E-zines

You will probably by now have come across the internet phenomenon of the "E-Zine", the electronic magazine or on-line newsletter. These are usually sent as text email messages, but are often then archived on the producers web site for some time.

Produce Your Own

Once your mailing list has started to grow, you should be thinking about how you could regularly get your message in front of those potential customers. Obviously there is no point in sending them email every fortnight saying, "come back to the site" - they will soon just un-subscribe themselves.

What you may consider is turning your mailings into an e-zine by including some articles - maybe only 1 or 2 per issue - that are of general interest to your list. The inclusion of "new books" or "this weeks special" in that format is a lot more acceptable - and more likely to be read - than sending them an ad by email.

Write for Others

E-zines exist for every possible subject, and most editors like to send them out every week or so. Many e-zines exist mainly as a vehicle to carry paid advertising, so the editors don't have a lot of time to spend creating articles.

There are exciting promotional possibilities for specialist webmasters who are willing and able to write short (400-500 word) articles and get them placed in relevant e-zines.

This incredibly powerful promotional tool can be very low cost, builds credibility, reputation and traffic - and is still not being exploited by the majority of site owners.

If you are interested in looking into this further, the best resource on the subject is The E-zine Money Machine.

Rick Beneteau has made an art out of writing for e-zines to create amazingly effective low (or no) cost promotions for products he has been affiliated to.

As well as showing you how to write, format, and submit articles in the right way to be successful, you also get access to lists and lists of e-zines that are looking for material.

Free Material for E-Zines

Don't think you can write articles for your own e-zine? Don't worry - there's lots of material out there you can use.

Firstly, sites such as MakingProfit have large searchable databases of articles that have been submitted to be used in any e-zine. The vast majority of them relate to small/home business and internet marketing - so if you're looking for articles on another subject, you could try asking for contributions in newsgroups or other specialist forums.

The downside to using other people's articles of course is that they are usually trying to promote something - and you will be carrying their ad at the bottom of their article. You can still turn this to your advantage by promoting appropriate affiliate links of your own alongside the article - formatted either as editorial or advertising content.

Additionally, you could use the specialist news feeds from MoreOver to give your e-zine real up-to-the-minute content and provide a genuinely useful service.

Automation

Managing e-zine subscriptions and delivery can be very time-consuming - though advertising supported free services like ListBot can help. If you'd like to have more control over the management of your list, then e-zine list management and delivery is just another module that's included in the ROIBot set of marketing tools.

Instead of wrestling with the challenge of producing a new e-zine edition every week, you might consider delivering a sequence of pre-determined emails to each new subscriber.

A series of recipes, top 10 tips, "how to get the best from ...", a training course - there are lots of options.

Why would you want to do this?

Research shows that regular contact is a major factor in getting sales. Apart from increasing the chances of you being in mind at the time a buying decision is made, it helps establish credibility and trust, and is a good example of "give, then take".

But don't try to do this manually - it's a nightmare (bitter experience again =:>). There are several places you can get free autoresponders if you are willing to carry an ad in each message you send. I use GetResponse for several projects because I like their management tools, and the fact that you can personalise your messages - for example by capturing and using the recipients first name.

You can upgrade to the paid version of GetResponse and get rid of the ads, but otherwise the free version has virtually all the functionality of the paid version. Just write your series of messages, decide the timing for the deliveries, and get visitors to send a blank email to yourautoresponder@getresponse.com.

Again, autoresponder functions are built into the ROIbot toolset.