By: Taban Khajehnassiri
What is the key to success and effectiveness of a newsletter? Am I going to answer this important question? I do not know, but I'll try to make it a little bit clear.
Yes, first of all, let me say Viva Summer Olympic Games! I was watching the opening ceremony on TV, and I was thinking to myself: "It is really an art ... and what a great art we witness on this arena!" Yes, it was such a great performance. Then I started thinking about something else, something that is and can be considered as an art, a very complicated and difficult art.
While you are doing it, you always learn something new, everyday. I was thinking about a sport, or let me say an art, not included within
Summer games at all. In my mind, there was an image, image of bullfighter.
A bull fighter fights with the animal who does things he doesn't expect. In writing a newsletter, the editor I believe has many thing in common with a bullfighter. First he has to concentrate on the subject he is dealing with, the subject acts like a bull, it moves up and down, stops and then moves on again, the author is dealing with a means, a pen or this
very keyboard, just like a bullfighter, he moves it here and there, stops and concentrate then moves writing all over again, when the editorial and his articles finish, he has killed the bull with his pen right between the eyes.
Every new newsletter acts like a new game right in front of the people (readers and subscribers) watching the game from their stands. A
newsletter editor writes for the people who expect thing that he doesn't do or know how to deal with. A bull fighter learns from the bull's
reactions, the editor learns from the feedback for his newsletters and its content.
It must be a great show anyway, and without it, people will leave the arena. A bullfighter learns how to move and carry the bull from a path
to another, and again it is the bullfighter who must make an art, an exciting one from it. The editor has to change themes from a path to
another to please his readers making that art from it. Yes, at the end of a show, it is a must for the bullfighter to kill the bull, the same way as the editor must finish his newsletter's editorial. In bullfighting that's the bullfighter who takes risks.
If you are running a free newsletter, and
you are the editor, you are the one who takes risks, but if your subscribers have paid to receive your newsletters, they have come to the
arena to watch something interesting and brilliant, If they get what they are looking for, that's ok, if not, you are the looser even if you have killed the bull, in this case, your viewers have taken risks. Today people know more about bullfighting, but they don't know more about writing a newsletter on the Internet for a large number of people expecting a miracle within your newsletter.
In the ring, each bull is something else,
is another world, another planet, in preparing a newsletter, every issue must be something new. And finally bullfighting as some people say is an
aggressive and violent act. When you send Spams, that is the only aggressive part of a newsletter. Use op-in and do not Spam. And that's all.
This article first published as the editorial of WWN September 16, 2000