Ezine Format and Distribution!

by: Jon Kogan

The previous article "Understanding Ezine Publishing!" focused on ezine publishing basics. Determine your goals. Plan a publishing strategy. Decide on ezine topic. Establish the frequency. Develop the content.

No matter how competitive the market is today, still one of the best forms of advertising is submitting your ezine articles to article directories. (Visit Goggle and search for "article directories". There is certainly no shortage of listing as Goggle pulls-up 6,920,000 results).

At the end of each article, create a resource box. When other ezine and websites publish your articles, your resource box will be included. It will help you increase traffic, gain subscribers, improve your link popularity for the search engines and generate revenues.

The question is how to deliver your message in the most efficient but inexpensive way. One way is to outsource your tasks to the services of another company, which will charge monthly fees on an ongoing basis. The other approach is to purchase software to manage your own list. The cost is usually a one-time fee. I personally use EzineAnnouncer software to post my articles. It offers 1372 ezine promotion resources. I also use paid services.

Proper format and design of the actual e-mail messages is an important factor to assure it will be read and not deleted. Plain text e-mail publications are generally the most popular and email programs will have no difficulties to open and view the contents.

HTML, (the email actually is the same as a webpage), is much more complicated, requires lots of extra work, need special software and/or knowledge to create the formatted message, and also can be stopped by antivirus program as well as software firewalls due to the risk of the html virus.

Many subscribers simply prefer text whenever it is available. If you're brand new to ezine publishing, make text publishing the number one choice. However, should you decide to offer an HTML version, make sure your subscribers are given a choice.

If you write in Microsoft Word or another word processor, be aware that those programs do not insert line breaks, and you will be forced to end each line with a hard "carriage return". That's a lot of hard work. Than there is a simple text editor such as Notepad, but you still must insert the line breaks manually.

To ensure that your ezine will appear well formatted in the majority of email programs, you need to follow the standard rule. Use the same newsletter formatting rules in all issues of your newsletter. Line lengths should be 60-65 characters. Longer lines will be forced to wrap in some email clients and will not look good. The Courier New is the best choice font to compose ezine, however, I've used Arial and Times New Roman and had no problems since it was composed and formatted in Ziney Pro editor.

An editor software must allow user to open, change and save text as easy as possible, cut and paste selected text into an email or text file, while maintaining the set-line length. The line length should be very easy to adjust by changing the number of characters in the appropriate textbox.

Keep in mind that ezine article size is 400 - 1200 words. Larger messages may be converted to attachments by some email programs. If your article is converted to an email attachment, it may not be opened due to the threat of computer viruses.