Before you put out your first issue you are faced with some decisions. Some of those are listed below, with pros and cons. Do you use HTML or text? - Text has advantage that it is supported by any email client. Also, text is fully self-contained, meaning people can easily read your message whether or not they are connected to internet. This can be an advantage is ensuring your ezine actually gets read.

HTML can be made to look better as you have much more control over formatting. You can also include graphics, sound and even multimedia. Note, however, that all of these elements must actually be stored elsewhere, which requires bandwidth and also means your message is more difficult to read offline. On other hand, you can embed a banner or other graphic which can be used to determine how many people are actually reading your newsletter.

You can combine best of both worlds by using stationary files, although this restricts your readership to people who have clients which can view them. Stationary files can come with their graphics self-contained, which allows offline reading, and they have all of formatting capabilities of HTML.

Do you include outside advertising? - A major question, and it depends upon purpose for your ezine. Some ezines are pure lists of ads - I believe these last about two seconds in your average inbox before being deleted. Why? Who needs a list of advertisements? We all get so much spam already that more ads just don't make sense to most people.

A better strategy is to provide some content, with lots of links back to your web site. You can then include advertisements interspersed with articles, which increases chances that they will be seen. If you get enough subscribers you can even sell advertising space if you do it this way.

Personally, I don't mind a few ads in an ezine. This is same model that magazines in real world use - advertising pays for content. However, I like to see a ratio of 4 to 1 at least, content to advertising. You give me too many ads without adding value, and I will tend to delete ezine or to unsubscribe entirely.

Do you include full articles, partial articles with links to your website or just links? - There are pros and cons to each method. Including full articles tends to make for very large newsletters. In addition, I've found that I am less likely to make it to bottom of ezine if there is a large amount of text. This is especially true if I run into an article which I do not find useful - in that case I am very likely to just delete message without reading any more.

Partial articles is an excellent way to get people to read your ezine. By doing this, you allow them to see that there is, indeed, more to message than just one article. Thus, they are less likely to stop reading if they find something which is not of interest. Of all methods, I dislike lists of links most. I find this confusing and I am entirely likely to just delete ezine unread.

I think best of all worlds is to combine all three methods in each ezine. I like to include partial articles with links right at top of ezine, where they are likely to be seen. Following those links, I generally include a couple of articles in full, generally reprints from my website. At end, I include a number of useful links to articles and features which my readers may find of interest. If anyone makes it this far, they are, in my opinion, much more likely to click on a link than anyone else.

I can however give you pro's and cons of having your own newsletter.

OK let's start with pros.

You get recognition

You can place your own ads for free.

You get to have your own opt-in list.

You find there are still very nice people out there, reading your newsletter.

You can post your articles for other ezines to use, creating advertising for you.

With a large enough subscriber base you can sell ads to other marketers, once you can do this, you can start getting back some of bucks you spent getting to this position. (I HOPE)

You also have a sense of pride, that in some small way, you may have made someone's day a little better.

Now let's take a look at cons.

Before I start cons, I want to tell you this. Don't let this talk you out of starting your own newsletter. I am convinced this is thing to do if you plan on staying on internet and marketing.

You can start out without spending money, until your subscriber base gets to seventy five to one hundred. Then look out, because it starts to overwhelm you.

You are trying to send out one hundred emails by hand, using copy and paste.

You are receiving emails with subscribe in subject line, and you are putting them on your opt-in list manually.

You print each and every subscribe, so if you get accused of using spam, you have proof that they signed up of their own free will.

You keep all of these in a special three ring binder, hoping you will never need them.

You try many many things as I have to try to handle all this without spending money.