5. Shortcut on desktop

Place a shortcut to you directory where your master and upcoming ezines are in. That way every time you find a link, that would be helpful to your subscribers, copy and paste it straight in.

6. Build over time

If you ezine goes out fortnightly, day after it goes out make some progress on next one, even it means just check layout, but get it started and finish it a couple days before publishing day. This gives you time to check it before sending.

7. Write your own articles

How can this save your time? By having your own articles, you can increase your creditability and never have to look for new fresh information.

Ezines build customer trust for ongoing sales. Anybody can write articles, you don't have to be a world class author.

8. Use a proof reader

This doesn't have to be a large expensive service, I use students who do a good fast job. I email information to them, next day I get it back ready to send. The best way is to send it as an attachment and keep an eye on your formatting when you get it back from them.

9. Treat it like a 100,000

That's right, 100,00 subscribers "and" $100,000. Keep to your publishing dates, treat your subscribers like gold and they will trust you and become long time repeat customers.

10. Use a mailing list provider.

I used a lot of services from software, like mailoop, list servers etc. So far bringing service in house using a personalized script Mail Master Pro has been a good option, check it out at

http://www.cgitoolbox.com/cgi/mmp/

Personalizing you newsletter will make it "stand out" from other 80,000+ ezines online.

Producing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build trust, promote your site and increase sales. Remember that it should be only one of you promotion methods and way of increasing sales. Have a great day.

Then there's ads. We have to have rules to make it fair to everyone, but will people read and adhere to those rules? Nope! They'll spam us with ads too frequently, too large, illegal, wrong format ... Quite apart from 95% that are a total waste of time and space because they are all for same thing.

No wonder so many ezines that once offered free ads are now discontinuing this service. The time spent weeding chaff from wheat simply cannot be justified. We set up to help others and it's old story, "Give a hand and they'll take an arm".

It's selfish, counter-productive and foolish. No-one is that desperate to make a living that they can steam-roller over fellow humans in their way. Always be careful what you do to people on way up, because you never know -- you might meet them on way back down.

So how's this dooming your business?

Well, it should be obvious, but I'll point it out for those who need help; that if there is less free advertising available you'll either have to pay for all of it and go broke or you'll never get to promote your business at all and still go broke.

If ezine editors have to spend all their time on admin, they'll never have time or space left for useful content and you'll never learn anything -- that is presuming you bother to read in first place? If you think you know it all, very likely you have most to learn.

If you use autoresponder addresses, free addresses or any other of nasties I've described, you've already labeled yourself as uncaring and unprofessional. You've doomed your business right off, no-one will deal with you. Many editors are now banning those addresses, so you won't get their value and assistance anyway. At end of day, you've only robbed yourself.

Well, it has to stop. Quite apart from what I have mentioned above, various services on net are having to tighten up rules and policies in a response to level of abuse. If you don't do your part in stemming it, by acting responsibly and not allowing others to get away with it, then commerce on Internet will be effectively outlawed and your business will be doomed. Take heed.