I have done a monthly Newsletter for my site (with the help of a friend)...now I'm on my own..LONG story.

Anyways...watching my statistics I've found that my site reaps the rewards of members new and old for a good 5 days after I send out a newsletter. Because of this I am starting on December 1st to send out a newsletter on the 1st and 15th of each month.

This link will bring you directly to my Novembers newsletter
http://www.ourcreativecompanion.com/news/newsletter.htm

I NEVER realized the time that goes into it, let alone the time that goes into mass emailing it out!!

I would love some opinions/pointers on Newsletters from anyone who does them themselves..ie:should the context always stay the same...

I will help anyone in return if they need a hand if I am able to.

GlitterHugs,
Jenny

my host gives me my own newsletter, the more members to it the less space i have. but it takes loads of members to take up all the space.

i love my host

the only thing is, the newsletter is some extra work to do. pretty long

who do you use for your newsletter?

I am looking for a FREE newsletter host too. I dont know which to choose, a good one, with easy html editer and templates available. what do you guys recommend?

We are "hosting" our own newsletter to cut down on costs, as we have almost 3000 email addresses.

Here is the link to the newsletter program we use..

www.dtp-aus.com

GlitterHugs,
Jenny

I have found that if you are using a advertsing company(for example: Burstmedia.com) they normally provide you with a newsletter program with thier services. I haven't used thiers much but from what I can see it makes things pretty easy. It allows you to chose between HTML or non-HTML format. Hope this helps some one.

When I write my newsletter it typically takes a few hours. I normally keep to the same format, which for my newsletter consists of sites news, an article, hints and tips, and a summary at the end.

I find it is good to have a selection of articles ready written to pick and stick as I like, that way I don't have to worry too much if I haven't had the time to write one myself.

I also tend to find that you really need to make the time to send it, otherwise you just forget and then it doesn't get done!

I've been running my main newsletter, the Webmaster Times, for a few years now. Its not hugely popular, but the main reason I run it is because it 'forces' me to create new content for my site (It's difficult to get motivated sometimes!). Unfortunately I haven't sent it out for a few months because writing it takes quite a while. Its mainly just a single article on something related to site building, but the article is always unique to my site. I host it myself as it's not very big.

The second newsletter, Free-Webhosting Update, is one I am quite proud of. When designing the newsletter for Free-Webhosting.info I realised that each month I would simply be writing a review of a host and posting it on the site and in the newsletter, so I combined the two. The newsletter is now fully automated.

Each month I go to a PHP page which generates the newsletter based on the database for the site. It puts in the latest review, the newly added hosts that month and some statistics (e.g. top 10 hosts) and then sends a copy to me. I then check my e-mail and have a link which I click which takes me to another script which sends the e-mail to all the subscribers individually, and sends a copy (with the subscriber list) to me. The newsletter is then stored in an archive.

It's certainly saved me a huge amount of time, and there's really no reason why it shouldn't be fully automated. I could set it up as a cron job and have it run and send automatically once a month. I do like to check things first though.

check out my FREE newsletter script thread if your looking for a great newsletter script with unlimited members/html templates and all...

i agree with david, newsletter really makes me add new content and stuff to my site.

35 subscribers and counting though