Starting an email newsletter

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Quick, give me a legal tip. Something in your area of expertise you recommend I know or do.

Got it? Okay, write it down. Just the idea or title. Make a few notes if you want, but don’t spend a lot of time.

Congratulation. You now have the makings of an email you can send to your list. All you need to do is to take the idea and write three paragraphs that explain your tip.

Could you do this again? Could you come up with something for next week? A tip, a quick story, a recommended website? I’ll bet you could. Excellent. You have next week’s email.

You can post these on your website, too. Great! You’ve also started a blog.

Many attorneys hesitate to start a newsletter or blog because of the perceived immensity of the task. If you think in terms of a writing a few paragraphs, once a week, it shouldn’t appear so daunting.

You have a lot of knowledge you can share. Substantive law, procedure, advice. You don’t realize how much you know.

You also have a lot of experiences you can share. Interesting cases or clients, war stories.

You run a practice. People want to know about your employees, how you manage information, how you stay productive. What’s a typical day like? How do you open a new file? What do you do when you have a conflict? How do you keep track of deadlines?

You know other professionals who have information your clients want to know. You can ask them to share some of their knowledge with your readers.

You celebrate the holidays. Your readers enjoy hearing from you and sharing the joys of the season.

You have problems. People want to know how you deal with them.

You have goals. People want to hear what you are doing to reach them.

You have likes and dislikes people want to know about. Technology, books, movies, blogs and magazines.

Write something and send it off. Do it again next week. Pick a day when you’ll send your email and put it on your calendar. The whole thing, from start to finish, shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes.

Now, once you’ve done this for a few months, you can take your backlog of emails and load them into an autoresponder. When someone joins your email list, they will automatically receive these emails. Once a week, they’ll get something from you, perhaps something you wrote months ago. You won’t have to write new emails if you don’t want to.

Starting an email newsletter isn’t difficult. Just start. One tip, one thought, and send.

For more ideas for your newsletter or blog, get this

 

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