For many people, starting an e-zine is the epitome of what online marketing is all about: start up, get subscribers, sell them loads of stuff and retire to the Bahamas.
I wish!
This short article attempts to dispel some of the myths
and help set those intrepid souls who really have a
burning desire to communicate, on the right road.
There are three aspects of e-zine publishing, all of
which are important: content & design, physical
production & distribution, subscriptions.
First you have to consider yourself and what you put
into the e-zine.
A few tips to get you started:
1. Before you do anything else, subscribe to
every newsletter you can get your hands on. Read at least three
issues of each and decide which one are in your own personal
top ten.
I currently subscribe to over 130 e-zines. I read all
of them occasionally but have about a dozen that I
actually look forward to getting.
2. Analyze the ones you are reading, to work
out what it is about them you really like.
Is it the fact-filled content?
The freebies?
The warm, chatty approach?
The quick access?
Or what?
3. Plan your own e-zine based on the styles
that you really like.
This sounds obvious, but isn’t often done. Too many e-
zines are formulaic. I don’t mean you should copy the
good e-zines, just that you should understand what it
is that makes them good – the essence – and emulate
that.
4. Think long and hard about how you will handle
advertising. This is probably one of the biggest turnoffs. If
your e-zine has too many classified ads, it may lose its warmth.
If you send out too many (or any, perhaps) solo/featured/targeted
mailings, you will irritate your readers.
5. In planning the content, it is a good idea
to have 3-5 issues ‘in the bag’ before you even think about
launching. See how they flow, one to the other. Are you allowing
your own personality to come through?
If on reflection you are not putting enough of yourself
into it, rework them.
Remember the adage ‘people do business with people they
like’.
length. Many pundits will tell you that newsletters have to
be short and punchy.
In some cases, I agree. Some newsletters, by way of
their subject matter, should be short and to the point.
Others, however, can and should be longer. My own
newsletter, BizE-zine, generally runs at about
3500-4000 words (about 10 pages when printed). When I
asked my subscribers recently if they’d like to see it
shorter (I was concerned that it took too long to read)
I got a resounding vote to keep it as it is.
If it is interesting, useful and personal, people will
enjoy reading it no matter how long or short it is.
Like a good article, a newsletter should be as long as
it needs to be.
7. When you do launch, and you have a growing
subscriber base, keep them involved. It is not your job as a
newsletter publisher to serve up whatever you think best. It
is your job to keep in touch with your readers and respond to
their wishes.
Grow, evolve, adapt and prosper.
Second, after you have gone through this process and
are ready to launch, then you can think about the
technical aspects of production and distribution.
Don’t panic!
When you are first starting out, don’t allow yourself
to be bamboozled by advice that says you need
sophisticated software/autoresponders/editors and so
on.
You don’t.
To start out, you probably already have everything you
need right on your computer.
First you need a way of writing the newsletter. Don’t
use Word, or any other Word processor because they all
put tons of invisible junk in the file that your
reader’s email programs will not decipher.
You can use any plain text editor. Good old Notebook is just
about adequate, but one of the best alternatives that I have
come across is TextPad. You can download a free evaluation copy
I have been producing my newsletter, BizE-zine, using
TextPad for just over a year and it has been wonderful.
The best feature is its easy ability to set and adjust
line lengths (hard to do in Notepad).
Some e-zines are produced in HTML format (colored
fonts, graphics, etc). It really isn’t much harder to
produce your e-zine in this flashy style, but the
result is fraught with problems. You are much more
likely to make an error and send out something that
looks awful (I get a lot like that!). Also, many
people’s email clients are not able to display HTML
correctly, so they will see gobbledygook.
As far as I’m concerned, plain text is my favorite. Of
my ‘top 12’ e-zines, I think only 2 are HTML.
Once you have written your e-zine, you have to have a
way of getting it out to your subscribers.
Guess what? Unless your list is huge, Outlook Express
is perfectly adequate for the job. Simply break your
list down into batches of about a hundred and copy them
into the BCC line. Then hit ‘send’. Your ISP may impose
different limits on the number of emails you can send
together – mine allows 120.
Again, I have been distributing BizE-zine that way for
over a year and it is only now that the numbers on my
list are getting bigger – over 2000 – that I am
considering moving up to something more sophisticated.
What else do you need?
An e-zine without a website to back it up is less
likely to succeed, so I’d suggest you buy yourself a
good domain name and some reasonable hosting.
This will add to your credibility, and allow you to get
new subscribers from other sources.
When you get more adventurous (and more successful) you
will probably want to add a decent autoresponder. This
will enable you to automate subscribes and
unsubscribes, set up ‘fax backs’ of articles, create
courses, and, of course, handle the mailing out of your
e-zine once you outgrow OE. But hold off on that
expense until you are sure you will get the benefit
from it. A decent autoresponder isn’t cheap.
Two things that you badly need that you won’t read
about too often are time and enthusiasm. Are you sure
that you will be able to stick to regular deadlines?
Are you certain that you will always have something to
say? Can you say it in an interesting way? Can you
communicate your enthusiasm for your subject to your
audience.
An e-zine is certainly not a short-cut to Internet
riches, but if you run it well, there is no reason why
you shouldn’t make money from it down the line.
First you have to establish your credibility, then you
have to build an audience, then you have to connect
with that audience, and only then can you effectively
sell to them.
With the worries lately about spam filters at ISP
server level preventing e-zines from being delivered,
there is a trend for publishers to publish their work
direct to their website and simply send out a quick
email each week advising their readers that it is
ready.
Martin Avis is the author of the best-selling ‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ – a complete blueprint to private label rights success. Visit http://www.plrsecrets.com to see how you can tap into this goldmine for yourself.
