Effective Ezine Advertising Part One

By Terri Seymour
Posted Thursday, August 26, 2004

Marketing an online business can be a daunting task, but is not hard when you take it day by day and step by step. Advertising your business, product, affiliate program, etc. in quality ezines can be well worth the money spent. When choosing your ezine, writing your ads and making your contacts, there are some things you should consider.

* Finding Ezines

Finding quality ezines to advertise in can be one of the harder steps of ezine advertising. There are hundreds of ezine directories which list good ezines of all kinds. Whether you need a gardening ezine or a business ezine, directories are a good place to start. You want to target the ezine to match your product or service. If you are selling vitamins, you want to find health and fitness related ezines.

Try these directories to get started:
(http://www.myfavoriteezines.com)
(http://www.ezinedepot.net/)
(http://www.cumuli.com/ezine/)
(http://www.freezineweb.com)
(http://www.directoryofezines.com)

* Subscribe to the Ezine

After you find the ezines you want, subscribe to them to get an idea of the consistency, reliability and quality of the ezines. Make sure the ezine is mailed out when it is supposed to be and that it contains quality content. You do not want to advertise in a big list of ads. This will lower the value of your ad by quite a bit. Does the ezine contain feedback from the other subscribers and if so, what do the subscribers say. These are all ways to indicate whether the ezine publisher is trusted by the subs and whether or not you can trust and believe in the publisher. This is VERY
important!

* Contact the Publisher

Once you have established that the ezine is reliable and contains quality content with limited ads, write to the publisher of the ezine to get to know him/her more. See if they make themselves available to their subs if need be. Take note of how willing they are to answer your questions and if they reply personally or with a form letter. If the publisher is not available to his/her subscribers, chances are the trust/respect relationship is not there.

* Swap Ads for a Test Run

If you are also an ezine publisher, ask the potential ezine publisher for an ad swap. This will give you a chance to see how the subscribers respond to an ad. It can also get you more subscribers.

You can also run some test ads to find the most cost effective ezines, but this could be costly. Here is an example of a test by a fellow publisher:

The same solo ad was placed in the following ezines:

1. GuruMailer - 27$ (2 solo's a month) (http://www.anownsite.com/cgi-bin/tracker.cgi?lgm) a limited subscription based list
2. TFI News - 12.400 - 37$ (http://tfinews.com/advert.html) (special offer of 21$ at the time of submission)
3. Village Of Tidbits - 9.000+ - 20$ (http://villageoftidbits.com/BusinessReviewSolos.htm)
4. My Own Ezine (MOE) - 2.000 - 15$ (http://www.myownezine.com/advertising.shtml)
5. PLNews - 17.800 - 30$ (http://www.promotelinks.com/advertise.html)
6. Peej's Business Ezine - 10.600 - 20$ (http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/peej/index.html)

The goal of the ad was to have the reader click the link to visit a page where he/she could subscribe in order to get further information about The Ultimate Viral Marketing Strategy.

This page, although named differently for tracking purposes, was exactly the same for every ad.

Using AdTracker, I was able to count the number of clicks in the ad AND the number of clicks on the page.

Here are the results:
Ezine #ad clicks #page clicks
1. GuruMailer 22 5
2. TFI News 36 9
3. Village Of Tidbits 12 5
4. My Own Ezine (MOE) 46 21
5. PLNews 38 8
6. Peej's Business Ezine 6 3

As you can see, the smallest ezine was the most responsive!

This test was done by Case Stevens of (http://www.anownsite.com/) Thank you Case. ;-) You can read Case's entire article here: (http://www.anownsite.com/newsletter/030706.html)

In Part 2, I will try to help you learn how to write and track your ads. An effective ad is very important to your advertising campaign because even in the best of ezines a badly written ad could be your downfall.

About the Author
Terri Seymour owns and operates MyOwnEzine.com Learn to publish and promote your own ezine. mailto:subscribe@myownezine.com Complete list of her articles for reprint please email: mailto:myownezine-index@getresponse.com Earn 50% with the MOE Affiliate Program (http://www.myownezine.com/moesalespage.shtml)