Email Software. My favorite is Eudora Pro a powerful program that allows you to use any number of aliases and SIG files. You can sort and filter your mail into folders, set up any number of mailing lists, set up stationery files and more. If you have a small list of newsletter subscribers you can even use Eudora Pro's blind carbon copy feature to send your Ezines to your list.

Listserver Software. Mailoop will allow you to send your Ezine ... and any other messages you have ... to your entire list, no matter how big that list is. Mailloop will also add and subtract subscribers from your lists automatically ... and it can be set up to personalize your newsletters if you wish. Once you own the software, you can send out an unlimited number of messages at no additional cost! To find out everything Mailloop can do for you click here.

Provide good content. Your objective is to sell people your products or your services ... or to build traffic to your site ... so you can sell advertising! Whatever it is, you need to provide good content to your audience so that you can build rapport and trust... a relationship. Then when you make a suggestion for a product... whether it be yours or someone else's, they will trust and believe you.

For example, in this article I have mentioned a number of pieces of software I use. I don't have any vested interested in telling you about them ... I have told you about TextPad because it is a truly useful piece of shareware ... and I use Eudora Pro daily. I wouldn't want to have to live without it. I have also told you about Mailloop. We used to recommend Mailloop because we loved it... and then we decided we liked it so much we bought the rights to it. However, if it wasn't such an incredibly useful piece of software, we wouldn't have bought it... and I wouldn't be telling you about it!

And you have to do the same thing with your newsletter. Provide good content, tell only about the good things, the things that truly work, the things you believe in!

You don't have to do it alone. You can hire someone to help you write some or all of your articles. You can encourage your subscribers to contribute articles or ideas or news sources ... if it is appropriate. You could "trade" articles with another non-competing newsletter owner or ask an expert to contribute a paragraph or two ... or even a whole article. If you get help from other people, make sure you acknowledge them. Give them a credit line and a link to their site ... let your subscribers know who your experts and contributors are.
If you use someone else's work, always always always get permission and always give credit!

6) You must sell your products or services. If you are selling advertising then you must get people to visit your website. Don't lose track of the purpose of your Ezine. Your Ezine allows you to regularly contact people ... so you can sell them something they want or need.

You didn't start this process so you could get up on a platform and air your opinions. You didn't set your Ezine up so that you could become the next publishing mogul. You didn't set it up so that you would have lots of work to keep yourself occupied with ... you set it up so that you could build your business... so that you could sell your products or services or advertising space. Don't lose track of this.

If you aren't sending your readers over to your website to find out more about a product or service ... you should be selling them from within the newsletter. If you have a classified ad section of your newsletter... put your own ads in it! And don't forget to tell people about your products and services ... old and new in the editorial sections of the newsletter.

Make sure you have good information and good relevant content for your readers... and don't be shy about telling them you exist... that your products are there to help them with their problems ... that you have a solution to their problems and woes! Hit their hot buttons again and again. This is what your newsletter is for! Make sure you build credibility and rapport with your subscribers. Adding things like "Our email lists are totally private, we will never sell your information to anyone!" and follow through with your promise, because if they believe in you, trust you and you can prove that you know what you are talking about, they will buy from you!

Publishing a newsletter (ezine) is crucial to boosting your credibility and building a relationship with visitors to your site and who, hopefully, become customers.

First impressions are important and you should painstakingly plan your web site and the content included in it. People are looking for value and are not prepared to spend a long time looking for it.

You need to provide good content and keep enforcing it through regular follow-ups, don’t let that old adage “out of site, out of mind” creep in.

It is important to turn that first-time visitor into a subscriber so they keep coming back to your site. That is where it is most critical to form a trusting relationship with your readers…remember you’re selling a service, so be user friendly.

Publishing a newsletter is not an option, in many case, it’s a necessity. The newsletter is your touch-point between your messages and your customers.

The percentage of visitors to your site that you can turn into subscribers is hard to determine and is dependant on a number of factors. Such as:

Although it seems obvious, include a subscription form on your Web site. Respect the person’s privacy and gather only the information you absolutely need.

Don’t be discouraged by your sign up ratio, it takes time to build a quality list and quality, not just numbers, is what you want. Aim for a double opt-in subscription policy. This means that you send out an e-mail to a subscriber following their sign-up to confirm they actually want the newsletter(ezine).

Spam e-mails are annoying and their rate continues to rise. It is advisable to have a double opt-in list if a web surfer should report you to one of the policing servers. With double opt-in you are protected.

Now that you are getting closer to publishing your first newsletter, or even if you’ve started, you need to market it and build traffic. We recommend the following service for automatic submission to over 1600 sources.