Creating and Publishing An Ezine or Newsletter 

Your best sales tool and marketing arsenal is your ezine. Creating an ezine publication or an email newsletter is one of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers and website visitors.

If you think about it, the chances of anyone returning to your site are slim to none if you don't attempt to capture their return.  You do this by placing a form on your site that directs them to sign up for your newsletter or ezine.

Having said that, there is a fair amount of thought that goes into creating an ezine.  But not to worry, a little up front thought goes a long way and the work of publishing your ezine or newsletter will become fairly routine after a few short months.

Before getting started you must focus on a few items that will help you determine who your audience is and how you are going to deliver the goods, so to speak. Find a pencil and piece of paper and thing carefully about the following. Write down your answers and review them:

• Why do you want to start an ezine publication?
• What is the purpose of the ezine?
• Who do you want to read your ezine?
• How much do you want to cover in your ezine?
• How do you hope to affect your readers?
• How often do you need to publish to reach your objectives and goals?

Who is Going To Be Reading Your Ezine or Newsletter?

These are all things that you're going to have to think about in order to give your readers what they want to read and also where you are going to find them.

Who are they? Are they men or women? Are they moms, dads, business people, college students.  Do they work from home, work at a job, handicapped?  How old are they?

How old are they? Are you appealing to college students or middle aged men? Keep in mind that your website could appeal to all ranges but you don't want to waste time targeting people that really have no interest.  For example, I might not want to seek out middle aged business executives for my beauty skin care site.

Where do they live? Is your business demographic specific?  Is your product or service relevant to only certain areas of the country. For example, are you going to sell snow boots in Florida?

Do They have hobbies?  Perhaps your product or service appeals to people with hobbies. 

Where are you going to find them? If you have a golfing shoes site don't promote your ezine in a baby shoes directory. On the other hand you might want to make a presence on a business site that attracts business men, why?  They have a large population of golfers. Keep in mind exactly who might use your products or services and advertise in directories where you might find those people.

What do they read?  Think about what people subscribing to your ezine would normally read. Is it the Fishing magazines, Entrepreneur magazines, Wall Street Journal, Beauty or Consumer magazines?

What are their interests? Is your newsletter a hobby for them or business related or both? For example: If your business is travel related, what else would your customers be interested in? Places to eat? Shop?

What is their income level?  You don't want to sell your products to people that cannot afford or need them. 

What is their Education and background? Are your readers already knowledgeable about your topic? Is your product or service geared toward beginners, intermediate or advanced audiences?

How are you going to keep their attention?  Your biggest job will be to keep your subscribers. You won't do that by delivering stale, uninteresting information.  Keep your newsletter or ezine light. Interject some humor and show an attitude of caring.  Give them a piece of who you are and why you do what you do.  Make a monthly plan of your newsletters and what you expect to offer.  Then in each newsletter offer a pre-view of what is in your next issue.

How to keep the creative juices flowing - What the heck do I write about?

If you look around your computer a little bit you would be surprised at all the things you have to write about or advise others on in your ezine publication or newsletter.  If you're like me you have desktop icons galore and each one opens up to a new world of learning.  If anything, you probably have an overload of information you could write about.

Check out your email in box. Did you receive any new information today or interesting articles that you can place in your newsletter?  Go to online forums in the topic of your choice.  Look around at the questions people are asking.  Can you create a topic that might cover that specific question and provide a solution for it?

Keep your eyes open and you'll find more information that you need to create an informative and interesting ezine.

An Ezine format to consider:

Offer a Tips List:  Always include some tips and strategies with regard to your products or services.  No matter how trivial the information, it can be helpful. Do you have little tricks you use everyday or ideas that you've thought of that might help others. If so, get them out there. Your readers will thanks you and they grow to count on you for creative ideas. 

Reviews: Offer product reviews or provide a guest review of a product or service. This is excellent for anyone with affiliate products.  If you promote a product find someone who endorses the product and see if they'll provide an in-depth positive review.

Questions and Answer:  Include a Question and Answers section or better yet direct your viewers to your blog.  Allowing questions and posting your answers helps keep your readers informed and helps build relationships. Also, keeping a page on your site of frequently asked questions is also an excellent way to keep down the level of repeated questions.

Article by a Guest columnist: Include an article by a guest columnist or industry expert. The article should include useful information regarding related to your products. For example, if you sell or promote tax software, include an article on the benefits of using tax software. 

Classified Ads:  Placing classified ads in your newsletter or ezine is an excellent way to generate revenue, however it's not recommended to charge for ads unless you have reached a subscription base of 1000 members.  Patrons want to know that they are getting some bang for their buck and they prefer their reach to be substantial.  revenue from your Once our subscription base reaches 1,000 members, we will accept classified ads on a limited basis. We will accept 10 classified ads - up to 5 lines - at a cost of $50.00 per ad.

Contests: Contests are a great way to achieve reader interest.  For example, poll your readers to provide you with their most pressing question.  Propose your offer to say that if you use their question in your next newsletter you'll offer them a free widget. This can be done with any type of contest, just make sure you provide something free in return for their effort.

Ezine Advertising

Here are a few newsletter locators that you can add your newsletter to or possibly advertise with. 

These newsletter locators are especially helpful because they list newsletter specifics such as how often the newsletter is published and their number of subscribers.  These are quite helpful when determining if a newsletter will be worth advertising in.

Happy promoting!

http://www.ezinelocater.com/
http://www.ezinehub.com/
http://www.mommyportal.com/newsletter_directory.htm
http://www.ezinelisting.com/
http://www.jogena.com/
http://www.cumuli.com/