By Jessica Albon

When your visitors click on to your website, is your newsletter helping or hurting your image? Does it proclaim, “Hire us, we’re professional, trustworthy, and do impeccable work,” or is it clearly old and neglected?

It’s time to transform your newsletter into the beautiful, brilliant salesperson it can be. Open up your own website and go over these five points to see how you’re scoring with first time visitors.

Do you keep archives?

I’m the first to sing the praises of archives. They’re a great way to demonstrate to first time visitors why they should subscribe. They’re fantastic for your search engine rankings. And they’re a shockingly easy way to let your website get dusty.

Does your archive page make your website look abandoned? Were you great about updating them until 2002 when you suddenly stopped?

If you’re going to keep an archive page, you’ve got to be obsessed with keeping it up-to-date. If you don’t keep it up, when visitors stop by, they may think you’ve gone out of business.

Also, in building your archives, don’t just list them by date. You have a great opportunity to demonstrate your communication skills by summarizing each issue after the link.

Keep your archives up to date to demonstrate your attention to detail.

Do you promise privacy?

Do you share or sell email addresses with others? Assuming you don’t, do you make that clear beside every subscribe box on your site? Do you offer plenty of reassurance to your readers that their information will never be compromised?

If you’re not posting your privacy policy, you’re increasing visitor distrust–definitely not the way to win clients.

What should your privacy policy say? You’ll want to talk to a lawyer about that one, but spend some time looking at what other sites have to say–what details they include that make you feel comfortable.

Don’t copy what you find, but take your notes to your lawyer and put together something that protects you, makes readers feel comfortable, and represents the experience you want visitors to have with your site.

A well-written privacy policy goes a long way towards building trust.

Do you make visitors search for subscribe forms?

Here’s another chance to show visitors to your site how easy you are to work with–make it easy to find the subscribe form.

When visitors are browsing your site and stumble upon your subscribe form, it damages your credibility.

Why? People don’t like to feel like they might be left out. They don’t like to feel that some of your customers get a better deal than others.

And by making it hard to find your subscribe form, you’re creating the impression that they’ll have to stay on their toes if they work with you to make sure they get everything they’re paying for.

Don’t make visitors wonder. Put your subscribe form in an easy-to-spot spot on every page of your website.

Put that subscribe form front and center to ensure equal access.

Do you ask for intrusive information on your subscribe form?

It’s good to ask questions of your subscribers. In fact, just by asking subscribers for their first name (instead of just asking for their email address), you’ll increase the quality of your subscribers substantially.

That doesn’t mean asking every question works in your favor, though. So, take a critical look at your subscribe form and ask yourself why you ask each question.

When you ask for extraneous (or overly personal) information, you’re making visitors think you’re into wasting time. And no one wants to sign up for a newsletter that’s likely to waste their time.

So ask only for the information you really need in order to provide a solid newsletter. Leave the rest out.

By carefully considering what information you want up front from subscribers, you’ll demonstrate to site visitors that you value their time.

What does your confirmation page say?

Now, take a moment to actually subscribe to your newsletter. What happens next?

Are new subscribers taken right back to your home page? Are they stranded on a third-party’s website (and bombarded with ads)?

Never leave your subscribers stranded. This makes them wonder about the care you take with your clients. No one likes to be at a loss for the next step.

Your confirmation page should include at least three things: a brief “thank you for subscribing” message that lets readers know when to expect their first issue, a contact email address or phone number if they have questions, and something else to do.

Your “something else to do” could be to offer them an immediate discount on one of your products or services. It could be to ask them to refer others to your newsletter list. It could be to ask them to download a special gift. Just be sure to give new subscribers something to do next.

Carefully craft the experience of new subscribers to put them in the optimum frame of mind for their first issue and you’ll demonstrate the care you take of all your clients.

Examining what your newsletter’s currently saying about your company helps you maximize its success as a sales person. By making just a few changes, you’ll find visitors think much more highly of you and join your newsletter in the right frame of mind to buy.