Your
own ezine
By
David Callan
As
a webmaster, running your own free Ezine
(also known as a newsletter) can bring
huge benefits to your website and help
increase your profits. You have seen them
all over the Internet, nearly all sites
related to marketing offer them to their
visitors.
The
popularity of these Ezines is based on
the need for information. The number one
reason people are online is because they
want and need information and that's exactly
what Ezines provide. Ezines are mostly
delivered via email, some however are
delivered as HTML pages. Ezines which
are delivered as HTML pages still utilize
email though as the webmaster will email
subscribers notifying them that a new
issue is ready.
There
are many advantages of starting your own
Ezine, however Ezines do require a bit
of work to get started and maintain so
they may not be for everyone.
Let's
go through a few of them advantages now.
There a two main advantages. These include
being able to maintain regular contact
with your website visitors and being able
to build a relationship with them also.
Ezines
allow you to maintain regular contact
with your website visitors. This is vital
to your success because rarely do people
buy on their first visit, in fact most
people usually have to be exposed to an
offer up to seven times before they'll
buy from you. Your Ezine allows you to
keep the connection with your sites visitors
and also allows you to remind them you're
there so that the can revisit and maybe
after the 6th or 7th time at your website
they will buy.
They don't have to visit your site for
your sales messages as Ezines give you
the excuse to send potential customers
another and another and another email
packed with articles, tutorials and information.
Each edition of your Ezine will of course
include your sales message.
Ezines
are great for building trust and relationships
online. If your Ezine provides regular
quality content which your subscribers
can really use they'll begin to trust
your opinion and will also begin to feel
that they know you. This is important
as you must develop relationships to make
real money from your website.
The
other often overlooked advantage of having
an Ezine is the income it can generate,
not from selling your products and services
which we've already discussed above but
from selling advertising space in it.
You do however need a medium to large
subscriber base before other businesses
will be interested in advertising within
your publication but this is not that
hard to achieve, especially if your Ezine
is regularly full of quality content.
You can earn a few hundred dollars every
month just from ads if you play your cards
rights.
Disadvantages of running your own Ezine
include the amount of work involved. While
publishing an Ezine you've to regularly
write a lot of quality content before
your next edition comes out (usually every
week) and this isn't always easy. In fact
it's never easy, the next thing that adds
to your work load when it comes to Ezines
is maintaining your email addresses, many
people change their emails addresses and
even more enter in the wrong email address
on your sign up form, it's your job to
get rid of the bad addresses and keep
the good ones.
You can of course get software to automate
the maintaince of your email list, there
are also lots of online services which
you can use to maintain your list too.
Certain software can automatically unsubscribe
and subscribe different email address
as well as do other things, this will
significantly cut down on your workload.
The content part can't however be automated,
it takes time to create quality content
and there is no way around this.
Now for a little summary, you need an
Ezine if you sell products or services
on your website, without one you'll be
losing touch with hundreds if not thousands
of potential customers which could in
turn make or break your business
