How To Launch Your Own Profitable Internet Newsletter Step By Step

Through effective Ezine marketing techniques you can achieve phenomenal increase in sales. You can not only minimize your total cost but also earn huge return on investments through Ezine publishing. Compare it with other ways of advertising and you will realize how easy it is to save money when you employ these tactics. If you use postal mail to send flyers, information brochures, etc. to your potential customers, your message might not reach the right person and besides, it can cost you a lot of money.
Where To Find Free Ezine Content
You don’t have to write lengthy articles to have a successful ezine. In fact, like we discussed earlier, lengthy articles can only have a negative impact on the quality of your ezine. Your article should have words ranging from 500 to 750, not more than that. There are various resources available on the Internet that provide free articles, which can be used for your Ezine.
Before you use any article described as free, make sure that you have asked for the author’s permission. Do not assume that just because the article is mentioned as free, you can use it conveniently. Carefully read the disclaimer mentioned on all these websites, just to get an idea of what kind of procedures do you need to follow. Usually, you may have to mention the author name by giving him/her due credit and provide a formal introduction.
Free resources to improve your writing skills
If you do decide to write the articles yourself, it is advisable that before starting out you brush up your grammar and language skills. High school grammar will be long forgotten. You would need to get a grip on professional communication and how to write crisp and concise articles. Innumerable websites provide help with this aspect.
Generating Ideas For Your Ezine
The beauty of Ezines and eBooks is that they can be written about anything and everything. There are innumerable subjects worth writing about. The key is to have an open mind and be aware of the situation around you. If you regularly study various ezines that are being published you would have a fairly good idea on what to write about. The more you research and analyze the easier it is for you to inspect a typical reader’s mind. All you need is one ray of light and you can find your way out.
Following are some great ideas that you can use to add effective content in your Ezine:
· Write a book or product review related to the topic of your Ezine.
Don’t limit your review to only tangible books and products. Review
internet-based services, websites, e-books, the choice is limitless.
· Set up interviews of experts and professionals in your field.
· Write a troubleshooting article or a ‘How to’ article. For example, in
your Ezine all about food, write an article ‘How to whip up quick
lunches in 10 minutes’.
· Write a short real life incident that happened with you which taught
you a thing or two. You come across as a ‘real’ person with real
mishaps and real problems in life. And how you dealt with such a
real situation shows your strength of character. Your readers will be
able to relate to you more and will trust your opinions.
· Go to news groups and discussion forums on the Internet and see
what people are talking about nowadays. Most of these groups
have archives that go way back. That way you also learn how
people and their thought process evolved and guess their next step.
· One thing that you must understand and firmly believe that your
Ezine is all about a topic you love and know a lot about. Your first
idea will shoot from your knowledge bank. Run through your head
and you will be able to write quite a few articles.
Finally, research for new topics. You will be amazed at how many new topics you will find! Earlier, when you needed to do some research on any topic, you needed
to hit the local library. Go through big books with tiny letters and dig up old newspapers to find out the content relevant to your article. That would take hours, even days and it used to be a demanding task and only those who are persistent and patient would make it through. Thankfully, with the advent of Internet, you can get as much information you need through the click of a button. One link leads to another, one website takes you to another website, one page is connected to another and that way you have unlimited information at your disposal that can be
used the way you want.Whenever you are on the internet, browsing, researching or just plain surfing, make sure that whenever you find any web page or any link
relevant to the article you are contemplating to write or that can be useful
for your Ezine, save it on your hard disk. That way you can look up the
information at some other time. Even if you find some information on an article you have already written and published or about some article you are considering writing in future, do save it anyway. That way in case you need to update your existing
article you can do that easily. Also, saved information can be used at any time, so even in future if you are planning on writing about a particular topic, you can do so immediately without having to go through the bothering task of searching on it all over again. Even if the topics you have researched are constantly updated, the basic premise remains the same and you can use that as the platform of your
article. For example, technical articles change as per the innovations that take place in the industry, but old information can be used to reflect on how the product has evolved. Also, historical information don’t change, the harrowing stories of World War II stays the same.
So, when your Ezine has such articles, it always helps when you save all the information that you have, so that you can sprinkle it tastefully in your articles.
Ezine Marketing
Most Email programs allow all kinds of different formats these days. Email programs in the old days displayed only plain text messages. However, this has changed greatly and users can now send and receive mails in their full glory that includes special font, colors, messages, pictures, sounds, and animation.
An ezine written in HTML should be compatible with most email clients.
The good news is that these clients do not have any special formatting requirements. A newsletter would be displayed as is in your subscriber’s
email program. However, it is always a good idea to have every newsletter
in two formats – one HTML and the other Plain Text, incase some
subscribers have problems opening HTML mails.
You may want to keep the level of graphics down as it may take much
longer for subscribers to open your ezine with a load of graphics. Prior to
sending your ezine to subscribers ensure that you test your formatting for
compatibility with all kinds of Email clients, especially Outlook Express,
Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and a few web clients such as hotmail and yahoo.
Frequency of your Ezine
One of the main dilemmas of ezine publishers is how often should they publish and send out their ezines. When you plan your ezine, especially initially, it is very much possible that you may get so excited that you would want to publish your ezine as frequently as possible. Although, this is a good sign it would not work well with your subscribers. The best thing to do is to start off with a monthly ezine and then increase the frequency with time.
During the first few publications you would also get an idea of how well
are you able to manage your ezine and your subscribers. This may be
harder than you think. If you feel comfortable with the process you can
then think of an ezine published every fortnight. Please note that it is not
necessary for you to increase the frequency of your ezine to more than
one per month. You should only do that if you feel comfortable. I have seen many cases of publishers hurrying up into publishing ezines every
two weeks only to revert back to the monthly cycle.
Do not publish your ezine less than once a month unless your ezine is such
that it can only be published once in two or three months. This would
greatly increase the risk of your subscribers forgetting who you are.
Conversely, do not go overboard by publishing every two to three days.
Even if your content is timely or fabulous enough to warrant a daily
publication, it is very likely that your subscribers may not be able to keep
up with them and eventually unsubscribe out of frustration. The maximum
frequency should be once a week.
Determine how much information you have which you can share with your
readers. Daily Ezine like I said earlier, is not advisable unless you have
timely updated information like news or stock market. Let’s say you are
hoping to start a great Ezine that gives valuable tips on how to effectively
use the MS Office products. You think that you have too much information
to share and you start a daily Ezine that gives lengthy information on the
subject matter.
Your reader enjoys the first couple of Ezines, and then he gets
overwhelmed by all that information, and probably prints out the copies of
your Ezine so that he can read it later when he has time. Eventually the
copies pile up on his desk and his secretary is tired of cleaning up the
clutter. He gets frustrated and even though he finds the Ezine highly
informative, he has no option but to unsubscribe it. Whose loss is it?
More than his, it is your loss. Weekly, bi-weekly or monthly Ezine is your
best bet as the beginner.
Now if you publish your Ezine not very often, then your readers might just
forget you! They might forget ever having subscribed to your Ezine. Or
they will disregard your Ezine as one of the many spam messages that
they receive and put you in their junk mail folder. Unless you have a
super-special Ezine like an Ezine detailing some musical concert that
happens only 4 times a year or about some festival that comes only once a
year, then you can publish infrequent Ezines. However, it is not the very
best strategy. Do start with a balanced frequency, not too often and not
too sporadic. The key is to work out a schedule and stick to it. Publishing on a regular
basis would establish your credibility and suggest to your readers that you
are organized and can meet deadlines.
Finally, although you may avoid sending out your ezine during holidays or
just before them, you should not worry about the day of the week to send
it out. Although, some experts would suggest that the best days to send
out ezines are Tuesday and Wednesday this might not make a difference.
Just pick the day that feels right to you and stick to it.
Creating A Website to Launch Your Ezine(50)
It is very likely that your Ezines are created with an objective of promoting
some of your products. It makes sense then to have a user friendly
website that provides all information about your ezines as well as other
products. Your website must take a very unique approach. Although, you
may not design a very elaborate site, it still has to be designed for
success. First and foremost, it has to be functional. It should at least have
a separate page that houses all your ezines along with a listing of all
benefits that a potential customer might incur by signing up for these
ezines.
This section discusses in brief some of the basics of website designing and
hosting. These basics hold true for all kinds of websites. Thus, you could
follow these even if you intend to create a website to promote other
products and not necessarily newsletters. However, I would strongly
recommend that you have a separate web page for your ezines on your
website that can serve as a convenient place to get information as well as
sign up for them.
Every time a reader succeeds in executing a task on the web site, your
reputation is enhanced. Every time a reader is frustrated by the site, your
reputation is diminished.
Tools and approaches that make marketers and advertisers succeed offline
are often drawbacks on the web. The compelling image is slow to
download and frustrates the impatient scan reader. The catch phrase is of
little use to a reader hungry for information, which is especially true in the
case of newsletters.
The conception about flashy homepages has changed. When you arrive on
a home page and are met with a fancy Flash intro, you are no longer
impressed. Waiting for a large image to download, your frustration would
grow. Your potential customers visit your website looking for something
unique and important. Anything that slows them down is an annoyance.
You should portray your Ezines and other products that are promoted
through these ezines with accurate, well-written, up-to-date content. Many
marketers and advertisers still don't understand the web. The key is to make your website as content rich as possible. Make it as simple as
possible.
If I were to list out 2 things that are an absolute requirement for your
website, they would be
? Simple, clean, a very user-friendly design
? Reliable host and domain name
Let us first look at some of the aspects of designing a website.
Automating the Ezine process(61)
The process of creating and distributing ezines involves a number of
phases right from developing content and format to marketing and
advertising to delivery and distribution. Most Ezine publishers, especially
smaller companies and individuals deal with content creation and ezine
marketing themselves. However, as many have found out hiring third party
Ezine software vendors may be a good idea.
These vendors would take care of distributing and delivering your Ezine to
your customers at nominal rates. Doing so would save much of your time
and effort – something that should be directed at creating informative
content and developing marketing strategies.
You can do your distribution yourself as well. More on this is discussed in
the chapter on advertising in this eBook. However, if you do decide to
outsource this process to a third party, there are some considerations to
keep in mind in order to determine the best solution provider.
The beauty of hiring firms that provide Ezine software is that many of the other aspects such as formatting, managing, administering, and tracking
are also automated by these.
At the outset, let me also mention that you could also buy such software
and manage the whole process yourself. However, I would recommend
that you outsource the delivery process to a credible and reliable software
vendor.
Here are some of the features to look for in Ezine software and the service
providers.
Content Management Most ezine software offer tools to manage the content of your Ezine. This
includes content formatting functionality enabling content to be published
with different kinds of pre defined templates, and formats such as text,
HTML or a combination of both. This is an extremely handy tool.
Making Money From Your Ezine
Information is freely available on the Internet. Do paid ezines work? The
answer is in most cases they don’t. The magic word here is most cases –
there are exceptions where paid ezines have been highly successful.
If you are just starting out with your ezine forget about asking your
subscribers to pay for your ezine. Paid ezines can only work when you
have established a name for yourself. Besides, if your main aim behind
running an ezine campaign is to promote your other products avoid having
paid subscriptions. You may charge for ezines if you have been able to
regularly publish them for a period of time constantly increasing your
subscriber base.
What can make the transition from free to paid ezine successful is out of
the ordinary content. Your ezine should have extremely unique and
informative content that would otherwise not be available freely on the
Internet. People are only going to pay if they find that your ezines actually
help readers. For instance you could have an ezine about Search Engine
Optimization wherein you provide tips and guidelines that are proven and
not available elsewhere.
Another aspect of paid ezines is the ability to accept credit card payments.
There is no use having a paid ezine and only accepting the payment in
terms of checks and money orders. Having a payment gateway such as
ClickBank or PayPal would certainly help.
Paid ezines may work when administered and marketed in the right way.
The key is to convince your readers that they would be getting their
money’s worth by paying for your ezine.
Developing a fee-based Ezine
As soon as you start charging for your Ezine, your readers will start
expecting a higher standard from your Ezine as well as a good value for
their money. You need a well-thought out and balanced strategy so that
you can convince your readers that they are definitely getting valuable
information. You also need to provide unique and exclusive information
that your competitors do not provide. If you churn out the same type of
information in your fee-based Ezine, which is also provided by another free
Ezine or website, your fee-based model will never work.
Here are a few strategies you need to keep in mind if you want your feebased
model to be successful:
Advertising Your Ezine To Grow Your List
Setting up your advertising campaign
Newsletters are generally used as tools to market other products or
services. You would hardly have a newsletter which itself is an endproduct.
For this reason, advertising is an integral part of building and
publishing any newsletter or ezine.
Before you start your advertising campaign, you need to carefully plan it.
Start by asking yourself what is the purpose of the campaign – what
product would you be advertising through your ezine? There are many key
aspects of a successful campaign. Let us discuss each one separately.
The Timeframe
One of the first things you need to decide is how much time would you
give your campaign. You cannot have an indefinite campaign. It is always
advisable to fix a start date and an end date to your advertising campaign.
The reason for this is that within a specific timeframe it is easier to track
the performance of your campaign as well as set up a budget. Besides, if
at the end of period you find your campaign to be successful, you could
always continue with the same strategies.
Budget
Setting up a budget for your campaign is not as easy as it sounds. You
may have a specific amount in mind but simply using up the whole amount
at least initially may not be the wisest idea. Online advertising comes in
many forms. You could run a series of 5 campaigns as well as a series of
50 campaigns. The key is to spend your money right.
Some campaigns are obviously more expensive than others. Some may
even be free. This means that it is not simply a case of saying that you are
going to run a series of five different campaigns covering a range of
advertising media and so you will split your budget equally between the
five campaigns. You do not know what campaigns yield better results by
simply knowing the costs.
Any successful campaign is formed of the right ingredients. The hardest
part of your advertising campaign is not to set it up or maintain it but to
find the right ingredients. This can only be done with time. I would
suggest that you do not stretch you budget initially. Start with a few
campaigns well within your budget and track their performance over a
period of time. This will give you a better idea of what strategies work for
you and what don’t. In fact, it may not be a bad idea to spend less than
half of your budget initially. This way even if you lose all your money you
would still have money left for other campaigns.
On the other hand, if your initial campaign works, you could continue with
them and also jack it up a notch.
Tracking your campaign
Tracking your advertisements, as discussed above, is essential for the
success of the campaign. By employing some sort of a tracking system you
would be able to figure out which advertisements bring you the highest
number of responses. This is so very important, especially initially. It not
only focuses your efforts on the right advertising strategies but also helps
in achieving maximum ROI.
Now throught this article. Please subcribe to my enzine at
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