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Those who love to write and have a head for running a business should seriously give it a thought. Running a print newsletter can be fun and can also rake in the money, if that is what you love to do.

Like in any business, one has to be ready to shoulder responsibilities and think of eventualities. The success may be there or may not be there. It takes quite a bit to become successful in this industry.

First the ground rules

You have to create a product, which should pertain and pander to the tastes of the people. You need to sell this product via subscriptions taken from the customers. Newsletters are to be written every month, bi monthly, six monthly or whatever periodicity that you have deemed for it. Subscriptions also need to be renewed. You would require advertisements to keep the subscription cost down etc.

The costs of printing and delivering the copies are relatively low. These are just some of the costs; they can vary with time and inflation. All prices are per copy

· Printing a newsletter less than 12 pages - £ 0.60
· Mailing on a monthly basis - £8 or more
· Subscription prices can range from £40 and above
· Those with lesser number of subscribers (500 or less) are more profitable

There are two priced models for newsletter

· High priced - which has no advertisements, only subscriptions
· Low priced - which has advertisements

The High priced newsletter

As we have said earlier, these have no advertisements. Thus, all the expenses are made from subscription revenue only. Therefore, they tended to be expensive. Most are priced from £99 to £200. Therefore, the entire content in the newsletter is geared towards the customer. They only have text content, illustrations and pictographs pertaining to the subject matter.

It’s an easier newsletter to manage and can be managed by a staff of just one. Therefore, the content matter has to be strong and attractive enough to keep the subscribers as well as make many more. Therefore, it’s not for the faint-hearted writers as this sells on content matter alone.

The low priced newsletter

This is a strategy, which is followed by almost the entire publishing industry. This revenue keeps the newsletter afloat.

Normally the subscriptions rates are around £50, which many subscribers are willing to pay. The more the subscribers, more interest is created in the newsletter by the advertisers, who provide the revenue for the newsletter.

A typical issue has 48 pages, 30 pages of paid advertisement. Advertising revenue per page amounts to £600 and 1000 subscribers. Let’s calculate the revenue stream for this newsletter - that’s a cool £18,000 per month. Added to that is the subscription revenue per year of £50,000. These advertisement rates may also change compared to the number of subscribers that are there. However, this is definitely a more profitable venture.

This however, entails a lot of work and needs many people apart from the editor and the publisher to be a successful and a profitable venture. It requires that there be many overheads and sometimes these can become quite costly.

The easiest part here becomes the writing of the content. If it is tolerably good, your newsletter is definitely worth the time and effort that you are putting into it.

There are other options, which are available apart from these two revenue stream models

1. Low price, no ads - very tough proposition to hold and run. This needs thousands of subscribers to break even. This can take quite a while.
2. High price, many advertisements - those who pay a higher price for their bit of information can get quite disgruntled when they see advertisements. To convince them of the benefits of higher subscription rates in this case can become quite an uphill task. If you lose confidence of the customer, in this case then the newsletter business can altogether close down.

The choices are entirely yours of course as dictated by the market conditions.

Choosing the topics and subject matter for the newsletters

1. It should be of interest to the specific target audience whom you are targeting. For example a newsletter on dogs should pertain to just that, not something off the mark. The information is paid and the audience wants the information that they are paying for.
2. By writing about niche subjects, your newsletter will attract more attention and readership. Therefore pertain to at least one niche topic in the subject matter that you have chosen.
3. Homework…homework…homework. Like in any other business, doing your homework on all fronts is the layout, the revenue streams, content matter helps. Otherwise you might get stuck in the launch process for a substantial period of time.

These are some of the differentiating factors. Success and failure is dependent upon these as is exposure and experience. So go ahead publish the newsletter and best of luck to you.

This article was written by Craig Dawber of smarket-associates.com
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 9:13 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.