If you’re selling ads to make your newsletter viable, I will guarantee you are losing money! There are at least three reasons why this is true:
Your Income is limited by the number of ADVERTISERS, not SUBSCRIBERS you can attract.
Subscribers are relatively easy to come by, and a significant number of them are ready to spend money on well-targeted offers. Problem is, the vast majority of people wanting to sell them products don’t want to spend any money on advertising. As a result, editors spend much of their time and energy chasing after advertisers rather than putting out a quality newsletter.
The amount you can make on each edition is limited by the ad space available.
I want you to meet Jane. Jane has a newsletter with 5,000 subscribers. Go Jane!
She sends out three editions each week-a newsletter and two solo ads.
Each solo ad Jane sells is $35. Each newsletter has a top sponsor, middle sponsor and bottom sponsor ads. Total, they sell for another $50.
For her 5,000 subscribers, the most Jane can ever make from this set-up is $480 per month. In addition, she will spend a great deal of her time just trying to maintain the number of subscribers and finding advertisers.
The final reason why selling ads loses you money is this:
Selling ads forces you to focus on selling ads rather than the big money created through effective newsletter strategy.
If you sell ads, a couple things are going to happen. First, you will have a vested interest in building up as many subscribers as possible. After all, the more subs the more you can charge for the ads (or so people tend to think). Second, you will spend the rest of your time chasing new advertisers.
Neither of these are high income activities.
Selling ads causes you to be blind to real problems with your list.
Most lists I know need a serious overhaul. They just don’t produce for anyone.
I recently went to buy some advertising in a large eZine-we purchase in both large and small eZine’s, and this one was a biggie, 150,000 plus. I wrote to the GIC (Guru In Charge) and asked him for a few things:
1. Open rate-how many people actually open his newsletter.
2. Bounce rate-how many newsletters are “undeliverable”
3. Unsubscribe rate-how many people unsubscribe when the newsletter is sent out.
4. Subscriber Source and Age-where the subs came from and how old the names are.
5. Previous Advertisers.
While he could easily tell me how many people subscribed to his newsletter, he had no idea how many actually read the thing and he never kept track of bounce rate or unsubscribe rate. He did attempt to tell me how he got the subscribers, but I have a feeling he fudged that answer a little-his list more than doubled in a year and he really couldn’t tell me why.
On the advertisers he supplied me with the three previous along with their contact information.
When I called each of these advertisers, I was astounded. None of them were happy. Each one said the same thing: “I lost money. ” Each one complained they were very unhappy with the results.
Needless to say, I didn’t buy any advertising.
If you want to be successful with your list, you need to know more than “I sent out 5,234 yesterday”. You need to know if people are actually reading your eZine and responding to it. If your only concern is selling ads, you might gloss over any real problems in favor of having a higher subscriber count.
In my next article I will look at how to make more money NOT selling advertising.
Kevin Bidwell is owner of
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293
Kevin just finished a complete report on building a passive
income. Grab your copy here:
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