Before you put out your first issue you are faced with some decisions. Some of those are listed below, with pros and cons. 

Do you use HTML or text? - Text has the advantage that it is supported by any email client. Also, text is fully self-contained, meaning people can easily read your message whether or not they are connected to
the internet. This can be an advantage is ensuring your ezine actually gets read.

HTML can be made to look better as you have much more control over formatting. You can also include graphics, sound and even multimedia. Note, however, that all of these elements must actually be stored
elsewhere, which requires bandwidth and also means your message is more difficult to read offline. On the other hand, you can embed a banner or other graphic which can be used to determine how many people
are actually reading your newsletter.

You can combine the best of both worlds by using stationery files, although this restricts your readership to people who have clients which can view them. Stationery files can come with their graphics self-contained,
which allows offline reading, and they have all of the formatting capabilities of HTML.

Do you include outside advertising? - A major question, and it depends upon the purpose for your ezine. Some ezines are pure lists of ads - I believe these last about two seconds in your average inbox before being deleted. Why? Who needs a list of advertisements? We all get so much spam already that more ads just don't make sense to most people.

A better strategy is to provide some content, with lots of links back to your web site. You can then include advertisements interspersed with the articles, which increases the chances that they will be seen. If you get
enough subscribers you can even sell advertising space if you do it this way.

Personally, I don't mind a few ads in an ezine. This is the same model that magazines in the real world use - advertising pays for the content. However, I like to see a ratio of 4 to 1 at least, content to advertising.
You give me too many ads without adding value, and I will tend to delete the ezine or to unsubscribe entirely.

Do you include full articles, partial articles with links to your website or just links? - There are pros and cons to each method. Including full articles tends to make for very large newsletters. In addition,
I've found that I am less likely to make it to the bottom of the ezine if there is a large amount of text. This is especially true if I run into an article which I do not find useful - in that case I am very likely to just delete the message without reading any more.

Partial articles is an excellent way to get people to read your ezine. By doing this, you allow them to see that there is, indeed, more to the message than just one article. Thus, they are less likely to stop reading if they find something which is not of interest.

Of all the methods, I dislike lists of links the most. I find this confusing and I am entirely likely to just delete
the ezine unread.