The Top 10 Mistakes Email Newsletter Publishers Make

The Top 10 Mistakes Email Newsletter Publishers Make

1. Quantity vs. Quality
Many publishers become obsessed with getting as many subscribers as they can. The Quality of your readership is much more important than the Quantity of subscribers or the size of your list. This is particularly true for content publishers who are broadcasting content rich articles to their lists. Zombie and unresponsive addresses are meaningless. Subscribers who are willing to build a relationship with you are far more important.

2. Anonymity
When you present "just the facts, nothing but the facts" in your ezine, your readers will not get a sense of who YOU are. This is a difficult environment to build relationships of trust in. Less trust = less sales. Let yourself shine through in your ezine so that your readers have the experience of getting to know who you are. Be your own Unique Selling Point.

3. Snake Oil
Only represent products and services that you can truly stand behind and endorse.If you are supporting external advertising in your newsletter, keep in mind that what you represent, represents you. Adservers such as Google ads will not provide this match and trust as well as hand selected products and services that you can honestly endorse.

4. Scheduling by Sundials
Publish on time, when you say you are going to publish. Have you ever gotten an ezine apologizing for not being on time after months of lag time? Not a very professional approach! If you say you're offering a monthly newsletter, publish monthly, not bi-monthly.

5. Filler, It's What's for Dinner
Don't just insert whatever content you can find as filler. It's better to publish a shorter issue of your ezine than to grab whatever content you can simply to fill up space.

6. AdFest
Be particular and sparing in the amount of ads you run. Think 90% content / 10% promotion. If readers need to sift through ads to find your content, they likely won't pay attention to either.

7. Thin Ice
Don't spread yourself too thin. Many publishers get excited and try to publish multiple newsletters. It's better to do one ezine well, than to do many half-heartedly because you over committed.

8. But There's Only 365 Days...
If you're just starting out, creating a daily ezine is not a good idea. In fact, weekly may be too much. When you're first starting, you're all excited about your newsletter, but you're likely to find that you lose motivation on the 100th day of your daily. Start with a monthly or bi-weekly. It's a lot easier to increase frequency than to vanish.

9. Trust your Host
Many ezine hosting and management services are nothing but cattle herders. They probably don't care about you or your business. One spammer using your host can get YOUR newsletter blacklisted. Work with a host who cares about YOU, not about how many customers they have.

10. It's all For Matt
Before you send your ezine out, make certain that all formatting is correct. Who wants to read a text ezine that have you have to scroll left and right to read? Or an HTML ezine with broken images, links and formatting?