Good post!  Will watch to see what you charge the advertisers and how it goes!

Christina- you might approach moving companies- they would likely see the value, and help with the expense.  When it's finished, I'd love to see the newsletter- sounds great.

I'll be posting prices and successes/failures for the world to see :D  I'll also put a copy of our newsletter on our website and post that as well - although it's not about what our newsletter looks like or what it has in it that will help others, it's about having one and the consistency of sending it.

Great post, I like to hear more about your actual presentation to advertisers?  Is it difficult to get in the door?  How you making appointments or showing up? Are you hitting brand name or mom and pop? Are you using contracts? 

Vicky

Right now I am just approaching vendors we have referred to heavily over the years.  As I mentioned these vendors include lenders, insurance companies and appraisers.  I'll also start contacting all of the property management vendors we use including carpet cleaners, landscapers, restoration specialists, fencing companies, etc.  I also intend on approaching a few builders in the area.  I'm still in the "contacting our SOI" realm at the moment.

The presentation is simply our media kit, which I explained above.  We have the most heavily trafficked website in the North Idaho area so we also include a banner ad for contract advertisers as a benefit to the print newsletter.

I have been considering advertisers for my newsletter as well so I am interested to see how that turns out for you.  Keep us posted. 

Bookmarked! I'm looking forward to reading about your results.

Great info!  I've wanted to do a large scale newsletter that is "zero based" for awhile now.  I'd love to hear how much you charge for various sizes.  I'd imagine its also important to keep the number of ads to a certain minimum.  Looking forward to hearing of your progress.

Neal, what do you mean by zero based? (for some reason you had 2 exact same comments posted, I deleted one).

Zero based just means that other people pay for your publication.  The next level from there would be to actually make a profit!  Now that would be great.  But you have to be careful of having too many ads relative to content in the piece.  You wouldn't want to sacrifice credibility by having too many advertisements. 

One thing I'm actually encouraging is having advertisers pay for a 'full page' on which they put articles pertinent to their specialty (at this point all advertising I'm focusing on is somehow related to real estate).  I want to make it look like the advertising isn't advertising, but rather content.

That's a great solution Christina.  It's always better to offer helpful advice instead of a blatant "Hire me just because I'm me" ad.  You're also helping your advertisers increase their response rates by using the informational approach instead of the me,me style.

Christina--I have a colleague who just started a very nice snail mail newsletter to the upscale residents of several developments where he lives and works. He partnered with another in his office for the endeavor and they sent the first one out this past winter with a goal of a quarterly mailing.

They also had advertisers (I think about 6 small ads across the bottom of the newsletter.) One was a for a local restaurant. They put a coupon in the ad and not only did my friend and his partner receive a good response--The restaurant took in several of the coupons and was very excited to continue with the marketing program.

The coupon helped to show the restaurant the effectiveness of the promotion!

Very good ideas! Thanks for sharing! :)

Great post.  I was thinking that maybe one way to help you pay for your printing would be to keep the costs down.

Not sure who you're using for your printing, but maybe this www.click2print.com offers 5000 2 sided color postcards, with UV coating, shipped to your house for $140.  (I don't have any money saving ideas on the newsletters.

They are hands down the lowest price printer I've come across.  Decent turnaround time.

To do 5000 postcards at Kinko's/FedEx is around $1000, so hopefully this will help you save some $$.

If you have any recommendations for printing, etc, please post them.

Hope this helps.

- David

I look forward to hearing about your results.

David - we print our own.  We own 2 high volume/high speed Canon copier/printers and our cost is <1c page for B&W and <6c page for color.  For postcards this equates to 0.0175c per postcard.