Setting up a email newsletter could potentially be one of the most profitable decisions for your online business. Creating a newsletter allows you to maintain contact with leads and website visitors who normally wouldn?t return to your website. For a business, this opportunity makes it easier to promote products or services and for a nonprofit website it makes it easy to drive traffic back to the website. This guide doesn't cover autoresponders but it will explain how to build a very basic email newsletter system.

Unfortunately a lot of articles and professionals tell you to setup an email newsletter, but they never tell you how. Here is the two minute all inclusive crash course to starting an email newsletter.

I highly recommend using a service like Aweber or ConstantContact for your newsletter system. Both services cost around $20 a month, but they are definitely worth it. Aweber has the highest rate of deliver hands down. If you choose Aweber, all of the emails you send to your list will be received. Unfortunately Aweber has a strict no-spam policy which means all of the people you want to email will be required to verify their email address. Expect to lose at least 40% of your list when importing emails and around 20% of all people who subscribe there after. ConstantContact doesn't have this requirement, but you run a greater risk of having your emails marked as spam. I prefer ConstantContact for a basic website newsletter. Aweber is a more advanced email marketing program with different features.

If you prefer to avoid paying for email newsletter services, I recommend using PHPList. It is free to use and it works nicely if you know what you are doing. This program isn?t always reliable, but it is free and it gets the job done, most of the time.

If you are planning to setup a very basic newsletter to maintain contact with your website visitors I recommend doing the following:

1. Sign up for ConstantContact or setup PHPList

2. Add a sign up form on your website in an obvious location.

3. Offer something free in return for email newsletter sign ups even if it is just, ?Free Email Newsletter?.

4. Start collecting leads

Be sure to continually send your email list newsletters, but don?t over do it. It is important to maintain contact with the list without annoying them. I wouldn?t recommend sending more than one email a week. If you stop sending emails to them, they will forget who you are and mark your messages as spam.