In order to have a successful ezine, you need a great layout, original content, and of course advertisers. No matter what else you have, it’s pretty difficult to get there without any income. That’s why finding people and products to advertise in your ezine are so important.
Before you get started looking for advertisers, you’ll need to figure out exactly how much space you have to advertise in and how much you’ll charge. Space depends on the layout of your ezine. It’s important not to overwhelm the reader with so much advertising that you leave out content, but you also need to have enough to pay to produce the magazine.
You may be tempted to make up for lack of space with charging a lot for your advertising, but you may not be able to sell the space you have that way. Whatever you choose to charge for advertising space, make sure you can back it up. You’re trying to convince someone to spend their money; they need some sort of proof that it will be worth it. You need to be able to back up your sales pitch with numbers and results, not meaningless guarantees.
When putting your ezine together, you need to have an idea of who your target audience will be. This audience is your jumping-off point for who you want to advertise in your ezine. Once you know your market, do some research. You can do this in the library by reading marketing journals, or you can go online and look at web pages, ezines, message boards, and anything else that has the same audience. This will give you a good idea of what types of companies you’re looking for.
Once you find specific areas you want to target, pick up your phone and start calling. This is going to take a lot of time, finesse, and a whole lot of persistence. If you have the resources to hire someone to do this for you, it would probably be worth the price, especially if they have experience in the area.
So, you’ve put out the call and have loads of advertisers coming in with offers. Now you just pick the most profitable ones and go with it, right? Not quite. Having a quality ezine means not only offering quality content, but also offering quality products advertised. If someone buys something advertised from your ezine and receives a substandard product, that’s not only going to reflect poorly on the seller, it’s going to reflect poorly on you as well. By the same means, if they find a quality product, they’re not only going to recommend that product, but also your ezine to their friends and associates.
Before you advertise something, take time to sample and review their product if possible. Do some research into their company. Does it really agree with the image you’re trying to promote on your ezine? If not, you might consider looking elsewhere.
While you might want to be picky, in the beginning you might have to make some compromises. While keeping up standards is great, you still need to make money to keep your business afloat.
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