The appearance of your e-zine is one of the most important factors in determining your e-zine's success. Getting subscribers is the easy part. Keeping them will entail a little work.  A professionally written, well designed, content rich publication will insure your e-zines success.

When formatting your e-zine, keep in mind there are many different types of email programs and they are not all created equal. As a general rule, to accommodate all of your subscribers and their different email programs, it is probably best to write your e-zine in plain text. As with email programs, word processing programs are not all created equal as well.  Programs like Microsoft Word, etc., are great for writing business letters, sales letters, etc., but not a good choice for writing your newsletter due to formatting issues.

A good program to consider using is Notepad. This program should already be on your desktop.

Another consideration of great importance is your line length.  If your text lines are too long, some email programs that aren't capable of viewing long text lines will force the last few words to the next line and your text will be viewed like this:

As a rule, a generally safe line-length is 65 characters (including spaces).

A good way to count your characters is to type out the following code at the top of your e-zine.

Type: 01234567890123456789 until you reach 65 characters.

As you begin typing your text, when you reach the end of your code, use a hard carriage return. (Hit Enter) Once you have determined your proper line-length, erase your code.

If you'd rather not have to worry about hard carriage returns, you might want to use a program called "TextPad". http://www.textpad.com This program can be set to automatically insert a hard carriage return when your text has reached 65 characters.

When you're ready to begin, make an outline for the contents of your e-zine to enable you to create a template.