Make your newsletter look like a pro's.

We're going to assume that you know why you need a newsletter.

We also have articles on how to start your own newsletter or Yahoo! group. By the way, if you miss eGroups you can use its British site. It only sold its US one.

Moving on, we have a story on how to write a must-read newsletter. But we haven't yet touched on the biggest downfall of many beginning newsletters: bad formatting.

Proper formatting
Without the proper knowledge you'll end up with a newsletter
that looks like this.
Not only is it hard to read an improperly formatted newsletter
but it's really annoying.

The bad formatting happens when you write a line that's too long for the email reader and the reader wraps it oddly. The solution is to keep your lines short.

Experts disagree on the best character length for newsletter lines but it's somewhere between 60 and 70. So let's split the difference and say 65. You can either count and hit return every 65 characters, or you can get a program to count and hit return for you.

Compose in the proper program

Don't compose the newsletter in the email delivery program. Compose it in a nice little program with spell check and email-friendly formatting features.

Microsoft Word is a bad choice for this. Just don't use it.

Leo recommends Note Tab Lite. It lets you set your line length and has a nice spell-check feature. Just set the line length to 65 and type away. Note Tab does the line breaking for you.

Keep it short
Now that you've got line breaking taken care of, remember to keep your email short. Some people say 69 lines. I say eyeball it and make sure you're not overloading the intended recipient. Remember that people don't like to scroll.

If you have to have a long newsletter, put a table of contents at the top so people can see where to scroll to find the best info.

Break it up
Don't just send one big long block of text. Break it up with white space or rows of characters such as asterisks (*) or dashes. Keep in mind that if anyone wants to read your email on a wireless device such as a PDA or phone, those long lists of characters are annoying.

Make links work
Make sure you link out to longer information, but make sure your links work. Nothing drives people away from newsletters faster than links that don't work.

AOL users will have to use HTML tags around links to make them work, like this: <A HREf="http://urlhere">link here</A>

Should I make HTML newsletters?
While HTML newsletters look cooler and solve the linking and formatting problems, they're also much larger files and not everybody has HTML email viewers. Evaluate your audience and decide if they'd appreciate HTML newsletters. Err on the side of text-only at this point, though. They're easier to produce and more widely accepted, including on mobile devices.