Be sure and mention any specials or any new free things. This is very important. Tease them with something free, something which absolutely requires them to visit site. A free desktop theme, or some wallpaper, or clipart or anything like that.

Don't overload thing with ads. A few is fine, especially for your own services and offerings, but if you include more than half a dozen ads your e-newsletter will wind up deleted more often than not. Especially if those ads are at top of newsletter.

HTML format is great, because you can also include nice looking graphics and other things. In addition, HTML code can be included in your site as content - previous issues. I would stay away from any Java, ActiveX, Javascript, VBscript or any other fancy things as these tend to be frowned upon in emails. Just a nice looking, simple, quick newsletter describing what's new and telling visitor why he needs to come back to your site.

And that's what's critical ... getting visitors to come back to your site again and again.

If you don't get an acknowledgement, don't be afraid to resend message a week or so later.

You want to add his link to your page first as a gesture of good faith, and to show him that you thought his site was of high enough quality to recommend it to your own visitors.

Nine times out of ten, this works like a charm. You get added to his links page and it only cost you a few minutes to write up an email. Now it's automatic - you don't need to worry about it anymore. More than likely you will only get a few visitors a month from something like this, but it adds up over time.

And there is a much bigger payoff - getting you page listed on other sites increases your popularity to some search engines. This moves you higher in search list, which improves tremendously number of people who will visit your site. An indirect but very definite return on investment.