Effective Newsletters Can Be Great Business Tools

A regular newsletter can be a great marketing or customer-service tool for your home-based business. Whether you use it to keep current clients up to date about new services or to entice prospective customers with all the things you can do for them, it's important to keep a few tips in mind:

1. Settle on your style. One of the biggest problems with newsletters is inconsistency-someone is referred to as "Mr. Boris Champer" here, "Boris Champer" there and "Personnel Director Boris Champer" there. Choose one style and stick with it.

2. Ask a friend to proofread. Never trust your eyes alone to make sure your newsletter is error-free -- it's too easy to miss a misspelling or a missing "the" when you've stared at the same document for seven days in a row. Always ask someone else -- preferably a professional copy-editor -- to read your copy before going to the printer.

3. Limit your typefaces. Just because you've got 250 fonts on your word processing program doesn't mean you should use them all. Newsletters with too many typefaces suffer from the "ransom letter" look. Stick with a single font for all your body copy, and possibly one other for headlines.

4. Don't overwhelm with gray. Even if you don't have photos or artwork, use a few tricks to keep your newsletter from being a mind-numbing sea of gray text.

5. Match your look to your purpose. If you're a dietitian providing nutrition news to doctors, you probably don't want your newsletter to look cartoony or cute -- this is a professional publication. On the other hand, if you're a book store owner who's offering fun book and game tips to parents of toddlers, cute and colorful is the way to go, not Wall Street Journal style.