There are two main way to get people to sign up for your newsletter. The first one you saw on GreenFeet.com: get them to your site and get them to sign up for your newsletter. Pretty straight forward.
However, the other way can be a lot more powerful form of email marketing. They're called co-registrations. Co-registrations (or opt-ins) are where you offer your newsletter on the registration page of other web sites.
Here's an example - RedJellyfish.com. Visitors will register with RedJellyfish.com in order to access certain features of the site. When they do register, they are taken to this page.
See how below the registration information they can also choose to receive electronic newsletters from site sand businesses other than Red Jellyfish? Those are co-registrations / opt-ins.
So, let's say you have a newsletter for your site. And let's say you make deals with certain targeted web sites to get co-registration for 50 cents each and that you have $500 to spend. Well, for that $500 you could get 1,000 people subscribed to your newsletter. That is an excellent deal. Let's say you're purely a content / advertising based web site and that you send out your newsletter once a day.
Those 1,000 subscribers are just like getting 1,000 visitors to your web site each and every day. To do that, generally, would take a lot of time and effort and be very expense. But with email marketing it takes just $500.
Perhaps you're thinking "I have no idea how to publish an email newsletter!" Don't worry - we have you covered! There is a very simple and inexpensive service out there called Constant Contact that allows you to create and publish your own newsletter.
You don't need to know HTML or anything like that. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use Constant Contact for email marketing purposes. You'll see how easy it is to start and publish your own electronic newsletter.