There are two types of added value for a newsletter: value that adds to your subscribers’ engagement and interest and value that adds to your bottom line.

Both of these are important additions to any publication and should be part of your newsletter’s focus from the get-go.  Adding value to your readers’ experience boosts their confidence in your publication and engages them in the newsletter in many ways.  Adding value to your side of the newsletter (i.e. it’s profit potential) definitely keeps your interest level and engagement up as well.

Adding Value For Your Readers

Giving extra value in each issue shows your readers that the newsletter is all about them, not you.  It gives them incentive to not only participate in the publication itself (by clicking ads, reading content, etc.), but to get their friends and colleagues interested too.  Word-of-mouth to advertise subscriptions is, like any other marketing, the best kind you can get.

There are a lot of ways to ad value for your subscribers.  The simplest is to find discounts, freebies, or other offers you can pass on to your readers.  Coupons they can print out, offers they can get by mentioning your newsletter, or even just plain “generic” values that you point them towards that they might not have found on their own are all great ways to boost value.

Other values for readers include exclusive information they can’t get somewhere else (articles), featured writers or gurus whose information is aimed directly at your readers, and more are another way to give value to your newsletter.

Finally, engaging your readers and interacting with them (via the newsletter) further enhances its value in their eyes.  Answering questions is a great way to do this, or publishing “letters to the editor” in each issue is great too.  Anything that makes your newsletter personal to the reader ads value.

Adding Value for You

Value in a publication is a two-way street, of course.  If you aren’t interested (or profiting somehow), even if your newsletter is a hobby publication, you’re going to lose interest or compromise your newsletter.  If your readers aren’t interested, they won’t click, buy, or engage in your newsletter either.

So adding value for you, as the publisher, is just as important as adding value for your readers.  Often, the two coincide and can cooperate to make both you and your subscribers happy.

If, for instance, you get a business to offer a coupon as an advertisement in your newsletter, perhaps you can have a stated goal with them as well.  Something like if 100 visitors come to them thanks to your newsletter, you get the service for free?

Or maybe just finding the deal is good enough to give you value and passing it on to your readers is just a bonus itself.  That also adds value to your experience.

Offering discounts or extras with your own products or services is, of course, an extremely obvious value adding to both sides of the equation as well. You can take this further by creating contests amongst your readership encouraging them to illustrate the highest and best use of your product/or service with a reward at the end. An excellent way to tie your blog into a contest is to have clients submit stories, pictures, or videos which you pick the best, display them on your site or blog, and then have an open contest. People want to win, so they will invite others to vote which will open you up to a wider audience.

Finding Discounts

One of the best ways to get discounts to offer your readership is to work within your business sphere, these are people you network with already so you will be doing them a service as well as yourself.

Another source for discounts and coupons is of course online, you can create a Google Alert to get discounts in a specific industry, niche, location, and/or product delivered to your email in-box. Major online retailers tend to have seasonal sales often, you can either bookmark their sites or sign up for their email alerts to keep up to date on the latest sales. There are also online sources that specialize in finding the best coupons and discounts on the net – we have listed some of them for you.

http://coupons.com

http://www.couponcabin.com/

http://www.couponmom.com/

http://www.couponchief.com/

http://www.retailmenot.com/

http://coupons.smartsource.com/

http://www.bestcouponbook.com/

http://twtqpon.com/

http://cheaptweet.com/

http://www.coupontweet.com/

https://www.mobiqpons.com/

There are literally thousands of ways you can ad value to your newsletter without breaking the bank or compromising anyone.  All of them will boost your newsletter’s success!