Now that you understand the benefits of offering your own Ezine newsletter and you have decided that you want to do just that, the next thing you need to know is just how to go about doing this. Creating and publishing your own Ezine or newsletter is not a cut and dried "one way to do it" kind of thing. There are many options available to you from the very simple to the very complex. We will cover a few of your options, though this list is by no means extensive. But you will get the idea. An Ezine can be as simple as sending your subscribers a single email. It doesn't have to be formatted in any fancy way and can be delivered by a simple auto responding service. While these type of Ezines are not much to look at, if they contain content that is relevant and people find interesting, they're not going to care that it's a simple email letter. They'll wait with bated breath for each issue. As for the auto responder itself, you can either get an outside service to send these out for you or get your own list server. The downside to getting a service is that you have to put up with them including their ads in your Ezine. The plus side is that they handle all the opt-in and opt-out procedures. By getting your own list server you have to take care of everything yourself. For beginners, it's probably better to have somebody handle your Ezine mailings for you. Moving up from the simple email newsletter, you can actually publish an Ezine that can be quite fancy looking. This can be done either in HTML form or PDF format. In either case your Ezine can contain some serious graphics as well as multiple sections. Some Ezines are as complex as real world magazines, containing sections for different articles on several topics and maybe a few ads sprinkled throughout. You want to keep the advertising to a minimum or your Ezine will look like one big sales pitch. You want your Ezine to be content over ads. When actually creating your Ezine, if you're the artistic type, you can create the look of it from scratch with your own custom graphics, logos, etc. If you're not that artistic, you can go online and get ready made templates to use. There are some places you can go to get free templates but you get what you pay for. The free templates aren't going to look all that great and most likely many people are using them. Your Ezine is not going to stand out. Buying a template will at least bring you up to the next level as not as many people will be using them and you'll have a lot to choose from. Your best bet though is to create your Ezine from scratch, giving it just the right look. Once you've created your own Ezine format, the next step is to actually get some content for it. That will be the focus of our next article. |
