Some advocate use of "Notepad" or "Wordpad", which in most cases is a mistake. If you are going to do any serious writing, and/or publishing, you must have a decent word processor such as "Microsoft Word" or "Wordperfect", which will not only point out spelling errors, but also grammatical blunders.

Others say you don't have to generate income from your publication. More Bunk! Unless it is a labor of love, in order to keep your interest at level it must be, you have to have a reason for doing so. The newsletter must either drive people toward becoming a potential customer, or generate income through sale of ad space - preferably both.

A common mistake is sending two emails per issue. One is purely content, and other is an ad sheet. While ezine advertising is an extremely effective way for advertisers to get their message out, an ad sheet is not advisable. People may read content portion, and never even open ad sheet. Others have an ad section where all ads are displayed in one place, which also gets skipped over. Neither method is a good way to present ads, especially for advertisers.

An effective way to present your advertisers offers, is to intermix them with content. But remember, if it is a bad ad, it won't be acted on regardless of which method is used, so you must be prepared to help with content of ads. If you accept a one time ad, it is a waste of your time and advertisers dollars. It is a proven fact that it takes 5 to 7 exposures before an advertiser can expect results.

Is publishing a Newsletter or Ezine a good way to help you toward road to success in your online business? It sure is! But unless you can give it time and effort required, you should consider other ways to make your business grow. Why not search out established publications that are geared to your target market, and place ads with them. Sure, it might cost a few bucks, but isn't your time worth something? Most people can scrape together price of an ad, but you can never replace lost time.

If you wish to reach higher levels however, you must approach your online venture like every other business, and devote your full time and energy to it.

The collection of email address, from "freebies" however, is a valid method of building a data base. But if you do, remember that there will be undeliverables as time passes. Some ISP's servers will automatically go into a "self protect" mode and shut you down if bounces reach a certain level. For that reason, you must have an emailing package that automatically removes bad email addresses from your database.

It is simply too much work to attempt to do this manually. Your standard email packages, in addition to having a limit on number of emails that can be sent at one time, don't have ability to automatically remove bounces from database.

Once your mailing list exceeds a thousand or so subscribers, if you are sending out a newsletter or bulk "opt-in" email, your best bet is to use a commercial List Server. To prevent spamming, many of List Servers however, use a "double opt in" procedure that requires potential subscriber to verify their subscription request.

If you publish more than one, they make prospect "jump through hoops" to become subscribed to each one, and many people simply won't do it. We use Topica", and they require "double opt in" procedure. We found that a very small percentage of people requesting to be subscribed, actually wound up doing so.

To counteract this, we designed a web page that potential subscribers could simply select publication(s) they wished. This is sent directly to "Topica", and subscribers are sent one confirmation that will add them to multiple lists. Since implementing this, we found that rate of subscribes is right back where it should be.

If anyone would like to use this form, you can see it at: http://adv-marketing.com/business/subscribe2.htm - feel free to use this for your publication, changing of course, our information to yours.

For smaller lists, consider a software package such as "Aureate" which resides on your computer, and allows you to automatically manage your bounces and unsubscribes.

If you do decide to follow publishing route in an attempt to build your business, it can be done. If you do it right way, perhaps concept of "Publish or Perish" does make some sense.