How many times have you read “the best way to market your site is to start a newsletter?” I’m here to tell you this is bull puckey.
Is this blasphemy? Probably! But before you get all bent out of shape, hear me out. I have been there, done that and writing a newsletter or ezine is not the best use of your marketing time. And, here are the reasons why not:
There are already more than enough newsletters and ezines on the Internet. Why waste your time starting another one?
You probably do not have time to write a newsletter weekly, bi-monthly or even monthly. It takes a huge commitment to meet deadlines and come up with interesting content 12, 26 or 52 times a year.
Also, where are you going to get the time to promote your newsletter/ezine actively? You aren’t if you want to continue running your business effectively and have a real life.
As for companies advertising in your newsletter, get real. Unless you have a substantial subscriber base, the small amount of dollars from ads won’t even pay you 5 cents per hour for your hard work. Besides advertiser dollars are becoming less as dot com businesses bite the dust.
So why am I raining on your parade? Because I want to explain there are better ways to market.
Write Articles and offer them free
Yes I know you’ve heard this before but it works. Instead of spending time writing and promoting an ezine, use this time to write targeted articles and submit them to ezines with subscribers numbering in the thousands.
This will bring more visitors to view your products or service than your own ezine with its 200 or less subscribers. Plus it doesn’t take as much time when you use content site services like:
http://certificate.net/wwio/wglines.shtml
You can also go to yahoogroups.com or topica.com and look up lists which accept articles. That’s how I found out about the lists below:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content
So write your content rich articles, send them off to the different lists and you’ll be amazed at how your “unique visitor” count will steadily increase each month. Plus you are branding yourself as an expert in your field and not to just 200 to 1000 people but to thousands across the Internet.
Also by allowing ezine publishers to place your article on their sites, you are increasing your popularity ratio with search engines because of the resource box at the end of your article with its clickable link back to your site.
Find Message Boards and Post
Go to the most popular sites in your industry and post to their message boards. Don’t spam but do post with useful information. Most of these message boards or chat forums allow you to put your web site address (URL) as a link.
This link not only lets visitors click back to your site after they’ve read your insightful post but more important, the search engine robots pick up this link which increases your link popularity. Again, increasing your chances of being ranked higher.
Write Press Releases
Offline marketing is very important to building a successful business and writing a riveting press release isn’t as hard as you think. A good way to learn how to write one is at Randall Hansen’s site at http://www.stetson.edu/~rhansen/prguide.html. His resource page offers loads of links.
Once you’ve written your press release, you’ll want to use the following site to look up newspapers so you can search out the contact pages for the editors and reporters email addresses:
http://www.newspaperlinks.com/home.cfm
By setting your priorities and allocating your time properly, all the above marketing methods will do more for you than writing and promoting an ezine. In fact, they should increase targeted visitors to your site by more than twenty times what an ezine could do over a year’s time because each method mentioned has a cumulative effect. And, the reason you have “No Time For Ezine.”
Judith Tramayne-Barth’s site is http://www.agoodread.com which has free books, articles and link pages you’ll love. She also writes excellent “how-to” books.
