How To Start Your Own NewsletterYour Road Plan To Email Marketing Success |
10. Suggest the Change Subtly to Your ReadersSuggest the change subtly to your readers Don’t just drop a bomb on your readers one fine day and announce that from next issue on you would want your readers to pay a subscription fee and if they don’t pay up then you won’t deliver Ezine to them. This is not only rude; it is also a bad move on your part. Your readers need to be motivated in order to pay for your Ezine. Hence, suggest it as delicately as possible to your readers, by giving many reasons that have forced you to take this step. For example, you can’t meet the production costs, the expert fees are too high, the web space provider has hiked the price as your subscription base has increased in past one month and so on. I would recommend that instead of focusing too much on reasons, you should always try to highlight the ‘many’ benefits of your paid ezine. Justify the transition! Don’t scrape down your free Ezine completely You can’t just take away the free Ezine from your existing members. If you want to get your readers to pay for your Ezine, give them something to hold on to. Continue some sections of your Ezine as free sections and charge fees for exclusive interviews, reports, archives and so on. Offer them freebies ‘Free’ is one word that everyone loves. You can provide some incentives to your existing readers by offering them free customized reports, exclusive tips by an expert, free one month membership, discount, even tangible free gifts such as coffee mugs, tee-shirts, posters, etc. You can also collaborate with other websites that offers cash that can be used on the merchandize sold on that particular website, conjoined trial membership to some other website, gift vouchers, and so on. You can also come up with a scheme where in if your existing members become members before a stipulated time, they get heavy discount or another such ‘freebie’. The choice is limitless; you just have to think it through. Revamp your website/Ezine Give your website or Ezine a face-lift and show a glimpse of it to your readers. Present before them what is in store for them if they choose to be paid members. If your readers see that your Ezine and website looks just the same and has no apparent changes done to them, they might not find it promising enough. Hence, before you get ready to launch your Ezine as a paid Ezine make sure that you have redone your website so that it looks and feels updated and informative. When you are a beginner, you have very limited subscribers. So, tasks such as adding new contact info, welcoming new reader, sending him/her regular issues, emailing him/her official notices, answering feedback and responding to reader comments, unsubscribing clients, etc. can be boring if not difficult. It becomes increasingly difficult once you start growing your readers’ base. Thankfully, you can automate this process, which makes life a lot easier for you. If you are using your own email program to send out regular Ezine to your readers, you can tweak the options features in it so that it enables you to send out multiple emails, automatic replies to every email you receive, forwarding emails to respective folders so as to organize the clutter in your inbox and so on. An automatic email responder is a program that can set pre-formatted responses that can be sent automatically once it receives any email. There are simple auto-responders that merely send a specific reply to any email received by it and there are complex auto-responders that require complicated programming and are programmed to do multiple tasks. Complex auto-responders also send specific emails at regular intervals in response to that one email it receives. The following are the uses of auto-responders: You can use it to send out information about your Ezine and how to sign up to receive regular copies of your Ezine. You can send out official notices or announcements about changes in your Ezine, a preview of the next issue, if you are planning on publishing a special article on some topic or an exclusive interview of an expert and so on. This program can be used to send out replies to user feedback. For example, the standard ‘thanks for sending your valuable feedback’. Later you can personally send out responses to specific comments or queries. You can send out automatic ‘thank you and goodbye’ messages to the readers who are choosing to unsubscribe. You can also send out sample issues to new and potential subscribers You can distribute news and notifications of archives on your website. You can also send promotional offers using this program. This program can help you distribute your advertising rate information and other media related info that can bring about more business for your Ezine. How can you go about signing for auto-responders? The following are the basic steps that cover this process: Your first step is to sign up for an auto-responding service. There are various web-hosting services that also offer this service as a part of the package. However, if you are to explicitly choose for this type of service, then it is a good idea to select it. One advantage of this is that since you have the same domain name for your website and for your auto-responder owing to the common web-space provider, there will be apparent consistency and your auto-replies will look more professional. However, if your web-hosting service does not provide this additional service, then you can sign up for auto-responders through various commercial websites that are on the Internet. Most of these services are free, while others charge a small fee. Secondly, choose a simple and easy to remember name for your auto-responding service. You can also choose different names that target different types of emails that you receive. For example, your Ezine is ‘All about Mexico’; for new subscribers you can have ‘welcome@allaboutmexico.com’, for unsubscribe requests, you have ‘goodbye@allaboutmexico.com’, for news and notices you have ‘news@allaboutmexico.com’ and so on. Always choose short and descriptive names. Next, decide upon the text you are planning to use in your auto-responder messages. Choose appropriate messages for appropriate responses. Now, configure the auto-responder so that it fits in your requirement. Choose how often you want the auto-responder to send messages. You can also select if you want each copy of the message forwarded to you. You can also choose if you want only specific messages forwarded to you, for example every feedback message received by your auto-responder or every complaint received by it should be forwarded to you on your email address specified by you. Lastly, test the auto-responder to make sure that it is fully functional and you can put it into practice. Send test emails to each address you have created using auto-responder and check the replies you receive. See to it that you have not received garbled text or there are no missing words or data in your reply. Check how long it takes for you to receive the automatic message; it should not take more than a few minutes. Check the message format and if you have provided any links in the message, see if they are functioning properly or not. Making Money from Selling Advertising Space If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and deliver the papers to their readers. In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a daily basis. And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher appoints agents at every part of the covered territory. So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund the operations. The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on the paper’s high readership. On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter: simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers! If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad. In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities. We discussed paid ezines as one way to generate an income from your campaign. One of the most popular ways of generating income with Ezines, however, is through advertisements. If you are a reputed and established Ezine publisher with millions of readers, chances are that the advertisers will come running after you, trying to push you to publish their ads in your Ezine. However, that is when you are an expert Ezine publisher and have spent your time and effort in building your Ezine to the state where it is today. Let’s talk about how to deal with selling ad space in your Ezine when you are just starting out in the Ezine publishing sector. The number one thing to keep in mind is that the amount of money you charge per advertisement depends on the kind of publication you have. If you have an Ezine catering to a niche market, going out only to a specific group of readers, who are focused and who know what they want, you might want to charge higher for the ads you publish in your Ezine. This is because your advertisers know that their ads are going to reach the right strata of consumers and the people who will read their ads are actually potential purchasers of their products. Similarly, if your Ezine is about a common market or provides information that reaches a wide variety of people, like news stories, etc., then you might want to charge less per ad. This is done as the competition is too high in the field that you are and there are many Ezine publications dealing with the same product as you are dealing. For that reason, you might want to start with charging less per ad. However, there are no fixed rules on how you should charge for the ads that are published in your Ezine. You have to determine the worth of your Ezine, as in how valuable it is to your readers. Will they miss your Ezine if you stop publishing? Do they enjoy reading every issue that you publish? When you determine the importance of your Ezine in the lives of your readers, you can determine the value of ads you want to publish in your Ezine. Simply said, the more popular your Ezine is, the higher revenue can be earned through selling ad space in your Ezine. Another thing you need to consider is the frequency of your publication, that is do you publish weekly, biweekly, monthly and so on. If you publish a weekly Ezine, your advertisers are divided into four slots per month; that is they can get their published as often as four times a month if they want. This does not mean that the value of their advertising is decreased as they are published more often, it actually means that the more active their ads are, the higher chances they have of getting their ads noticed by readers. Do not fall in the trap of providing as many as ads as you can in your Ezine just so that you can earn more advertising revenue. It is true that you might earn more revenue from your advertisers, but you will fall down in the eyes of your readers, as they will not appreciate getting bombarded with so many ads. No one likes having to wade through plenty of advertisements in order to actually find the information they want. It is exasperating and frustrating, and they might decide to unsubscribe rather having to go through this ordeal. A typical Ezine ad should be approximately 6 lines in length, 65 characters per line and it should have an accompanying URL linking to the advertiser’s website or have the email address specified by the advertiser. You can also have ads as long as 8 lines and you can charge more for every line you add. The longer the ad is, the better the promotion for the advertiser. Subsequently, you can charge more for that. You don’t want to run ads and simply hope to get your readers to click on them when you just start out. Wait till you get a fairly decent number of subscribers, before you can expect to get good response rates. Till that point, you can run your own ads or public service advertisements in your Ezine. Make sure that you run at least a couple of these ‘not for profit’ ads, so that when you do decide to run ads for profit, you do not take your readers by surprise. If your readers are used to see an ads-free Ezine, they are not going to like the idea of seeing ads suddenly. So, do keep this point in mind when deciding your advertising strategy. As far as advertisers are concerned, if you want to please them, get good response rates for them. That is the fundamental rule for having a congenial relationship with your advertisers. If they like the response rate that their ads are generating, they are likely to place repeat ads in your Ezine. If that is the case, you can be assured of the advertising revenue that you will generate as your repeat customers are going to give you unfailing business. The key here is how to strategically place your ads so that your readers notice them and are motivated to click on the ads and generate potential income for your advertisers. You can place the ads in the ‘most read’ or ‘most popular’ section of your Ezine. Doing reader survey and getting feedback from them can find this out. That way you can determine the most read section of your Ezine and place the ads in or around that section which can draw potential customers for your advertisers. Another good strategy is to place ads right at the top of your Ezine, just where it has begun or right near the end of it. Your readers are more likely to click ads before the content has begun or after the reading content has ended. They will not be bothered by unsightly ads that spring on them while they are reading an interesting section or article in your Ezine. And they will actually have the time to read the ads and possibly click on them once they are done with the reading or have not yet started reading your Ezine. You have to strategically place ads in your Ezine and not just scatter them randomly in your Ezine. This policy of yours will be significant in deciding whether your advertisers will go to you or your competitors for placing their ads. I have provided a recommended ezine template, including suggested ad locations in the “resources” section at the end of this eBook. Mailing List for Affiliate Marketers If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list. Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list. Granted, that most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not making money from affiliate programs, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods. While having your own mailing list is, by a long mile, not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive. This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable. In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.
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Browse Site3. Invite Guest Writers to Write in Your Ezine 5. Free Resources on Writing Skills 6. Write Attractive Descriptions 8. Free Hosts – a Definite No No 10. Suggest the Change Subtly to Your Readers 11. Creating a Comprehensive Online Media Kit 13. Always Look for Opt in Ezines 14. Auto Responder Improvements |
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