1. If you don’t subscribe to newsletters in areas that interest you, now is the time to join them. To find them, go to ezine directories such as The Ezine Directory or The Directory of Ezines. Put on your investigator hat and brew a pot of coffee or tea. Your mission is not just to read sample newsletters, but also to study them to get your newsletter design. Write down what you most like and least like about each. Make a rough outline of how favorite ezines arrange articles, ads, and links—in what order and format. From this research, you will get an idea of what you want to create. Newsletter design as well as newsletter format is often best when it is simple, not fancy. It is not plagiarism to do an ezine with a similar look and feel of an existing ezine. It’s called “don’t reinvent the wheel.” It would be plagiarism, of course, to copy their content or design exactly.

2. Now you’re ready to begin creating newsletters. Start with something as basic as a text editor program. You can create your own newsletter template with it. Alternatively, you can obtain free ezine templates. Type in the words free ezine templates and/or free newsletter templates into your search engine to get locations. If you create your own newsletter template, place a grid at the top of your page to help you keep the line length at 65 characters. The reason for this is that when the ezine is sent by email, other people may not receive it as it looks when you send it out. Their settings may not tolerate anything longer than 65 characters, so if you had a longer line, it would wrap it around and cut off part of your sentences. Alternatively, you can use a text program to stop at 65 characters for you. If you use Note Pad, you will have to keep your line length manually. If you use certain text editors like Text Pad, you can pre-set it to stop at 65 characters.

3. You have your newsletter design and an outline to go by. You should also develop a “theme” for your ezine. Choose a short, memorable newsletter name. What will the newsletter focus on? Keep your topic in mind as you develop each issue. Write down the type of people you think will be interested in your topic. That is your target audience. Keep them in mind as you create newsletters. You have several choices for your articles. Write them yourself. Pay a writer to write articles under their name. Pay a writer to “ghostwrite” the articles under your name. Get free articles. Use an exchange tactic: One free article for free classified advertising; or free newsletter for one article. Most ezine publishers use a mixture of all of those. To get free articles, consult sites such as Ezine Articles.com or Go Articles.com. Or put the words free article into a search engine to find more.

4. Now you have your articles. What ads are you going to place in your email newsletter? Well, what products or services do you want to promote? You can write your own ads or you can hire a copywriter. If you’re on a tight budget, read through the classified advertising in magazines, and in the ezines you subscribed to, and study the ads. Look in several issues of the same magazine. Notice if you see an ad repeated month after month. That ad must be pulling in orders. If an ad asks the customer to order, it is a direct or hard-sell ad. (This is rarely done in small classified-type ads since there is not enough wording to properly describe the product or service). If an ad invites the customer to call or email for more information, or to click on a link for more information, that’s a soft-sell ad or a “two step” ad. The ad is step one. The follow-up info is step two. In a two-step ad, the follow-up ad is the hard-sell that presents a fuller description and asks for the order. Write down ads that you think are really good. With these as references, develop your own short ads until you can afford to hire a professional copywriter.

5. Now you have content, articles and ads. You need a way to send your email newsletter to subscribers. It is extremely helpful if you also have a website (that’s another article, but websites can be easily and inexpensively done too). If you have a very small list to send your ezine to, you can use your favorite email program. Are you ready for this? There are also places that you will send your ezine out free for you and manage your subscriber list. The exchange is they will want to put an ad for their company in your ezine. They are called list servers. Two good ones are E-Groups and Listbot. To find more, just input list servers into your search engine. Alternatively, purchase newsletter software or hire a professional service to do it for you.

6. Now, you have your free ezine set up and ready to go. You have secured your method of delivery. You know your target audience. You have your articles and your ads. Issue one, your pride and joy, is finished. Who is it going to? You need subscribers. If you have an existing customer list, they should be converted to subscribers. To get people to subscribe, they need to know about your ezine. It’s time to announce your ezine to the world with web promotion tools. I’ll bet by now, you have already guessed you can get this done free too! (Don’t you love the Internet?) You may start with newletter-library.com and list-promote.com. Find more with a search engine. Add your free ezine to the ezine directories you found in Step #1.

7. Compose a free article that you will give your subscribers as incentive to join. Now, you are getting subscribers and issue one really needs to hit the great-cyber-highway, doesn’t it? Make sure that you send a test copy to yourself first to see how it will appear before your subscribers do!

8. Nothing like planting a seed and watching it grow! But you will need to help it along with web promotion and positive PR. Start with producing a quality ezine. As you go along, you will develop more expertise. The important thing was to begin –to plant the seed. You can achieve good PR and web promotion results in many ways. I can’t discuss them all in the space of this article, but I can give you some advertising promotion ideas to think about:

• Advertise your ezine by placing classified ads in other email newsletters with large subscriber lists that appeal to your own target audience.

• Fuel advertising promotion with ad exchanges with other ezine publishers (i.e. I’ll help your advertising promotion if you’ll help mine!)

• Go all out with web promotion by placing banner ads on complimentary web sites—you will need to create these or have someone do it for you.

• Accomplish web promotion with link exchanges.

Is it really this simple? Experienced email newsletter publishers are shaking their heads “no!” There is a mountain of information still to be learned about ezine publishing, PR, and advertising promotion. But you can climb that mountain as surely as anyone else has. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. If you can walk through these eight steps, you will start a great journey. You can learn as you go and as you grow. The important thing to remember is that all the information you need is readily available to you if you’re willing to look for it. For, when the student is ready, the teacher always appears.

Sally Morton is Senior Writer with Partners Online LLC (d/b/a http://www.hobbiesgeneratecash.com/ and http://www.nutsforcars.com/). An experienced freelance writer, copywriter, and editor, Sally can be reached at sally@nutsforcars.com.