Anyone with a blog can tell you it's difficult to get people to read the stuff you publish online. Imagine if doing so were part of your job description? Maybe that's why the thankless task of writing the online newsletter so often falls to the intern.
It's an annoying paradox: The Web provides an easy connection between company and customer, provider and consumer, for every single field of interest imaginable, but the sheer amount of pages on each subject, coupled with the widely variable quality of the information, serves as a huge impediment to the completion of that connection. So how do you stand out and drive readership"
Obviously, the paramount trait your newsletter needs is top-notch, useful, irrefutable information. Whether you're writing a newsletter on Astronomical discoveries by your research university's physics department, or one on kittens, you have to provide material that's useful and trusted by people in your area of interest.
One thing that people hate about corporate websites is corporate language. The copy on a corporate website usually never stops selling: selling itself to you and selling itself to itself. As a skimmer with the power of the mouse in my hand, I don't have to tolerate your mission statement, or that quote from the CEO, or the other quote from the CEO, or the phrase "meeting your plastic extrusion needs..." or any of thousands of annoying little violations of my intelligence which are so commonly found on corporate websites and within corporate newsletters.
If you can present useful information in a clear, journalistic style, with no fluff, readers will view your company (or your office if it's an internal newsletter) as competent, trustworthy, and valuable. And they'll come back to you again and again. You can do this by following some basic guidelines.
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