Put together your editorial calendar now and automate your newsletter!
Just a little time now will make your newsletter much easier to produce- and more consistent - next year. Developing an editorial calendar now can help you focus on where you'd like your newsletter to take you. It's good business practice to plan for the next year and develop your marketing efforts to take you there.

Start with the end in mind
If you've been doing a newsletter for a while, review your mission statement. If you're just starting, this is the time to decide what the mission of your newsletter will be. When you set your objectives and then layout goals to reach those objectives, your newsletter becomes a valuable tool to build your business.

Your objective may be to get more business. One of your goals could be to educate past clients and new prospects of your services. So your mission statement might be "to inform and enlighten". Many business put their mission statements right on the front of their newsletter to better communicate their goals to their customers. This is a good idea. It tells your clients that you're making a commitment to them.

Steps to developing your editorial calendar
You will use your objectives and goals to steer the content of your newsletter. Whether you're doing a quarterly, monthly, or bimonthly newsletter, create a folder for each issue. Now using your professional expertise ask yourself these questions:

• Is there seasonal or time-sensitive information that should be addressed as certain times of the year? Always keeping your objective firmly in mind, what topics would lead to that objective and be relevant to the season or time of the year? What trade magazines or other professional venues do I routinely tap into?
• What are some other professional sources that I use now?

With the answers to these questions in mind, mark each issue's folder appropriately with the intended topic. Things may change but at least for now you've got a game plan.Now as you do your research to stay active in your profession, you just make note of topics that relate to different issues of your newsletter, make a copy and drop it in the appropriate folder. This procedure makes compiling each issue a breeze. As you assemble each newsletter issue, you sort through the items in the folder. Some things can be combined into one article, some will make great bullet lists for side bars, others will make perfect main articles.

Don't get carried away with stuffing your newsletter with great content and forget to make it personal. Your newsletter should be like a letter to al friend, so take a little time to write a few lines that's just from you to your reader. Never forget that the main goal of a newsletter is to build lasting relationships.

There's one more thing ...
Before you pack it in, you've got one more task to complete to be sure that you've got the most powerful marketing tool around. While you're planning your editorial calendar, take the time to plan your response mechanism. That means how your readers respond to you.

Your newsletter won't work for you if no one reads it. Creating a two-way conversation is the key to a really magical newsletter. If the reader can evaluate your newsletter periodically, it will help you to fine tune it so that it will be required reading. Work in the following questions:

• Is the newsletter easy to read and understand?
• Is it personal to you?
• Is it eye catching?
• Do you get new information and useful ideas from this newsletter?
• Does it live up to your expectations?
• What more would you like to know?

This simple idea puts you way out ahead of the competition. You have a gauge on what your clients are expecting and wanting. Now just deliver and you're home free.