How to transform your printed newsletters into their online equivalents: Part 3

In last week’s post, we explored the tools you need to put the “e” at the front of your newsletters.

This week we complete our series by examining the point of it all – compelling content.

The notion of content being king has been with us for decades. But the relatively recent capability of being able to disseminate content cheaply and easily via internet services and mobile devices has multiplied its importance.

But it doesn’t end there. Content is also the fuel of search engines. Without it, their robots and spiders – the automated mechanisms that trawl the web for keyword-laden content, have nothing to devour and so lead to a painful electronic death.

Thus it’s fair to say that if content was king prior to the internet, it’s now been elevated to deity status.

So how do we generate cut-through content in this competitive, information overloaded world?

24/7 publishing

The most fundamental change to the old way of creating newsletters, is that there is now no need to wait to publish your content.

Previously, all content had to be given a deadline so as to be able to edit, layout, print and distribute the end newsletter to its recipients.

This approach was effectively cost-driven. The cost of producing and distributing this content was drastically reduced if you could assemble as many pieces as possible – and as budget permitted, within the given timeframe.

But the approach was also predicated on the cost of production and delivery.

In an online world, these costs are virtually nonexistent, so there is no need to ensure the simultaneous production of multiple articles.

Provided you had the right tools, you could simply publish content to the internet as soon as it was edited.

So online content became “story” oriented instead of “compilation” oriented.

From stories to announcements

This meant that instead of relying on newsletters to actually provide the content, instead it simply “announced” the availability of the content and then pointed to the entire story on the website.

This really made the notion of adding your compiled eNewsletters to the website somewhat redundant.

In the online world, the website IS the eNewsletter.

This new notion of “announcing” news items also became perfect fodder for social networking.

The “post” would announce the new content and link through to the website for the full story.

What’s more, the sooner an article is published to your website, the quicker search engines can find, crawl, cache and subsequently rank your content for its keywords, giving your website yet another useful boost on search engine results pages.

But while the medium has changed, has content experienced a similar transformation?

The more things change…

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, content is now briefer, has more headlines and is more subjective in approach.  Blogs have seen online content become more about personal accounts rather than objective journalese.

But also no, the quality of writing and the ability to entice and persuade its reader has essentially remained the same.

Where the more significant changes have occurred is in the content for social networking. The “always on” and information hungry nature of this development is something that smaller business have never had to deal with before.

The notion of being a broadcaster is one that smaller business continues to struggle with in their already time poor world.

But that’s the subject of another post…

The main points again…

In summary, those that want to E-nable their newsletter content need to achieve the following:

• Think in terms of individual articles, not whole newsletters.
• Find and install the right online publishing and email broadcast tools.
• Move from objectivity to informed subjectivity.
• Treat your website as the newsletter and the newsletter as the announcement mechanism.
• Use social networking to announce new stories and pieces.