editors will continue to work with a writer who submits sloppy material that needs to be fact checked or heavily rewritten each time. Worse yet, you don’t want to submit something with factual errors in it.

4. Have a short, three to five sentence bio on yourself ready to submit to editors. Not all publications provide information on authors with published articles, but when they do, you want to take advantage of free publicity. Don’t EVER submit a one page or one paragraph bio to an editor, unless they specifically request this much material. They’re being gracious by providing some space and most editors will not want to take time to carve a bio down.