Newsletter Newsletter Date

Volume 1 Issue 1

Title
[Company Name] , [Street Address] , [City, ST ZIP
Code]
[Web site] [e-mail] [phone]

INSIDE THIS Getting Started

I SS U E
By Author Name
1. Getting Started
When designed correctly, a newsletter provides specialized
2. Writing Great Newsletter information to a targeted audience. To help you achieve this
Articles goal, this template offers suggestions that you can also find in
the article in the Template task pane titled “Creating a
3. Fitting an Article into a Newsletter.” You may also be interested in reading “Printing
Tight Space a Newsletter,” which describes different printing options,
4. Inserting Your Own Art such as using large paper to print your newsletter as a folded
booklet. In addition to these template Help articles, the task
5. The Elements of a pane also contains links to Help topics related to the
Newsletter Microsoft Office Word features used in this template, such as
text boxes. As an added help, before you begin replacing this
content with your own, you may want to print this template
to, so you can keep these instructions.
“To catch the reader’s To find a particular article within this newsletter, refer to
attention, place an Inside This Issue, on page 1.
interesting sentence
In creating a newsletter, first determine the audience. This
or quote from the
could be anyone who might benefit from it, such as people
story here.” interested in purchasing a product or service.
You can compile a mailing list from business reply cards,
customer information sheets, business cards collected at
trade shows, or membership lists. You might consider
purchasing a mailing list from a company that serves your
target customer.
Next, establish how much time and money you can spend on
your newsletter. These factors will help determine the length
of your newsletter and how frequently you publish it.
Fitting an Article into a Tight
Space
By Author Name
So you have space for one more article in your newsletter and one of
your experts out in the field is writing the article. How can you
determine how long the article should be? “To catch th
As in newspapers, the length of a newsletter article can be thought of in reader’s at
terms of how many “column inches” are available for the article. A place an int
column inch is a measure of space, namely an area on a page one column sentence o
wide and one inch deep, used to measure the amount of type that would from the st
fill that space. This will vary from newsletter to newsletter depending on here.”
the font you’re using, its size, the column width, and the amount of
space between lines and between paragraphs. By knowing how many
words on average fit into a column inch in your newsletter, and then by
measuring how many column inches are available for the article, you can
tell the writer how many words their article can have. Let’s take this
scenario one step at a time.
Fill up at least ten inches of column with actual article text.
Print out the page and use a ruler to measure how many inches of
column your text takes up.
Count the number of words in the text.
Divide the number of words in the article by the number of inches the
text takes up. For example, let’s say you have 456 words in 12 inches
of column: 456 ÷ 12 = 38. That’s your magic number for how many
words fit in an inch of column in your newsletter. But you’re not
finished yet.
Measure how many column inches you have available for the article.
For example, we’ll say it’s seven inches.
Newsletter
Title Page 3
Inserting Your Own Art
By Author Name
You can replace the pictures in this template with your company’s
art.
To do so, click where you want to insert the picture. On the Insert
menu, point to Picture, and then click From File. Locate the picture
you want to insert, and then click it. Next, click the arrow to the
right of the Insert button, and then click either Insert to place a
copy of the picture into the newsletter, Link to File to display the
picture without actually inserting a copy, or Insert and Link.
Since the Insert command embeds a copy, the picture is always
visible, but it may greatly increase the size (in bytes) of your
newsletter, depending on how large the picture is.
In contrast, Link to File does not increase the size of your
Caption describing pictu
newsletter file, and if you make changes to the original picture, they
automatically show up in the newsletter. But the picture won’t
display if viewed from a computer that can’t link to the original (for
instance, if the original picture is stored on another computer on a
network).
Insert and Link inserts a copy so that the image is always available,
and also automatically updates changes to the original.

Writing Great Newsletter

Articles
By Author Name

“You can transform your life and business in just seven minutes a
day.” If that statement makes you want to read on, consider
yourself hooked.
A newsletter is competing against a lot of distractions for the
reader’s attention, so it’s important that the first one or two
sentences of an article hook the reader. And since that hook creates Caption describing pictu
an expectation, the article needs to justify the use of the hook, or
the reader will feel manipulated.
Along with the hook, the article’s headline needs to be brief, active, “To catch the
and clear in its purpose. Beyond these essential characteristics, a reader’s atten
headline attracts attention if it’s highly relevant, inspires curiosity, place an inter
or has some other irresistible quality. sentence or q
Newsletter articles are short on space and their readers are short on from the stor
time, so the articles must be well-focused, aiming to make one here.”
major point. The making of this point can be achieved through two
to five (or so) sub-points.
Newsletter
Title Page 3
Newsletter
Title Page 4

These points must have, as their primary aim, the To sum it up, grab the reader’s atten
benefit of the reader, who should be able to point through an effective headline and ho
out this benefit. It can be new knowledge or then reward the reader for following
insight, an idea about how to improve business, or giving them something they didn’t ha
better, how your business can improve them.
In addition, keep the article brief an
The article should clarify, inspire, encourage, focused, and if appropriate, demonst
enthuse, provoke thought, satisfy—it should elicit your products and services address th
a positive response. And the best response of all, raised in the article. By doing so, you
of course, is that the reader decides that your good chance of keeping the readers y
products or services provide the solutions they and of gaining new readers with ever
need.

The Elements of a
Newsletter
By Author Name

In the course of adapting this template to suit your

needs, you will see a number of different newsletter
elements. The following is a list of many of the elements,
accompanied by a brief definition.
Body text.  The text of your articles.
Byline.  A line of text listing the name of the author of
the article.
Caption text.  Text that describes a graphic. A caption
should be a short but descriptive full sentence.
“Continued from” line.  A line of text indicating the
page from which an article is continuing.
Date.  Either the date of publication or the date you
expect the newsletter to be at the height of its
circulation.
Graphic.  A photograph, piece of art, chart, diagram, or
other visual element.
Header.  Text at the top of each page indicating the
name of the newsletter and the page number.
Headline.  The title of an article. A headline needs to be
clear in its purpose, brief, and active, and should attract [Company Name] , [Street Addr
attention by being relevant, inspiring curiosity, or for ZIP Code]
having some other irresistible quality. [Web site] [e-mail] [phone]
Newsletter title.  The title of the newsletter.
Pull quote.  A phrase or sentence taken from an article
that appears in large letters on the page, often within a
box to set it apart from the article.