The best place for your e-zine signups may not be on your home page. That’s just one of the ‘takeaways’ we coaxed out of Paul Smith, editor of Newsletter on Newsletters, following the NEPA conference in Washington, DC this month.

According to Paul, Mequoda Group believes that the subscription area needs its own URL, and that it should have lots of free content while avoiding a commercial look.

This approach will encourage more sites to link to yours, thus increasing your search engine rankings.

Paul also says that publishers sending out HTML e-zines, should go back to a text hybrid (text, but with links and fonts). That’s because Google’s Gmail (text only) is growing exponentially, even though it’s only in testing. Moreover, AOL’s default setting blocks external images. And you can expect other ISPs to also block images within a year or two to prevent viruses and spyware.

Here are some other tips from Paul:

*Single-article e-zines generate 5% more opens and reads than do multi-topic newsletters.

*E-zine names captured from co-registrations are 50% worse than names you get directly.

*A deliverability test showed e-mails to most ISPs went missing between 7-9% of the time, but at AOL the no-shows were 29%. This means you need to get on AOL’s White List or you can kiss off almost a third of your AOL subscribers.

*Contrary to popular belief, the free content in e-zines isn’t killing off paid-subscription newsletters. Even though 27% of NEPA members published free e-zines (up from 4% just 2 years ago), 40% launched at least one new paid-subscription newsletter this past year (compared with 14% the year before).

Want more from Paul? Click here. (www.newsletterbiz.com)

*People will gladly accept advertising in exchange for information and entertainment, so the creation of a content-filled e-mail newsletter is the best strategy to deliver your advertising messages to your audience with success.

*You can place sales messages throughout your newsletter, provided you do so tastefully. In fact, relevant content that your audience wants to read may be more effective at driving sales and response than pure promotional copy.

*A comprehensive program will include other non-newsleter e-mails, including event invitations, shipping and order confirmations and account information.

*Start with a general newsletter then offer several other, more specific newsletters that target specific segments of your audience.

*Only write about relevant, interesting subjects. Your audience will stick with you—and digest your sales messages—as long as you keep up your end of the bargain. This means that some marketing and executive “pet peeve” messages need to stay out.

*Make sure your e-mail looks good on various e-mail programs and monitors, including laptops and handhelds.

*Create fun or interesting e-mails that your subscribers will want to share with friends. This type of viral marketing is critical to keeping subscribers happy and building your subscriber base.

Matt Blumberg and Michael Mayor are the driving forces behind Return Path, an e-mail performance company. Collaborating with them on this project are their colleagues, e-mail strategists Stephanie A. Miller and Tami Monahan Forman. This article was excerpted from their new book, “Sign Me Up! A Marketer’s Guide to Creating E-mail Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales (iUniverse Inc., 2005) © 2005 Return Path, Inc. All rights reserved.