Well, it must be as there are so many doing it, you might think. Are they doing this with an account provided by an ISP (Internet Service Provider) such as AOL? Of course not, they would be dropped like a "hot potato". They own their own ISP and are relatively "bullet proof" if complaints are received.

Forget spamming addresses. Building a subscriber base is a slow process. If you can't dedicate at least a year to this process, you will most likely be better off trying something else.

The very first thing you must do is identify a "niche" market, in which you are knowledgeable. At first you will be only author. Spend some time on your articles, and try to make them interesting. Watch your ratio of subscribes to unsubscribes . Yes, even best Newsletter will not appeal to everyone. If a particular issue generates a large number of unsubscribes, try to determine why.

Don't be pretentious with your writing style - write as if you were talking with someone. Spell check - with word processing tools available, there is no excuse for a word that is spelled incorrectly. Have someone proof read your Newsletter for content before sending it out. Is it interesting to them?

Format your Newsletter - best width is 60 to 65 characters per line. This is readable by virtually all email clients (readers). If you don't format line length, it may appear "choppy" when read by some. While it may look good on your system, it may appear disjointed on others.

Can you make a few hundred a week with a Newsletter? Yes! But, like anything else, it requires time and a commitment from you.

Some are free and others cost anywhere from $60 to $7,500 per year. Let's talk about free as that is normally within budget of most people. There are a number of free list servers available, and a search on Internet of "Free List Servers" will quickly provide this information.

One I found, which I like is "Topica". In point of fact, I have four of my lists there. Before doing this, I did considerable research on Company, and while I had a number of questions, they were all answered to my satisfaction. They also recently revised "look and feel" of their web site (where you interact with them) and that was a definite positive as it is now a lot easier to navigate their site.

My largest list is "Your Business Newsletter" with 10,000+ subscribers. This is an announcement list, which means that only I can send information to subscribers. My smallest is "Just Jokes" with just 22 subscribers, which started last week. This is an open discussion list, which means that anyone can send out a post to subscriber base.

Now Topica obviously has some high powered computers as messages sent are usually delivered within minutes of being sent. Now my next question would be - how can they afford to do this free.

Advertisers pay freight. You get a small and very unobtrusive ad for their services at end of each email sent, and they provide archival services on their web site. If you visit there, you will see banner ads of their advertisers - a small price to pay for quality of their services.

As a prudent person, once a week, I download all email addresses of my subscriber lists. Does this mean I expect a problem with Topica? No, it means I am a prudent person. They do allow you to download all of your addresses to your local computer, which is a plus. If you ever decided you wanted to leave their service, your mailing list will be intact.

You are limited to 500 addresses that you can load directly, and this is to prevent UBE spamsters from abusing their service. If you do have a larger list to import, you can make arrangements through their customer support.

Anyone who uses a mailing list should definitely check this out at: http://www.topica.com/ - feel free to visit our newest list at: http://www.topica.com/lists/justjokes/ - and if you have some humor to share with us, don't hesitate to subscribe.