600 Words

Publishing an Online Newsletter isn't easy. And, like world beyond Internet, you'll meet a few hostile individuals who want to make it even more difficult.

Believe me, if you are in publishing game Online for long run you will have to cope with following challenges at least once. I've listed these problems in reverse order: from laughable to ridiculous. Let's start counting down!

7. You receive an email. The sender visited your wonderful site. They think it's great. Ah...here are a few programs sure to drive traffic to your web-site like stampeding cattle. (Heh, but do I want people trampling my web-site like dumb cattle) They include 2 dozen or more affiliate programs to click on.

6. You receive an email from a new subscriber requesting his one free ad bonus for signing up. They send you a rambling, misspelled, 10 line badly formatted ad. (Spell check Please!)

5. An individual sends you an email for a Mutually Beneficial joint venture. (Yup) This Online wheeler dealer offers an ad swap. You run their full page Solo Ad and they will run your Solo Ad. But wait! After investigating you discover this individual does not have a website or newsletter. And email address is fake. (Beware grasshopper of strange email bearing solo gifts)

4. And a few marketing masters only want a regular ad swap up to 5 lines. After research, you discover this mastermind of con doesn’t have a newsletter to swap ads with or a website. And...you guessed it. The email address was fake. (UMMM..eenie meanie minee NO Thanks!)

One of common problems faced by ezine editors is being able to format their ezine so that it does not get screwed up when sent out.

So what causes formatting information to be changed when your ezine is received by your subscribers?

There are many different email programs and they all interpret email text they receive slightly differently. Some email programs automatically word-wrap lines at a set number of characters, others do not. Some will use a different character font and font size from original text.

The biggest problem an ezine editor faces is trying to compensate for different font types. A font type determines how much space a character occupies and how close it is to a neighbouring character.

Always use monospaced fonts, or fixed fonts. Otherwise, your text may tend to grow when emailed. In other words line gets longer. This effect is caused because these characters, known as variable fonts, can occupy a different amount of space making fixed alignment of text very difficult. Fixed fonts all have same amount of space.

The next thing to avoid is using tabs to align lines of text. This will cause you alignment problems. The best way around this is to always manually insert number of spaces you require and incidents of major formatting problems will be reduced.