Publishing your first e-mail newsletter.
By
Joanne Glasspoole
I've been an "e-publisher" for a couple of years now.
Publishing an electronic newsletter (E-zine) is a fabulous way
to market your Web site. But getting started takes planning, hard
work and commitment.
First, you need to decide on the subject of your E-zine. The subject,
ideally, should complement the subject of your Web site. Next,
you need to establish a schedule for sending out your publication
(e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly), and then, more importantly,
you need to meet your deadlines.
To ensure your E-zine gets read, it is crucial that you provide
information that is original, informative and beneficial to your
readers. You need to make your readers hungry for your content.
Your content, however, is not your only consideration. You also
have to consider the format you send your content in.
When I decided to publish my first E-zine in 1999, I copied ideas
from the E-zines I liked and respected. There are thousands of
E-zines on the Web, but the really good ones are rare gems, because
they are formatted nicely, contain no spelling or grammar mistakes,
are professionally written, provide original content that you
won't find in ten other E- zines, and they are fun to read.
One of the first mistakes I made when I began contemplating the
design of my E-zine's template was to use my word processor. Although
the formatting stayed true in Outlook Express, when I viewed the
newsletter in AOL, it was a mass of unformatted text that ran
on forever with funky characters and was completely unreadable.
I was aghast. With my "tail between my legs," I sent
an apology to my subscribers and immediately scrapped my word
processor for E-zine publishing.
For your E-zine to display correctly in e-mail, you cannot rely
on word wrap. When I edit my e-mail newsletters, I manually insert
line breaks at 65 characters. It's a pain, but it is the only
way to ensure your e-mail is readable in all e-mail packages.
Otherwise, your reader ends up getting a long, rambling e-mail
message with no line breaks that makes no sense.
Although HTML newsletters are becoming more and more popular,
I still opt for the good, old-fashioned text format. If you want
to offer HTML newsletters to your subscribers, that's cool. Give
them the option. But if they're using an older e-mail client that
doesn't support HTML, you might as well delete your message before
you send it, because they won't be able to read it.
I recommend formatting your e-mail newsletter as a text file.
Do not use word processing functions, such as bullets, bold face
and italics, because the formatting is lost if your reader's e-
mail software doesn't support rich text.
Instead of MS Word, I use a text editor called NoteTab Light to
format my E-zine. It's a free download and works great because
you can set your margins to 65 characters (or whatever you choose)
and NoteTab Light does the line breaks for you with a few keystrokes.
To download NoteTab Light, visit
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,10615,24530,00.html
NoteTab Light is highly customizable. To change your user settings,
click on View > Options >. Take a look at all of the settings
and configure to your liking. To configure the column wrap, go
to Documents, check "Wrap to Column" and put 65 in the
box. Then when you close out of there, click Document > Update
Column Wrap, and, poof, your document will be correctly formatted
at 65 character per line. (Note: You may need to make minor revisions
to your layout, but it's easier than retyping.)
Once you have a format that meets your specifications, I recommend
that you set up a template to use in NoteTab Light for future
issues. It'll make your job much easier and quicker. I use templates
for everything, including my e-mail newsletters.
For more information about e-publishing, visit the following resources
on the Web:
Email Publishing Digest
http://epdigest.com/
Ezine-Tips.com
http://ezine-tips.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 2001 by Joanne Glasspoole. Joanne is the editor/publisher
of CYBER QUEST. Each issue is jam packed with original reports,
news briefs, cool Webmaster tools, and more. To subscribe, send
e-mail to
Majordomo@lists.kdv.com
with "subscribe cyberquest" in the body of your message.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------