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Synopsis

BNI has had a newsletter since 1985. SuccessNet started quarterly and now appears monthly online. It’s free to subscribe by e-mail, even if you’re not a BNI member yet.

If you want to create your own newsletter, ask yourself these 10 questions.

1. What is the purpose of the newsletter?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Why would my target audience want to read the newsletter?
4. How will it benefit my audience?
5. What features will it contain?
6. Who will write the text?
7. Will I use a professional to design the layout?
8. How often will it go out?
9. How will it be distributed?
10. How do people sign up for it?

Two more things to remember:

• Your newsletter should be informative and educational, to motivate people to read it.
• Consider outsourcing production to a professional, unless you work in this area yourself.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 091 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you?

Ivan:
I’m doing great. Thanks.

Priscilla:
And where are you today?

Ivan:
Well, I’m back at BNI headquarters again, and we are doing director training this week. And I mention that because I think it’s important for BNI members around the world to know that we’ve got over a thousand BNI directors around the world, and BNI directors have to go through three eight-hour days of training, 24 hours of training with a 900 page set of manuals. So becoming a BNI director, there’s a lot of work involved, and sometimes you have an opportunity to ask your director, take a look at the manuals, because there’s really a lot that goes behind the scenes. Many times the members just see the tip of the iceberg, and there’s a lot behind the scenes.

We’re working here today with BNI directors all around the world, going through BNI director training.

Priscilla:
Wow. Okay, great. What are you going to share with us?

Ivan:
I want to talk about creating an informative newsletter. BNI has had a newsletter now for the 24 years we’ve been operating, since 1985, we started our first newsletter. At that time, it was every other month, or it might have been quarterly at that point, a quarterly newsletter. Then it went to every other month, bi-monthly; and now we have a newsletter that comes out every month. It is called SuccessNet online.

If you, as a listener, are not getting SuccessNet, you should get an e-mail every month that gives you a link to the articles. You can go to a Web site and take a look at it at any time, and you can also subscribe and get an e-mail. The newsletter Web site is BNISuccessNet.com. BNI, the word “Success”, the word “Net”, all one word, BNISuccessNet.com. Got there and you can subscribe; it’s free. We now have 160,000 subscribers worldwide. It is free. I’ll mention it again; doesn’t cost anything. And you will not get spammed. We don’t send out any e-mails other than “Here is this month’s issue.” Actually, we did send out two other e-mails over the last 20 years, and those were relating to disasters that were done in the world, and we created a fund to help support those, and so we just sent out an e-mail. That’s it. Other than that, you’ll never get any other e-mails.

So newsletters are important. We’ve been highly committed to them for a long time, and I want to give BNI members some ideas on what they can do to create their own newsletters.

Think about people you consider to be experts. They’re known for sharing their knowledge through books, research papers, columns, articles, newsletters. Experts write. If you want to be an expert, you want to do an informative newsletter. Of course, you can’t just sit down and crank out a good newsletter overnight. You need to really think it through and plan it out in advance. If you like the idea of a newsletter and you want to use it to network your business, here are ten questions to ask yourself to help you in producing the newsletter.

One, what will be the purpose of the newsletter? What do you want to focus on? In BNI, our purpose primarily is two things. One, to provide educational content to BNI members; and two, to have some news content. Here’s what’s going on around the world, to show the global nature of the organization.

Two, who is your target audience? You need to ask yourself that. Who is your target audience? Is your target audience clients as well as prospective clients? Or is it just clients? For BNI, it is members as well was prospective members. We include both.

Three, why would my target audience want to read my newsletter? Why would my target audience want to read the newsletter? That’s an important thing to ask yourself. You want to make it informational so that they want to actually read something, not just a sales pitch.

Four, how will it benefit my audience?

Five, what features will it contain? Now, that’s easier than it may sound. You want to take a look at a number of newsletters and see which features of other peoples’ newsletters would work for you. Certainly go to BNISuccessNet.com to get some ideas of the kinds of features we use, and try other peoples’ newsletters to get some sense of what you can do.

Number six, who will write the text? That’s a big one. And one of the things you can do is maybe get some people to be regular contributors, but still, if it’s your business, you’re going to need to do a contribution with every issue. So I recommend you don’t start off monthly. Start of quarterly or every other month until you really feel comfortable with punching out content. Because a lot of people start a newsletter, and six month into it, they go, “Ohhhh. I had no idea it was this much work.” And they stop doing it. So who’s going to write the material?

Seven, will I use a professional to design the layout? We have almost always done that. We did it in-house for a while. It was just too much work. We have, for many years now, used professionals to design the layout of our newsletter.

Eight, how often will it go out? Well, as I recommended, I’d start off quarterly or every other month just to get it started before you try and make a monthly commitment. I can’t emphasis enough how much work it can be, but the benefits are great, but you want to start off easy and work your way into it.

Nine, how will it be distributed? We used to do newsletters through the mail; now the headquarter newsletter is online, and it’s the only way to go. I would never go back to anything else. But that’s just for us. That’s my experience. You may, especially if you’re a local business with a local newsletter, you might want to mail that.

And number ten, how do people sign up for it? How do they get it? With us, as people joined, we put them in the list, and then we have an ability for people to sign up as well.

A couple of other comments. Your newsletter should be informative and educational so that it brings in value to your audience and motivates people to read it. Also, unless you have a publishing or Web design expert on staff, you should seriously consider outsourcing the production of your newsletter to a professional. BNI uses CustomZine. If you go to SuccessNet, at the bottom, you’ll see a link, a BNI member, and they have produced our newsletter for many years.

Remember your newsletter is an extension of your business. It’s often the first thing that a prospect sees of you. Publishing newsletter week after week or month after month or quarter after quarter it time consuming, it requires a big commitment, but it can be a powerful networking and marketing tool. You want your audience to come to expect it, indeed, to look forward to receiving it. And that means you have to deliver it on time and deliver top notch quality. An expert produces nothing short of the best.

So those are my suggestions for creating a newsletter. I hope the BNI members can benefit from that.

Priscilla:
That sounds great. It also increases your standing, I think, if you link it to your Web site, right, sort of like a blog might. Is that true?

Ivan:
Yes. It does, yeah. And that’s where I started the conversation with. By writing, it makes you the local or regional expert in the field, and the more expertise you can show in your business, the more credibility that you have. And it’s a long-term, cumulative impact. But believe me, it has an impact.

Priscilla:
Great. Can I ask you one more question?

Ivan:
Sure, absolutely.

Priscilla:
Is it expensive?

Ivan:
Well, it doesn’t have to be, no. When you are doing a newsletter that – if you print it out, the BNI newsletter, it’s, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 pages of content, total content and a lot of graphics, and it goes out to 160,000. So yeah, it’s several thousand dollars an issue to do something like that.

But you don’t need to start there. We certainly didn’t. We started with something very simple, two page printed document that was mailed. The mailing it cost more than producing it. That’s one of the reasons I think online works really well.

So shop around, find people that will do something at a reasonable price. It does not have to be expensive.

Priscilla:
Okay, great. Well, thank you, Dr. Misner.

Ivan:
Thank you, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
It’s a great suggestion.

I’d like to just remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you will join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.