Sending newsletters to your readers and customers is a great way to keep them informed of what you have been up to. It’s also an opportunity for monetization, so you can make a little – or maybe a lot more than a little — money from your newsletter.

There are several ways you can monetize your newsletter. One of the ways is to sell advertisements to companies or organizations that may be interested in your readers. For example, if you write a newsletter teaching readers vocabulary words, you might want to run ads from publishers of dictionaries or thesauruses. Or if you have a newsletter devoted to local pizza parlors, you could potentially run an ad from the latest pizza place.

Monetizing by selling ads in your newsletter

These kinds of ads, which can show up unobtrusively in your newsletter, have several benefits for the advertiser:

* First of all, the rates may be much more competitively priced than Google AdWords or web site banner ads.

* The second appealing thing is that the advertiser can know exactly who the ad will be seen by – readers who are interested in a particular topic. They will also know exactly how many people are subscribed to the newsletter. In addition, depending on how much research the newsletter owner has done on demographics, the advertiser may even know what the percentage of male and female readers the newsletter has, where they live, and other demographic questions.

* Thirdly, just by running the ads in the newsletter, the advertiser is essentially being “vouched for” by the newsletter owner. That means that those pizza fans looking for a local slice may be more likely to go to the pizza parlor advertiser than they would after seeing the ad elsewhere, partly because they appreciate the eatery for running an ad in the newsletter. The chances of the readers going to the new pizza place will be even bigger if the ad includes some sort of discount.

If you are uncomfortable having to find advertisers for your newsletter, don’t worry. There are email marketing companies who will do the work of selling the ads for you, so you don’t have to do the legwork in searching for advertisers.

Monetizing your newsletter for yourself

You don’t have to sell ads to others to make money for your newsletter. You can also offer some product or service for your readers. For example, if you write a newsletter on career advice, and you have written a book on the subject, your newsletter would be a perfect place to run an ad about your book and increase your book sales.

What some newsletter owners have done with such ads is include special freebies and insider information that customers would not get by buying the book elsewhere. The possibilities are endless. So why not think about monetizing your newsletter?

Lisa Swan is a representative of email marketing company LiveIntent.com.