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Free Hosting Benefits
By Brian Alt

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An Ezine-Tips reader wrote:

I publish several ezines. However, since I don't have the volume yet, I use the free hosts (eGroups and Topica) to send out and handle everything.

I recently received a statement that people liked this version over the pay versions, because they know they can be unsubscribed.

With spam increasing, would it seem that the free hosts would be a more viable route to go?

Thanks,
H. Roger Baker II
http://www.PublishingStudios.com/

Thanks for the feedback, Roger. You bring up an excellent point.

Many of your ezine's subscribers -- especially if they have been on the Internet for a while -- may be familiar with the functionality of some of the more popular free email list hosting providers. By hosting your list with one of these providers, you may increase your ezine's "ease of use" for these subscribers by allowing them to manage their subscriptions to your ezine through the same service that hosts other email lists they might be subscribed to.

However, the chances are very slim that all of the email publications to which a single Internet user is subscribed would be hosted on the same service. As popular as eGroups, Topica, ListBot, and other similar services are, any one of them becoming the only solution available is highly unlikely. Internet users will always have to learn multiple platforms and methods of subscribing and unsubscribing to email lists.

As email publishers, the important part isn't so much that we match what our subscribers have already learned elsewhere as it is that we provide simple and easy-to-use instructions to subscribe, unsubscribe, change to digest mode, and so on.

While some paid services may not provide an intuitive way to join and remove oneself from lists, most do. In fact, most professional paid services provide you enough _options_ that you can present your subscribers with a number of list management alternatives. Free services, on the other hand, tend to be very light in the options area, but rather force their users to adapt to "uniform" practices. They're big and free, so they can do that :)

So to simplify my answer to the question of whether free hosting is recommended to give users an easier time of unsubscribing, the answer would be "no." If your pro hosting provider doesn't make it easy for your list members to remove themselves, then you may be using the wrong list hosting provider. Your subscribers should always know that they can be unsubscribed, and they should always be given easy instructions on how to do it themselves. If a pro host doesn't accommodate this, it doesn't deserve the label "pro."

For more on "Ezine Ease of Use," see this article.

Ezine-Tips for December 26, 2000

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Free Hosting BenefitsBy Brian Alt

Free Hosting Benefits
By Brian Alt