For Small Business Owners & the Self-Employed

Insider Secret:

Six Keys to Creating a Successful and Profitable Ezine

Copyright © 2004, Bill Platt
thePhantomWriters.com
http://thePhantomWriters.com

Fortunes are made on the Internet by people who have built solid mailing lists for the promotion of their online businesses. But the question many publishers face is how to turn their ezine subscribers into buyers?

Let me be honest with you. Your mailing list is only as valuable as your subscriber's willingness to purchase your products and services, or the products and services of your advertisers.

Until your subscribers begin to buy what you offer, your mailing list is not worth a plug nickel!

Here are the six ingredients that you need for creating a successful and profitable ezine:

ADVERTISING YOUR EZINE

* While often expensive, paid brokers can actually get readers to subscribe to your ezine. Yet, in my own personal experience, buying subscribers did put a large number of email addresses on my list, but it provided no value to my list since most subscribers never read my web-based ezine.

* One ezine advertising program that I have used in the past to great success is List Partners which permits you to set up an free affiliate program to permit others to advertise your ezine in exchange for free advertising or cash. http://www.listpartners.com

* I have generated some very solid advertising results using Publisher Ad Swaps.

By setting up private advertising arrangements with other ezine publishers, you can get your advertisement in another ezine in exchange for an advertisement in your ezine.

To locate like-minded publishers seeking beneficial ad swaps, there is a moderated discussion group dedicated to this task called the Ezine Publishers Swap Meet:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/publishers_swap_meet/

* Paid Search Engine placement can be another solid method for attracting new subscribers to your ezine.

* For more help in promoting your ezine, check out "How to Publicize Your E-Zine" at: http://www.zinebook.com/publicz.html

DEVELOP A STANDARDIZED TEMPLATE FOR YOUR EZINE

Your readers want a specific structure for your ezine. They want to be able to learn your structure and to be able to quickly follow your structure to get to the meat and potatoes of every issue. Your readers are pressed for time in the same way that you are, so they want you to enable them to get what they want from you in a quick and orderly fashion.

PROVIDE EXCEPTIONAL AND TARGETED CONTENT

When you develop your ezine, you know in principle what type of content that you want to bring to your readers. But, unless you have the financial ability to work your ezine on a full-time basis, finding the time to create all of your own content is a challenge that every publisher faces.

Fortunately, there are writers who have the time to create the content you can use, and they make their content available for publication so long as their terms of reprint are honored.These writers cover a wide range of subject materials that enable publishers in nearly every genre find a ready supply of content that they can include in their publications.

To learn how you can find articles that can be used for reprint in your publication, you should explore the following resources:

Niche Content Finder
http://www.freewebs.com/niche-content/

The Article Depot
http://articledepot.50megs.com/

The Phantom Writers Articles Archive
http://thephantomwriters.com/free_content/d/index.shtml

Free-Reprint Article and Content Providers Webring
http://b.webring.com/hub?ring=contentproviders

PERSONALIZE AND BRAND YOUR EZINE

In order to separate your ezine from the thousands of other online magazines, you must create a solid brand for your ezine.

What I mean by this is that you should always strive to make your ezine stand well above the crowd and to give your ezine its own personal identity. You want your ezine to be the one that your subscribers will read religiously and intently.

The way to develop an identity for your ezine, separate from your competitors, is to inject a touch of yourself into every issue. Talk to your readers as if you are talking to a friend or colleague. Your publishing competitors cannot duplicate your personality or your own personal take on life itself. Your personality is the primary ingredient that will help you to develop a solid ezine brand that your readers can trust.

CREATE READER INTERACTION

The greatest challenge in publishing an ezine is ALWAYS getting your subscribers to read your ezine.

One method for doing this is to develop reader interaction.

The one ezine that I know that has done the best job of this is Your Membership Exchange: http://www.your-membership.com

In this ezine, readers submit questions, and other readers answer the questions. Their unique selling proposition is" Newsletters for Our Members, By Our Members."

In each issue, a new question is posted, and then the publisher takes the best answers to a previous question and publishes them in the ezine. I read this one every day.

In my ezine, I had accomplished a strong level of interaction with my readers by running a contest. In every issue, I posed a brain teaser question and published the names of the first three people who in the previous issue got the answer right.

ASK FOR THE SALE

I mention this only because I know someone who is making this mistake right now. I am sure a lot of other publishers are making this mistake as well.

Many people begin the process of publishing an ezine for the explicit purpose of selling their own wares. They follow the advice of the guru's about developing a mailing list and publishing their ezine on a regular basis. A lot of work is put into the ezine to develop a loyal base of subscribers who read each and every issue delivered.

And when all is said and done, the publisher fails to ask their readers to purchase the wares that their e-zine was designed to promote. How does one actually expect their readers to buy their wares if they do not ask their readers to buy what is being offered?

You are the expert in charge of your publication, so you should not be afraid to ask your readers the hard questions. You must explain to your readers what you are selling, and you must ask your readers to actually purchase what you are selling! Don't be afraid of offending your readers. Take care to do what is necessary to help your ezine to generate the profits it was designed to create.

Bill Platt owns http://thePhantomWriters.com . Do you need free content for your website or ezine? Our archives deliver more than 350 free-reprint articles available for your use. http://content.thePhantomWriters.com . Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you to our network of 6000+ publishers & webmasters http://thePhantomWriters.com/distribution