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In the first part of this series, I talked about the importance of relevance to any newsletter effort. In the second part, I talked about building an editorial calendar to make the task of communicating your relevant message easier.

Now it’s time to talk about building trust and loyalty with each newsletter edition. One of my favorite business authors is Alan Weiss. He’s the “consultant to the consultants,” and has carved out a fantastic career for himself giving advice and writing books geared to the consultant market. His book, Million Dollar Consulting is a must-read for anyone wanting to get into the business.

After reading through 7 or 8 of his books, listening to him on tape, seeing him live, and so on, I’ve come away with a solid piece of advice that you have to follow in the consulting business–and by extension, any newsletter effort. Everything you do, every issue you publish, every article in every issue, must increase your visibility and your credibility at the same time.

Let me underscore this advice by way of a silly example. If you were to stand up right now at your place of business, and walk away from your desk as you start stripping off all your clothes, then run around your building and then proceed up main street to the downtown theater district, you would, by any estimation, increase your visibility.

In fact, you’d probably earn a spot on the evening news (depending on the size of the town and/or the local weird factor–here in Austin, you might not even warrant a second look!) or at least, a police report.

What about your credibility, though? Just because you did something as crazy as that, would you have earned any credibility points?

As crazy as all that sounds, most advertising is run on “act crazy and they will come” model. The promise inherent in any advertising buy goes something like this: you hand over 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 grand (or heaven help you, more) and we’ll run your ad in a newspaper/magazine/radio show/TV show/cable channel/web site for X days, with Y frequency, giving you adequate visibility.

The credibility is up to you, really, in that you need to buy the ad in the right places (to attract the right people) and the right times (no sense going after high-powered executives by buying up 2am radio spots), but at the very end of the day, only certain industries benefit from this approach. Just about anyone can see or hear an ad for 1/2 off books at insert-favorite-bookstore-name here, and if they’re book people (or know a book person) they’ll be enticed to buy. Same goes for food, clothing, gasoline, etc.

For the rest of us, in the B2B business, it just doesn’t work that way. You have to build credibility.

Why? Because building credibility leads to trust. Trust leads to conversations and consensus. Consensus leads to closed deals. Its the inside track. Let all your competitors slave away doing dog and pony shows with the same old tired PowerPoint presentations while you get busy doing the work. A newsletter story (or more likely, a steady stream of effective newsletter stories over time) can help get you there.

Let me walk you through it.

Let’s go back to our original example, the one featuring your small consulting firm taking on the extra-specialized or unusual work that the big boys can’t or won’t handle. I’ve been working this scenario, by the way, because this is the kind of situation I find a lot of my colleagues in. If they’re a small insurance company, then they’re the ones going the extra mile finding out how to insure a 5000 year old Ming vase–your big insurer wouldn’t even bother. If they’re a web developer, perhaps they specialize in creating MVC applications in CodeIgniter and that’s all they do. If they’re a copywriter, they specialize in medical or high-tech copywriting, and not so much with jingles for radio spots or what have you.

Regardless, the small consulting firm with a super-focused practice putting out a newsletter has to convince people that they have the right expertise and the right attitude to get the job done. You can’t just put out stories in your newsletter that say, “We’re really good and you should hire us.” Instead, that’s what the subtext of each of your stories should be. However, you have to finesse it.

So. If you put out a newsletter with 2-3 stories in it, each story should build on the others. The first story may be focused on the 10 things you should do in the event of X. The second story should feature a case study in which you helped a company with X. And the third story should be all the Y things you should do after X is completed.

If topic X isn’t big enough for this treatment, then make sure that topics X and Y (or X, Y, and Z depending on the size of each newsletter edition) relate to each other in some meaningful way. For example, X and Y might go together like marketing and sales (or operations and finance, or copywriting and copyediting), or they may be diametrically opposed, such as saving money on operations and spending more money on sales promotions. Doesn’t matter, because you have to tie things together, even if the tie-in is “these things are opposites.”

Furthermore, everything about the story must resonate with high credibility. You can’t have a boring or obscure or clever headline. Instead, it should say something like “How to Avoid Problems with X” or “The 10 Different Ways to Achieve Y.”

The tone of your stories needs to be conversational and friendly, and provide insight and advice, not a hard sell or just a list of fluffy adjectives that describes how good your service or product is. In fact, if you come right out and say BUY NOW at any time, it’s a sure sign you need to do a rewrite.

Instead, you need to tell folks, at the end of each piece, how to get a hold of you (whether that be email, phone, fax, or in person). If you don’t do it at the end of each piece, then put in a call to action in every newsletter. And if you don’t do specific calls to action (”To learn more about how we can help you save money on Z”) then provide a general call to action.

Ultimately, if you don’t ask, then that impacts your credibility, too. So it’s a fine line between being too coy and too pushy. Just state your case in a credible way, then tell folks how to get a hold of you if they need help with the same issue.

Over time, as you work through your editorial calendar, making sure that you keep hitting all the relevant points of your messaging, your going to target different parts of your audience. Over time, you’ll build up a library of articles.

That’s enough for now. In the next part of this series, we’ll talk a bit about mixing up the media you use–it doesn’t always have to be articles or downloadable PDFs.

Why? Because each edition must instill trust–they have to trust not only the content, but that you’re in your right mind at all times. If something isn’t obvious, point it out. If it is obvious, say that it’s obvious and move on without belaboring the point.

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