Newsletters are excellent venues for targeted traffic. Generally a newsletter is written or maintained by some one(s) highly motivated in a given vertical. This means alive, fresh, active material and readership dedicated to a specific area of interest. That is good.

You will find newsletters published and delivered by email, webpages, print, and even in streaming audio.

This just may be one of the best venues for reaching a targeted market. You will find thousands of online newsletters -- from small to large. Don't over-look the small newsletters they may charge little for a well qualified audience. And, don't over-look the large newsletters their low-rates may just surprise you.

Don't let the large number of available online newsletters (Click Here for Sources) be off-putting. In any given vertical there will be a very confrontable number of newsletters to deal with.

Use the same common sense here that you would in any endeavor, start looking around, explore the arena, make tentitive committments in the beginning while you are learning the lay of the land. Then by the time you are ready to make a major investment of time and money you will be well prepared.

When you do, you'll be pleasantly surprised at the small dollar cost of online newsletter advertising -- especially when compared to offline versions in the same vertical. And this is before you factor in the shelf-life of online newsletters. Most online newsletters are archived. This means their shelf life climbs to near forever. With search engines grabbing content from even the oldest newsletter archive your ad may be visible for years.

In the same manner that offline newsletters have daily, weekly, and monthly publishing schedules online newsletters have varying publishing schedules. This can mean a great deal of exposure and/or longevity of your ads. Remember Burma-Shave? With daily newsletters it's possible to do a Burma-Shave type campaign. People may end up waiting each day for your ad to appear to see just what silly pun or bad rhyme you'll come up with next.

Online newsletters can afford you an excellent opportunity for fresh ads. In print media you may have a month, 2 month, or 3 month lead time. Online you might have a next day or next week lead time. This means quicker modification of an ad campaign to incorporate topical issues and current trends.

When talking to a newsletter publisher try to cover most of the following questions:

• What is your circulation?

  As mentioned before low circulation is not necessarily bad. Find out the rates and do the math. A small circulation can be good for you.

• How many email subscribers see the newsletter?

  This number will be easy for most publishers to tell you. They just need to count the number of email addresses in the subscription base

• What is the traffic to your newsletter online?

  Again this is not good or bad. It is something to know and calculate in.

• Is the newsletter email list an opt-in list or an opt-out list?

  Opt-out email lists are spammers and you will not want to be associated with spammers. Also it is becoming a high priority in law enforcement to stop spamming. Maybe the publisher is out of the country but you might not be. Hence you could take a fall. It's just not worth it.

• Is the newsletter archived?

  Not all newsletters are archived. Find out.

• What advertising options exist?

  Find out the various plans. Is there a first time signup cost? Is there a discount for multiple insertions? Do they have sponsorships?.

• Get the "mechanicals".

  That means the form of your copy. How many lines? How many letters per line? Do they want the ad sent in any particular form?

• What are the deadlines for reservations? Copy?

• What exactly is their publishing schedule?

• Do they have topic specific issues?

  If there is an upcoming newsletter especially well suited to your goods, product, or service you may want to reserve space.

• How long have they been publishing the newsletter?

  If they have not been publishing long and have a large ciculation suspect spamming to bought lists and/or a little fudging on the numbers.

• Do they have a review section in the newsletter and/or website?

  Maybe they will like you product and review it as part of the websites content.

• Last but not least, what forms of money will they accept?

  Be wary of any newsletter that wants you to deposit the money by wire transfer into an off-shore account.

Most if not all of the above precautions and question apply. Don't suddenly become a dope just because it's free or cheap.