The road to newsletter success is paved with good ideas--and here's a baker's dozen of the best of them.

The "Publisher Profile" feature that runs in most issues of NL/NL contains, along with tales of hard times in early days and an amazing variety of pre-newsletter publishing occupations, any number of good publishing, management and marketing ideas. Here's just a sample:

1. An e-letter doesn't have to be a freebie. At Beer Marketer's Insights their Insights Express, a one-pager, is published "more than once a week" and priced at $245/year. The overlap with the print newsletter is only 10 to 20 percent.

Note: They market this product chiefly to their own lists. It hasn't done very well when they went "outside."

Use postcards to drive traffic to your website

2. At Privacy Journal Robert Ellis Smith uses postcard mailings to drive prospects to his website where they can order subs and ancillary products. Smith notes, "It's also not a bad way to clean a mailing list. After we get back the nixies, we may mail a full promotion package to that list."

3. With his own small firm, EM Practice, Robert Williford is a "reformed price hawk." He assumes that his "over 80 percent" renewal rate on a key title would allow him to raise rates "later" if need arises.

Williford is also an increasingly lonely voice for direct mail. "I think getting people to send you checks is better than an online order for a free trial."

4. Also in the direct mail area, Manisses Communications Group is working hard to develop association relationships. When they work the association, the members get promotions for Manisses titles.

"It comes on the letterhead of the association director offering them a 50 percent discount," says publisher Betty Rawls Lang. "It's a good deal for us; there are no list costs for one thing. It's one type of direct marketing that is still working for us."

5. Not for every publisher, but in markets that can support one, dailies seem to be the type of newsletter that is "impervious" to competition from online sources. "You can't get the information any quicker on the internet," says Paul Warren of Warren Publishing (which now has three dailies).

6. Use associations as a research tool. Many-time publisher Dr. Leslie Norins keeps a clip file of newspaper and magazine articles that look to him like "newsletter possibilities" (often a profession or industry with a problem).

"Then," he says, "I look for their associations. If there's one but it has only 280 members, I know they may have a 'problem' but aren't likely to support a newsletter, but if they have 28,000 members...."

Don't give away too much online

7. Think about how much information you give away online. Mark Ragan of Lawrence Ragan Communications did when an industry executive told him she'd "created an entire report solely from material free on our website ... Believe me, I went back to the office and we had a meeting on 'Is it time to stop giving away so much.'"

8. Is your title a selling tool? John DeLellis was publishing Writing Concepts but he thought, "Our subscribers may know what it is, but would a prospect spending three seconds over the trash can with our package understand?"

So the newsletter became Writing That Works--although, DeLellis adds, "I wanted to call it Good Writing That's Really Easy, Simple, and You Can Learn in 10 Minutes."

9. Ralph and Terry Kovel used to run ads or inserts for their other products within the pages of Kovels on Antiques. "We don't do that anymore and we don't run ads or inserts from anyone else either. We figure the newsletter subscribers are paying for the information."

About their extensive line of special reports, Terry Kovel adds, "Sometimes the most difficult part is finding the right title. We have one on how to deal with disasters. The problem is people don't realize they need this information until after their house burns down."

Every newsletter issue is a marketing tool

10. Helen Hoart at Consumer Health Publishing has made "more formal" a practice she learned when a company she was previously with acquired Communication Briefings. For each issue, the publisher, editor and marketer sit down together and review and select each story that will appear. "After all, every issue that goes out is a marketing piece."

11. Every year Andrew Harper of Andrew Harper's Hideaway Report offers subs the opportunity to give gift subscriptions--three for the price of one regular sub. About 15 to 20 percent convert to full paid and "another 20 to 25 percent seem to be perpetually renewed by the givers."

12. Harper also offers discounts on all three of their products in combination offers on their website. While in regular direct mail, Richard Harper notes, you can usually sell only one product at a time, more than half of Harper's online orders take a combination of more than one product. Their average online sale, after discounts, is more than twice the revenue of a single mail-generated newsletter subscription.

More good ideas

These ideas and many more are contained in our latest Executive Report, "Newsletter Success Boulevard: 27 Publishers Reveal the Profit-Building Secrets of Their Success, What Marketing Techniques Have Worked for Years, and How They're Meeting Today's Challenges" (whew!).

The 52-page report is available to NL/NL subscribers at only $47--or extend your subscription for another year, lock in the current low $229 price, and receive the report free of charge.

13. Here's our last "good idea": "Tell the prospect exactly what to do, and never assume he or she will infer anything." So--

Grasp your credit card in hand, pick up the phone, dial 845-876-5222, fax [phone], or e-mail [e-mail], and order your copy of "Newsletter Success Boulevard."