Internet Promotion: Ezines

One of the more important things that you can do to generate return visits to your web site is to publish an e-newsletter (or e-zine). Give your visitors a chance to subscribe on your home page, and you've got them for life! That is, as long as you send a newsletter on occasion and makes it interesting.

Here's the problem: someone visits your site and likes it. But the internet is a big place, so he may never return. But if you can get him to sign up for an e-newsletter, you'll get a chance to remind him to come back periodically.

Send something out at least once a month. Less often than that and you are losing out. If you can do it, send out an e-newsletter more often, even once a week.

What do you put into this newsletter? Well, you should be changing your site all of the time. A stale site simply will not make it on the web. That's the first thing to put in your e-newsletter - changes. You want to remind your visitors that you exist and that there is new content for them to look at.
Point out new content without giving away the store. For example, if you've written an article about money making opportunities on the web, then describe the article. Don't include the article as you want to get the guy back to your site.

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 the site. A free desktop theme, or some wallpaper, or clipart or anything like that.

Don't overload the 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 the top of the newsletter.

HTML format is great, because you can also include nice looking graphics and other things. In addition, the 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 the visitor why he needs to come back to your site.

Source: http://www.smartads.info/articles/em/8.html