The vast sea of newsletters - newsletters as business opportunity

Home Office Computing, May, 1993 by Patrick Huyghe

Take Advantage of This Diverse and Flexible Market

Not a day goes by without a newsletter of one sort or another crossing my desk. Some are just a single page, many are a standard eight pages long, but others have the heft and look of a newspaper. The topics? In the past couple of weeks, I've received a newsletter from a bank, a health club I belong to, a mail-order bookseller, a dentist soliciting my business, a credit card company, my congressman, a real estate agency, a writer's association, my accountant, and NASA, to name just a few.

These publications are known as promotional newsletters, designed to create a bond between the individual or company who sends them and current or prospective clients. Promo newsletters are meant to provide the recipient with information-- whether the topic is teeth cleaning, business financial planning, or the mysteries of space--in the hopes that you will support a cause or purchase products or services.

THE DENTIST AS PUBLISHER?

If your dentist is like mine, he has neither the time nor the ability to produce a newsletter on his own. Very often, professionals and organizations turn to outsiders--a newsletter production company, a commercial designer, or a freelance writer or journalist--to produce their newsletters.

If the proliferation of promotional newsletters in recent years is any indication of their success, then anyone with strong design, writing, or journalism interest and experience who is seeking a home-based business opportunity should give the field of newsletter production a good, careful look. Newsletters are an ideal home business for those with these backgrounds because the potential market is immense. Corporations, associations, organizations, professionals, clubs, churches, fraternities, individuals in business for themselves, and the government all publish--or should publish--newsletters. To sell your service, of course, you'll have to explain why you can do a better job of producing a newsletter for them than they can themselves. One reason is that many companies either can't--or won't--spend the money to hire a dedicated staff person to head up its newsletter production. You can also point out that, unlike a staffer, you can provide the company a much-needed, regular service, without taking up any room in its office or requiting benefits.

Still, many clients will express one seemingly insurmountable objection. "The clients might ask, 'Gee, how can you possibly know the business the way I know it?"' remarks Howard Penn Hudson, president of The Newsletter Clearinghouse in Rhinebeck, New York, and publisher of The Newsletter on Newsletters. "But that's not the question. You never will. And you would get bogged down if you tried to. What you try to do is come from the point of view of an outsider and ask the kind of dumb questions that the outsider would ask and want answers to. It's this kind of constant questioning that provides you with material if you're a good writer. Then it's just a matter of organizing it and making it attractive. A lot of freelance people get into doing newsletters because they are used to taking a lot of different assignments and working on different subjects."

A FLEXIBLE OCCUPATION

The newsletter business can be done either part-time or full-time, on your own or with others. Three years ago, David Gerring was a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker in White Plains, New York. Having heard that newsletters were a good way of drumming up business, Gerring went out and bought a desktop-publishing program (First Publisher 3.0) and did a couple of issues for himself. When his manager saw it, Gerring was asked to do one for the entire office. Before he realized it, Gerring found himself in the newsletter business. Good thing, too.

When the housing market plunged, Gerring was forced to leave real estate. He began a successful home-enhancement business, but in his spare time he has continued to produce the newsletter for his old office, as well as for other Coldwell Banker offices in the county. In 1992 Gerring produced 19 newsletters for six different real estate offices.

Personalized for each office, the newsletter runs four pages and contains home listings and mortgage news. The success of the newsletter, which is entitled Call Coldwell Banker, comes from the fact that it addresses the needs of the local real estate scene. "The local homeowner doesn't care about national trends," notes Gerring. "They just want to know what's going on in the neighborhood."

Gerring charges $25 per hour for his newsletter services, and it takes him 5 to 10 hours to produce each issue. His job ends with the delivery of camera-ready copy. The manager then has the issue printed, and the agents buy as many copies as they wish and do their own mailing. Gerring sees great potential for expansion of his newsletter business. At the moment, his publishing setup includes First Publisher, OneWrite Plus, Harvard Graphics, Quicken, WordPerfect, and Q&A. His hardware includes a CompuAdd 286 and a Brother 250 fax machine.