To receive a copy of this article to use on your website or in your newsletter just send me an e-mail at
Put "Article Request: Newsletter" in the subject line.

One of the greatest ways to promote your website, and your business, is with a newsletter. It's an easy way to keep your name in front of potential clients, and the repeated exposure builds confidence that you are reliable and will be around tomorrow. Newsletters, when done properly, can be easily and quickly put together, while at the same time being of great value to your clients.

Always keep your client's needs in mind when putting together your newsletter. Nothing will turn off a client faster than getting a newsletter that's nothing more than a thinly disguised advertisement.

Before you write your first newsletter, there are several things to consider. The first is, will your newsletter be in print or e-mail format?

The benefits of a print newsletter include:

• It's something your subscribers can actually hold
• It's easy, but costly, to add graphics
• Subscribers can read it even when they aren't at their computer
• If left laying around it's likely that others will read your newsletter

Even with these benefits, I would suggest using an e-mail newsletter. E-mail newsletters offer many benefits over printed newsletters, including:

• No paper and printing fees
• No postage
• No printing and affixing of address labels
• No folding or stapling
• Shorter articles, which can be written quickly. 200-500 words is ample.

So for now, lets just focus on enewsletters, usually called ezines.

Some people have asked me how they can charge for their newsletter. In reality, you can't. With very few exceptions, newsletters are free. There are a few experts in certain fields that do charge between hundreds and thousands of dollars for their newsletters. But these people offer very valuable information that is not available anywhere else, and can make their readers millions of dollars. I'll assume you and I are not one of these people.

As we all know, text newsletters are pretty plain. They don't have fancy formatting, graphics, colors or anything else to make the newsletter look pretty. For this reason, many people want to make HTML newsletters so that they can add all of these graphic features. I strongly urge you to NOT make HTML newsletters. The three main reasons are that they create large e-mails that will take a long time for the 52% of Internet users with dialup connections to download. Also, the graphics can draw attention away from your message. Another thing is that many HTML e-mails don't display properly. I would say that before I upgraded my e-mail program (Pegasus) that 90% of these e-mails were unreadable. With the upgrade 10% are still unreadable. This also happens with Outlook.

If you really want to make a fancy newsletter do what some people do. Create your newsletter online, and make it a page on your website. Then send out a text newsletter that has an outline of your newsletter with teaser sentences under each topic. Then have a link to the web page with the full article. This way, your subscriber will receive an e-mail that will download quickly, but have access to a content rich web page if they want more information. Even if they don't go to your website, you've still accomplished your goal of getting your name in front of present and potential clients.

Another question I often receive is how to make money with a newsletter. That's simple, with advertisements. You can take paid ads without a problem, if you have a large enough circulation. And as with all advertising, the larger the circulation the more you can charge. You can figure that with 3,000 to 5,000 subscribers you can charge $5 to $10 per ad per issue. To get a more accurate idea of what to charge, see what your competitors charge to place an ad in their newsletters.

A very important thing to remember about sending out a newsletter is, "Thou shalt not spam." Only send your newsletter to people who subscribe, and make it easy for people to unsubscribe. When someone does want to unsubscribe, remove them from your mailing list immediately.

I feel that any business that wants an easy and inexpensive way to contact their customers should have a newsletter. And if you make it short, easy to read and full of useful information, then your subscribers will look forward to each issue.