How To Succeed With E-Zine Advertising
1. INTRODUCTION TO EZINE ADVERTISING
We’re going to discuss something that is not quite as popular as it was back in the stone ages of Internet marketing, but is still a viable marketing strategy.
I’m talking about E-Zine advertising.
We’re going to be discussing what an e-zine is, how to set one up and so on. It’s actually quite a complex process and in order to do it correctly you really have to break it up into distinct steps or you’re going to end up getting confused.
Before we launch into the topic of e-zines, we’re going to first have a discussion on the state of email marketing in general. Why? Because most e-zines are sent via email. Yes, there are some e-zines that are web based, but for the most part, your most popular e-zines are going to end up in your in-box.
So let’s get into the subject of email marketing and the e-zine.
2. STATE OF THE UNION OF EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing, advertising, or whatever you want to call it, has taken quite a hit over the past few years. To understand how things have gotten so bad, you first have to understand where email marketing came from and what caused it to take such a down turn.
While history may be boring to many, you have to understand where you’ve been before you can understand where you are and where you’re going. Otherwise, most of what you’re going to read is going to be Greek to you.
Email marketing, in the early days of the Internet was like when we discovered the first cell phone. People would walk outside of their homes, take their cells out of their pocket, call up their best friend and say “Hey, guess where I am?” Of course the friend had no idea what he was talking about so he’d just answered, “You’re home.” And of course the reply came, “Nope! I’m walking down my block.” And of course the friend would say, “Yeah, right.”
Those days are long gone. Now the question is, when your best friend tries to reach you and you don’t answer your phone, “Didn’t you bring your cell with you?” Notice they don’t even use the word “phone” as cell is immediately associated with the word phone.
What does this have to do with email marketing?
Nothing and everything.
Let me explain.
In the early days of email marketing, when the only emails people got were either from their friends online or their ISP, there was no such thing as selling to people online.
Then suddenly that all changed. Email ads started to come. Slowly at first.
At the beginning, this was actually kind of cool for people as they’d see an ad come into their email box and they’d turn to their spouse and say, “Hey honey, look what we just got.”
But then the emails started to increase, especially if somebody went online to a web site and requested information. What would happen is that their email address would be sold to a zillion people.
That’s when people’s email boxes started to get overrun with what we now call spam.
Well, it really got out of control and eventually people starting screaming STOP!
So somebody had to do something about the mess.
Let’s now rewind a bit.
Before things got really bad, e-zines started to rise in popularity. People liked the idea of having news letters delivered to their email boxes about subjects that they were interested in.
But these same people started getting flooded with a lot of stuff they DIDN’T want. It got to the point where they couldn’t find their e-zine emails anymore.
So the complaints started.
Well, long story short, the ISPs had to do something about this mess. So they started putting what we now call spam filters on people’s email accounts. This seemed like a good idea at the time in order to keep unwanted emails out of a person’s in-box.
Except there was one problem.
The emails that the people were expecting to come, didn’t come. The spam filters really had no way of differentiating real spam from an e-zine.
Why?
Because most e-zines, back in those days really were just glorified ads. If you looked at en e-zine issue and a piece of spam email, you really couldn’t tell the difference except in very few instances.
As a result of this, e-zine email delivery started to drop like a rock and so did subscribers. It was starting to look like e-zines were going to die a slow death.
Then things got even worse.
In 2003 we had the Can Spam Act of 2003. I won’t bore you with all the details, but basically what the act said was that if you were to send any email to anybody on the Internet for business purposes, you had to include a ton of information such as an actual postal address. These people had to be able to hunt you down and nail you to a wall if you sent them spam.
Unfortunately, the Can Spam Act of 2003 didn’t stop the spam problem. The professional spammers still got away with sending junk all around the Internet and the honest businessmen were getting hurt. Somehow this was just all wrong.
You’re probably thinking right about now, why on Earth you’d even want to create your own e-zine. Well, things have changed a bit since 2003. Autoresponder services now have good relationships with the Internet community and can easily get your e-zine delivered about 98% of the time, which isn’t too bad.
So, because the worm has partially turned, we’re now going to teach you how to turn out a killer e-zine and build a substantial list in the process.
3. WHY OFFER YOUR OWN E-ZINE?
Good question. Certainly reasonable enough considering all the email horror stories I just told you. It would be perfectly understandable if you went running for the hills right about now. But before you do, you might want to read the following. It just may change the way you feel about starting your own e-zine.
What exactly is an e-zine? Well, an e-zine is short for “electronic magazine.” It is usually emailed to people though it can be in the form of a web page with a member’s login.
The first thing you need to understand is why somebody would sign up for an e-zine or news letter. This all comes down to why people even surf the Internet in the first place.
They’re looking for information.
This information can be anything from looking for a natural treatment for acne to trying to find directions for building a bird house. If you go to any search engine and type in just about anything, you will literally find millions of results on most topics. Yes, there is a lot of information out there.
But what if somebody wants a lot of information? What if they’re interested, not only in natural treatments for acne, but natural treatments for a number of ailments? Imagine how they’d feel if they saw something like this on the Internet.
“Natural Health E-Zine…Get your weekly e-zine news letter where we cover a different health issue each week.”
A person looking for such a resource has just struck gold. Don’t you think that they’re going to sign up for that e-zine quicker than you can say “Bob’s you uncle?” You better believe they will.
Okay, you’re probably thinking now something along the lines of “Okay, but so what? How does this do anything for me to send somebody an e-zine on a weekly basis? What do I get out of it?”
What follows in the next few articles are a boat full of things that you can get out of offering your own e-zine.
The point is, once you’ve gotten these people to opt-in, as we call it, you now have the opportunity to occasionally (and I do stress the word occasionally) send them an offer for something to buy from you. We’ll touch on how often to do this later in this series.
Publishing your own e-zine and building a list is actually building your business. So now we’re going to show you just how to do that so that you become an expert at e-zine advertising.
What this does is establish you as an expert in your field as well. As your subscribers get your information, they’ll start to see how knowledgeable you are and will begin to respect you for that knowledge.
Plus, and this is something most people don’t realize, but offering your own e-zine, you actually get educated yourself. It’s unlikely that you will know everything off the top of your head. This is going to make research necessary. As you research, you learn. The more you learn, the better you get at your business.
So without any more delay, let’s get into how to actually put together your own e-zine newsletter that’s going to have your subscribers eating out of the palm of your hands.
4. CREATING YOUR OWN E-ZINE
Now that we have established that creating your own E-zine is actually a good idea, we’re going to begin the process of actually creating the e-zine itself. The first step in doing this is deciding exactly what kind of e-zine you want to create.
Remember what we said in the previous article? There is more than one way to create an e-zine.
One is to offer what we call an e-zine newsletter. This is an e-zine that will be emailed to your subscriber base on a regular basis, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly or whatever frequency you choose.
In creating an e-zine newsletter that will be emailed, you also need to decide on the format of the newsletter itself. Are you going to send out text emails or are you going to send out your e-zine in HTML format? Just a word of caution; HTML emails are many times flagged as spam by Internet service providers, so you may want to stay away from them unless you have a really reliable autoresponder service that has an excellent delivery rate and reputation with the ISPs.
While we’re on the subject of autoresponders for your e-zine, there are a couple of ways you can go with this.
The first, and simplest, is to go with an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse. Both are good services and you can’t go wrong with either one of them. They will both make sure that the bulk of your emails get delivered to where they need to go. The advantage of having an outside service is that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints, as they will handle all of them, including all opt-ins and opt-outs, or as is most commonly referred to as unsubscribes.
The downside to going with an autoresponder service is that you are pretty much at the mercy of their system. If there are things about it you don’t like, well, you either have to live with them or switch to a new service.
The second option is to have an autoresponder script set up on your own server. The advantages of this are that you are in complete control of your list and how your autoresponder works.
However, there is a HUGE downside to going with your own autoresponder script. Should one of your subscribers happen to scream spam (yes, it DOES happen), the complaint goes to your ISP. If you get enough of these complaints, your ISP can pull the plug on you and you’ll end up losing your hosting.
My personal recommendation is to go with a service like Aweber or GetResponse. You will save yourself a ton of grief.
Aside from offering your own newsletter through email, you can choose to offer your e-zine in the form of a web page that you would update every so often.
There are pros and cons to this as well.
The pros to having your e-zine on a web page are that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints. No emails are sent. The person just goes to the site, signs up for membership, gets his login and password and then accesses the site whenever he wants to. This makes for very little work for you as far as notifying members.
A good idea would be to have the last time the site was updated somewhere on the main page with what the update was so that people don’t have to go looking all around for the new information.
The cons of having your own web site e-zine are numerous.
For starters, maintaining a website is a lot more difficult and time consuming than typing up a 2 page letter and sending it out to subscribers. If you’re not an expert at web design, updating your site can be quite a painful process.
Another negative of having a member’s e-zine is that, unless you still have them opt-in, you have no way of contacting these people to let them know that the site has been updated. Many people, if not reminded about the e-zine, will simply forget that it exists and as a result will not come to the site at all after a period of time.
Another negative about having a website e-zine is security. If you want to keep the site only open to members, you’re going to have to have certain scripts written to keep people from hacking into your site. All of this is going to cost a lot more money than just sending out a newsletter, even if you do have to pay monthly fees to some autoresponder service.
Regardless of which format you decide to go with, there are going to be administrative headaches with each. Because of that fact, I strongly recommend staying away from the website and go with the email newsletter, at least when you first start out. As time goes by, you can “graduate” to a web based e-zine.
5. E-ZINE CONTENT- WHERE TO GET IT
Okay, you’ve decided on the format of your e-zine. Regardless of what format you decide on, you’re going to have to get content for it. The question is, where do you get this content from?
Well, you basically have two choices.
You can write it yourself or you can get it from someplace else.
Let’s start with the writing it yourself option since it is the probably the best option overall.
First of all, let me explain why I feel writing the content yourself is the best option.
The Internet is content crazy. Everything on the Internet is based on content. The sites with the highest rankings and the most visitors have the most content. But not just the most content, but the most “original” content. And that is the key.
What exactly is original content? The best way to illustrate that is with an example.
You sit down at your computer and type up a story about how your Aunt Bessie went to the store to pick up a can of peas and ended up being attacked by a 700 pound gorilla. Now that’s quite a monkey story for the middle of New York City.
It’s also original content.
Now, let’s say you submitted that story to an article directory and somebody liked it enough to include it in one of their story e-zines. They pay the article directory for the right to use the article and then they send it to their subscriber base.
That is NOT original content. It is content that somebody got from a third party.
That is why your first choice is to write your e-zine content yourself. If you send out old content that you got from some article directory to your member base and somebody happens to recognize it from someplace else, they may feel cheated. Maybe they WERE expecting original content. Don’t get me wrong, purchasing content from article directories, or even finding free content, which you can do, is perfectly legit. But don’t you feel that your subscribers deserve the best that they can get?
Now, having said that, if you simply can’t write, you can still get original content. All you have to do is hire somebody to write it for you. You can go to a place like Elance.com and get somebody to write articles for you. Please understand that in most cases, you will get what you pay for. Somebody charging you only $3 an article is probably not going to give you top notch quality work.
Now, if you should happen to find somebody who is willing to write for you for free, there is going to be a catch to this. Most likely he is going to want to include a link to his website in the newsletter itself. So just be prepared for this.
Some people really have no choice when it comes to content and have to get content from a third party. If it’s original third party content, meaning they wrote it specifically for you, that’s fine. It’s just as good as your own, if not better, especially if they are a good writer.
But if you get content that has been circulated all over the Internet, your e-zine credibility just won’t be as great. This is something you might want to consider before you even decide if you want to offer an e-zine, because without killer content, that’s the ball game.
6. COMING UP WITH IDEAS FOR YOUR E-ZINE
This is where most people are tripped up right out of the gate. The truth is, this is no different from coming up with an idea for a product or service. In this case, your e-zine IS your product, and if you want to keep people hanging around for the next issue, you better come up with a solid idea to keep them coming back. This will usually take some thought and a lot of hard work.
So just how DO you come up with ideas for your e-zine?
Well, there are a number of ways.
The first is to go on the Internet and see what e-zines are already out there. If you go to a directory of e-zines, of which there are many, you will see that there are more themes than Imelda Marcos has shoes. What you might want to do is subscribe to a few e-zines in the niche that you are in and see what kind of information they send out in their e-zine newsletters. Don’t copy it. Just get a feel for what kind of information is sent to subscribers. Also make a note of the format of the e-zine. See if there are any ads in the e-zine or if it’s strictly content.
While you’re looking through these e-zines to see what they’re sending to their subscribers, here’s something you should do that very few people even think of. I’m just giving you the benefit of my years of experience here with this subject.
Look to see what’s NOT in the e-zine.
Of course each topic is going to be self contained and therefore you’re not going to see every piece of information that exists in each e-zine. But, over time, you will start to notice things that the e-zine publisher does NOT cover.
Why is this important?
Because this is potentially a market to exploit and take advantage of.
For example, let’s say you subscribe to an e-zine on Internet advertising and you notice that in all the issues, the publisher never once brought up the subject of article writing for the purpose of advertising. This could be a chance for you to capture that corner of the market.
How?
Simple. Start an e-zine for aspiring writers. Show them how they can turn their writing into profit not just by selling their works, but also by using their writing to promote other products and services. Teach them how to do a product review among many other things.
You could very well come up with an e-zine that reaches a wide audience.
Coming up with original e-zine ideas is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be excruciatingly difficult either. By doing a little research and thinking outside the box, you can come up with ideas for your e-zine that could very well make you one of the most popular e-zines on the Internet.
7. HIRING A WRITER FOR YOUR E-ZINE
Okay, you’ve got the ideas for your e-zine but you’ve also decided that writing is just not for you. However, you’ve also decided that you don’t want to dig up rehashed content for your e-zine. Well, in that case, the only thing left to do is hire a writer.
Work for hire on the Internet is not as easy to get accomplished as in the offline world for many reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, it’s a question of who blinks first.
Let me try to explain with an example.
John Doe decides that he wants to hire a writer for his e-zine. So he looks around the Internet and finds an email address of a Sally Rogers. So he emails Sally and tells her that he wants her to write 5 articles for his e-zine. Sally replies back saying that the 5 articles would cost him $50. He says fine.
Sally then emails John Doe and says that he has to pay $25 up front.
Now, think about this. All John knows about Sally is an email address. For all he knows, she doesn’t even have to be a Sally. In theory, and unfortunately what happens way too often, John Doe sends $25 to Sally’s PayPal account and then never hears from her again. He’s out $25.
In defense of Sally, if she’s one of the honest ones, what happens all too often is that she delivers the articles and never gets paid. She’s now put in all that work and has nothing to show for it.
This is why dealing with these type of things on the Internet are so difficult. In the offline world, you simply go down to the store with the money in your hand and say, “Are my articles ready?” The person who wrote them then hands you a package and you hand him the money.
So, the first thing you have to do when you hire a writer to write content for you is to work out the terms in advance. If the two of you can’t agree on delivery and payment, then there is no point in doing business with this person.
After you have worked out the terms of payment and delivery, you can then get into the details of what you want for the e-zine. Again, you have to be very specific about what you want right up front. If you have to, write up an outline of how you expect the articles to read. You may not be able to write yourself, but you should at least have a decent idea of exactly what content you want in these articles.
This is just another one of those reasons why I strongly suggest writing your own content, to avoid problems like these.
However, if you should find a really great writer who is easy to work with, hold on to this person. As you develop a working relationship, you will find that they will probably start to give you discounts on your requests.
These relationships are rare and hard to find, but when you do find one, hang on for dear life.
You may never find another one like it again.
8. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Okay, you’ve gotten your content. You’ve either written it yourself, paid somebody to write it for you, or shudder the thought, got some free content from an article directory.
Now what?
Now, it’s time to put it all together and actually create your e-zine, whether it be an email or a web page.
What, you thought this was all going to put itself together all on its own? No, I’m afraid there is quite a bit of work to do.
For starters, what do you want your e-zine to look like? Even emails can get pretty fancy without going the HTML route. There are so many fonts and styles to choose from. Do you want your e-zine to be just plain old ordinary Times New Roman?
Maybe you’re doing an e-zine on antiques. So maybe a font like this is something that just might attract your readers. Or maybe you’re putting together a comic book e-zine and something along these lines might be just what the e-zine ordered. Most people really don’t think about this sort of detail. That’s what separates the good e-zines from the really great ones.
Aside from the look, you also want to decide on the order that things will come in the e-zine. What if you decide that in addition to the article, you also want to put a brief ad in the e-zine. Do you do it at the beginning, the end, where? My gut tells me to give them the content first and then do your sales pitch. Remember, you don’t want to give them a pitch with each e-zine.
What if you decide that your e-zine is going to be a web page. How many pages? Will the content be on the main page? Will you archive all old newsletters? Will you have a page with products? Will you also have an opt-in box for an email series?
Lots of questions, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.
What about graphics for your e-zine? You do want to have a look that people will recognize. Branding is so important with everything we do online. Sometimes people will recognize us more by a certain logo than by the words on a page.
And what about the actual layout of your web page? You want each page of your e-zine to have the same look. If the pages are thrown together willy-nilly, visitors to your site are going to get the impression that this isn’t a very professional e-zine.
Everything has to look like it goes together, especially if visitors are going from one page to another, otherwise they may not even know that they’re at the same site and end up leaving because they’re lost. So navigation is also very important.
The point is, you just don’t throw your e-zine together. Everything has to be planned out to the letter if you want your e-zine to have a professional look and convey that professionalism to your subscribers.