Thursday, April 14, 2011

ON BLOGGING ~ Newsletter Help Wanted...

Image courtesy adria.richards via Flickr

I know that I usually use this space bi-weekly to share blogging tips with interested readers. But today I am trying to flag down some tips from any of you who might be able to help educate me on a particular area of recent interest.

I am looking for insight into how to create and best distribute an electronic newsletter.

If you are involved in a newsletter for your blog, your job, your volunteer activities or just happen to have knowledge about how to create and distribute them please tell me how!

Can you direct me to any tutorials, programs, guide books or other resources in this area? It is something I am looking into for future freelance writing opportunities. I think it would be fun and creative to help small businesses use them to generate better sales, referrals and repeat customers. But if I don't know how to implement my ideas for them, I'm not going to get many jobs.

I don't know how to create them in Word. I open the program and struggle with the templates. I don't know how to manipulate things well enough there on my own to create what I want. Am I missing something simple? Are there quality free or at cost templates out there on the web? Have you had experience with any electronic distribution sites and prefer one over the other?

If you don't have any way to help me directly, perhaps you know someone who might. I'd love to pick their brain. And of course, anything that I learn I would certainly turn into a lesson for a future Blog Tips post. And in order to hone my skills, I could always create a test Bumbles Blog Newsletter and use any dear volunteer readers as my guinea pigs to work out the kinks.

So, let me know if you can help a Bumble out. Much obliged!

8 comments:

Lin said...

I write the corporate newsletter for the company I work for--that is my job. I use Publisher and it is very easy to use and has lots of templates and such. If you have Word, you probably have Publisher. VERY easy to navigate.

I am not very good at the electronic portion of it, but I think you could easily find out how to do that. Mine is created in a PDF and printed manually by a printer and distributed.

Email me if you need help with it and we can discuss. I might be able to tap some friends for the electronic distribution part.

Cheryl Ann said...

I write a newsletter for my classroom and also use Publisher. It's very easy to manipulate photos with that program. Hubby uses Quark XPress and writes a newsletter every day, but I don't have that on my laptop. Publisher, for me, works just fine.

Jenny Girl said...

I don't write newsletters, however Microsoft Publisher might be worth a try. I just checked it and it has templates for newsletters, so that be a good place to start until you become famailiar. Good luck :)

Izzybella said...

Ditto all of the above on Publisher. Their templates are really user friendly and a good place to start until you become more comfortable with the program. As computer literate as you are, you really shouldn't have any trouble getting in playing.

kayerj said...

I can't help you out, sorry!! but I'll look forward to your upcoming post about it. Have a nice weekend :)

Little Ms Blogger said...

Not a clue. Sorry. But, it looks like you got some great advice.

Unknown said...

I don't know anything about creating and distributing a newsletter (I'm sorry). I wanted to wish you luck and let you know if you need any help that I can do, let me know :o)

Good Luck!
~ Amy

Tania said...

Thanks for this blogg post