About the Concept
Hi, my name is Michael and I run Zaptacular.com. I also run an online shopping site. As part of my operation of the shopping site, I have embarked upon the long (LONG) journey of launching and promoting a successful (hopefully) email newsletter. As part of my promotion I have made a few trades with other newsletter owners. These trades have been moderately successful. The problem with doing these kind of trades not only lies in trying to insure fairness for both sides, but also in the time it takes to arrange such trades. They can be VERY time consuming compared to the results you get back. I kept trying to think of bigger and better ways to do this. Ways that would offer more benefit to the parties involved in the trade.
Of course, you have seen sites trade ads for their newsletters on each other's "Thank You" page. This is a good place to advertise similar newsletters. I believe another good place is to have an ad on someone else's "Sorry" page. The page users see when they unsubscribe from that site's newsletter. Why? Because, if they can't find it in that site's newsletter maybe they will try your newsletter to see if it appeals to their tastes more. This works the other way around too! If they can't find it in your newsletter then maybe they can find it in the other site's newsletter.
These types of arrangements can also take a long time to arrange due to the complex programming that is sometimes involved.
Here's what I came up with...
Why not develop a way that the a list of newsletters, and a sign up form for those newletters, could be placed on multiple sites through a line of code as simple as this:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.zaptacular.com/yadayadayada/blahblahblah.js"></script>
So that's what I did! See an example.