How to transform your printed newsletters into their online equivalents: Part 1

One of the biggest transformations smaller organisations struggle with is that of managing their newsletter content for the online world.

Some are still publishing “the old way” by publishing, printing and mailing to their stakeholders. While this approach may be necessary for a range of reasons, these days it’s comparatively expensive and has very poor “viral” capabilities, ie. to be easily shared with others.

Others have evolved to the next phase – creating their newsletter as a PDF and emailing it to their list.

While this approach leads to significant savings in printing and posting, it is still very much an “old world” way of managing content which again fails to tap into the immediacy and viral attributes of the web.

Not only that, many email users block or can’t receive PDF content, meaning many may not get to receive it at all.

The change in content gathering and perusal

But the problem with both techniques is that they are based on what is now a bygone era as far as content publishing is concerned.

Even a PDF is predicated upon the notion of “printing and reading”, something that is simply not necessary today for so many reasons.

The point is that the advent of simple hyperlinking means that we do not need to include the entire contents of a piece within a printable document.

In fact, a well designed eNewsletter will instead allow printing (if required) at the end of the process rather than at the beginning.

In this series we will step through how to change your content gathering and publishes procedures to take advantage of the various benefits of the online world, such as:

• Savings on printing.
• Savings on mailing.
• Increasing sharing of articles.
• Attracting the attention of search engines.
• Increasing your recipient list.

Step one is to fundamentally change the way we think about content.

Thinking “stories” not newsletters

With printed newsletters (and many eNewsletters), it was necessary to plan and gather content for a range of separate pieces that would be pulled together into a single document.

While this approach is still useful for the emailed eNews approach, it fails to accommodate either of your website or social networking particularly well.

Unlike its printed predecessor, the web is not limited by space. Because web pages can scroll indefinitely, a piece can have as many words, images and even animations as you have hosting space for.

Conversely, it can be as short as you like too.

Continuous publishing

What’s more, if you have a good Content Management System, you can add it straight to the website without having to wait for the rest of the articles to be written or submitted.

This “continuous” approach turns the deadline/publish paradigm on its head. Now you can publish whenever you like rather than at a set time.

This might mean that you move away from set deadlines for all content to daily or weekly deadlines for individual pieces.

Social networking ready

The other benefit of the continuous approach is that it prepares you to take advantage of social networking.

Just like websites, social networking pages tend to deal with a single piece or idea rather than a compilation of them. In other words, the page itself is the compiling mechanism rather than having to rely on another method of doing so.

The trick with social networks is to “announce” the new piece and link to it rather than add the entire piece to the page. That means that the website contains your preferred “calls to action” rather than just leaving it on the comparatively restricted social network post.

Search engine magnets

This approach assists your search engine optimisation too. Once you publish your article to your website and social networks, search engines “robots” find it and immediately begin to organise it for relevant search terms. Websites Google (et al) regards highly have their new pieces appear on search engines within minutes of publication to the web.

To test this theory, conduct a Google search on some breaking news and see how long it takes to appear.

Once you’ve mastered this new approach to publishing, you will gain the benefits of having the content of your organisation hit its stakeholders faster than ever before, while taking advantage of important viral dissemination effects.