This week/month on Sfx newsletter?

Hi, My name is Cosmin and I'm from Romania.
I work @ Hewlett-Packard, doing Email Marketing.
I also am a freelance web-designer & collaborate with a small design studio.

I have almost 2 years of experience in this field, I can manage a newsletter send-out from the concept/design phase to the final launch.

I also have the necessary tool for this (nothing related to HP), so it would all come down to 3 things :

1. The database of subscribers - I import it in the tool
2. The concept / content - either you create the html, or I do, using your text (or we all do the text together, no matter)
3. I send it out and you receive metrics reports (Google Analytics can also be used for tracking)

I can also do personalized newsletters, based on the subscriber info (name, last name...), FTAF (forward-to-a-friend), double opt-ins, live pages...just about anything you would need.

The number of customers or launching frequency are not an issue, I would suggest no more than twice a week - weekly would be fine.

As for design skills, you can check out this page » this is the live page of the last newsletter I created.

If you need me to help, please drop me a line on my Gmail, or PM me here (mail would do better)
Waiting for your reply.
Cheers, Cosmin.

I think this is a great idea it should be sent to everyone to try to unite the online users to use firefox instead of ie

The simplest way would probably be to make the Sfx newsletter an Sfx project so that its easy to:
- distribute: we just send it to the group's subscribers (via the Email members of a group feature)
- gather contributions/suggestions for articles via forum posts
- have others involved in the project if they would like to participate, since it would be done in the open

I agree that a weekly will be tough in the beginning, simply because it will take a while to get organized. Maybe biweekly or monthly? I think it's ok to try and change the frequency as we learn from creating it.

As far as getting subscribers, I think the first step is to create the first newsletter, post it on Sfx (we can feature it and also mention it in community@sfx) and ask for feedback and subscriptions at that point.

It seems that every time that I get pumped up about the idea I end up bogging myself down with details and so if you have ideas for a structured format to begin with or to follow through on, I'm all ears.
Well, all eyes in this case.

I'm really inspired by about:mozilla and how uncluttered and straight forward that it is.
No matter what content the newsletter contains, I believe that it will be a more challenging task to get people to subscribe than it will be to produce the newsletter itself. Apparently the best way to generate excitement and participation in a project is to offer a free t-shirt so how about we step it up a notch and ask people to tell us what their favorite color iPod is and we'll throw in a wink wink as a footnote.

As far as the actual distribution method I'm still looking at a few options. Deb Richardson was kind enough to share the source of the service used for about:mozilla and it offers a good starting package.

1. You're basically limited to a list of 100 subscribers, and can send a maximum 6 times per month.
2. We'll shamelessly insert a MailChimp badge in the footer of all your emails (on the plus side, you can earn affiliate rewards when your badge refers new customers).

I think that would be fine to start (as long as we can brand the newsletter the way that we want to) and if by chance subscriptions were to exceed their minimum then perhaps Mozilla would be interested in picking up the tab but even before that, I'm looking into some of the options that I'm already paying for through my hosting provider.
They offer email announcement lists and I can setup an appropriate domain name for the newsletter to be sent from so that it isn't from something like sfxnewsletter@joesinnertubesandbarbecue.com.
I'm just waiting on some info that will give me an idea of what resources it will pull from my account/service.
And of course we could definitely distribute the newsletter from SFx itself because it is the most logical option, the resources are already in order, and you could provide the opportunity to sign up for it when people are registering to become new members.
It would be a great tool to hopefully entice people to take an interest in things that they normally wouldn't when visiting the site plus we'd be providing a newsletter feed that would be a summary of all of the site's substantial activities giving good exposure to content and projects that need and deserve it.

What do you have in mind for the frequency that the newsletter should be distributed? Right off of the bat I'd say that weekly would be tough considering that there are full days when there is no activity at all going on at SFx so we'd be forced to create content. about:mozilla reports on the latest news and happenings from the world of Mozilla more than it actually creates content and it would be nice to stick to that kind of model but also have some exclusive features as well.

Otto de Voogd (who you are familiar with) is on board. Not that I'm incapable (well maybe, what do I know) but I've asked him to take on proof reading. He's very meticulous with pretty much all that he does but most notably is his work as an editor for dmoz
where maintains about 18 categories with several thousand websites.