The layer effects in Photoshop offer lots of possibilities for creating quick and interesting glows. Here are a few examples. For the first example, use a black background, and type white text on it.
Check apply, and change the color to black.
For the moment, we can't see the text at all. Now choose outer glow from the drop down menu. A slight yellow outline appears. At this point, you could change the glow color, or blending mode, but I left them at the default, and brought the intensity way up to 350, and the blur up to 7. I didn't even render the text.