Ezine advertising has been glorified by experts the world over as the last refuge for the little guy/gal to make a buck online. Well, I hate to deliver bad news, and please don’t shoot the messenger, but there are some draw backs to ezine advertising and many of the Inner Sanctum E-Letter subscribers are making them daily. Let’s look at the most common mistakes and their solutions.
Mistake #1: Not Tracking Your ads.
Many business owners have no idea how they can track every ad they place. Whether for an affiliate program or their own product, they just don’t know. Not knowing what ad is working and producing the sale will cost you and your business thousands of dollars. When you know what ad produces and what ad doesn’t you can cut the worst of the ads and only keep the ad/s which is producing for your business.
>>Solution: Mistake #2: Writing me-too ads.
When writing your ad you must take your ego, your desire to boast about you and your company, out of the equation. An example of a me-too ad:
“Acme Law Offices have been in business for 20 years. Our staff of lawyers all graduated from Harvard Law School with honors. Call us at 1-800-acme-law today!”
>>Solution:Mistake #3: Running Classifieds.
Since they don’t cost much, business owners tend to use classifieds to save costs. Classifieds are cheap, $5-$20 per ad, and in most cases run faster than solo or top sponosor ads because the ezine publisher runs 10-20 per issue.
What’s not so commonly known is the fact classified sections are often times scanned by the reader (I scan past them every time) and get very little eye time.
>>Solution:Run Solo or Top sponsor ads. These ads get more exposure. They are exclusive (solo mailings) or only have 2-3 (sponsor ads) per issue spaced out between the content. Mistake #4: Going for large subscriber bases. Large subscriber stats are impressive. 30,000 subscribers is a ton of eye balls and the potential to return a profit is greatly increased. Well, this is completely untrue.
A recent test we ran took our breath away. We spent $180 on a solo ad to a subscriber base in a general marketing publication of 30,000 subscribers. We ran that same solo ad for $65 in an ezine about pop-up marketing strategies with a subscriber base of 1200.
Ad #1 to 30,000+ brought back $0!
Ad#2 to 1200 specifically targeted subscribers brought back $900 in pure profit!
>>Soltuion: Mistake #5: Running your ad once.
When I first started advertising ezines I would run one ad one time, if it didn’t produce results I would switch ezines and run the ad again. This was I tested the ad. Many business owners are doing the same thing today. By running the ad only once, you’re cutting your chances to profit in half.
By running it 2-3-4 times, even if the first run didn’t make a profit gives your ad more exposure, readers will “think” it’s producing because you ran it more than one time, therefore other subscribers must have thought it was worth looking at helping your ad produce.
>>Solution:
