Publishing Your Own eZine – the Pros and cons

There are several advantages publishing your own eZine can offer to you. Thus if the pros appeal to you, then publishing your own paperless newsletter can be ideal for you.

The most obvious reason publishing an eZine can be the most ideal business to you is that it is so easy to start that any individual can do. There is no need to invest in starting a brick and mortar business or even staff and heavy machines for that matter.

In fact, you can do this from the comfort of your home as the most important thing you will need is an auto responder equipped with broadcast feature. Auto responders such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com are highly recommended when it comes to publishing your own eZine.

In spite of the low start up cost and monthly fees, you can make money from several profit centers within the spaces of your eZine issues. You can make money from selling advertising space, just to name one.

Most importantly, you get to build your own personal media and spread your marketing influence, making you more valuable to product and service owners thus do not be surprised if you receive Joint Venture proposals every so often.

Given some of the best reasons in the world of Internet Marketing, publishing your own periodical eZine can one of the best money vehicles you will ever acquire or even build.

As with any other types of businesses, publishing your own online newsletter has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offers.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One obvious challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer and that you run out of ideas every so often that your publishing schedule is threatening you.

A way of taking care of this problem is to create your content in advance. You can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/ or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content, provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the article has republishing rights conveyed.

However while publishing to a blog is not seen as the same as an ezine I would encourage and beginner to consider it. Emails get blocked all too frequently so putting your content in a blog with a link to the post within the email encourages people to take a look and cycles visitors around your blog – so long as you keep up with regular updates.

This cuts down excessive words within email -just place an intro with a link to your post. This also should keep down the probability of your message triggering spam filtering. Now your only problem is to get people reading those emails…

If you are trying to sell something on the Internet, pricing your services/ products would be the single most important decision you will take. Since, the Internet provides thousands of alternatives to the customers, you need to be at par with the competition. The prices that you quite will determine how long you can stay in the market.

You need to acquire a clear cut idea about pricing. To what extent can you push it? How often do you need to review the prices? A lot would depend on how you handle this stage of business.
You have to pinpoint a consumer group to begin with and then estimate how much they would be willing to pay for your services or products.

Different people use different techniques to set the prices of their products. Some of them have a scientific basis and some do not.

Cost is defined as the sum total of the expenses that you incur when making a product. Expenses include cost of raw material, machinery, packaging, delivery etc. Price is amount customers have to pay for per unit of you product /service.

For you to make a profit, the price should be more than the cost. Your prices should be consistently above the cost if you are planning to run your company for a long time, except in special cases.

Sometimes you can lower the prices, to gain entry into a market for example. Starting with prices which are lower than your competitors would make people notice you. And once you collect a decent number of customers you can gradually increase prices!

How much would customers pay for your services is directly proportional to significant and valuable they think your product is. Of course your marketing strategies and reputation in the market will play a significant role in this regard.

Between these two numbers, your cost and the price your customers are willing to pay for your product lies your ideal price. If your price is a little lower than what your customers are willing to pay for your services, it would definitely work in your favor in the long run.

If your price is higher that what is fair in the eyes of the customer you would end up losing your appeal and market and gradually your viability. 
 
They look to getting the most out of the least money spent that is why pricing your products correctly goes a long way in ensuring that you keep getting customers and make profits. But that necessarily does not mean that you can only woo your customers by reducing prices, as this can often lead to losses.

But more than price, it is the value of the product that determines its price in the eyes of the customer.

Before starting a small business first understand the need of the target market and then try to provide a suitable solution.

These 7 steps are to be used by entrepreneurs who want to start a new venture or create a marketing plan for an existing successful set up. Most people talk about the greatness of their products or services. Instead you should regularly educate the target market and build a relationship of trust and credibility.

“Think marketing” is the mindset to be developed for your products and services. You have to market constantly. Do not fall for stop and go marketing. Some small businessmen start marketing during down seasons only.

Having a successful marketing plan is essential for the venture. Profits and growth are directly proportional to effective marketing.

If you are thinking where to start this 7 step outline will help you to understand the market and business. 

Let’s answer the following questions: 

1.Who— Who is your target market? Who is your ideal client? What is the research to be done for finding out more about the target market?

2.What— What does your ideal client want? What does your product and services do for them? What problems of your customer are solved by your product? What solutions does your client require? What is your unique selling proprosition or USP that makes you unique? What are industry trends? What will make your client react? What are you selling? What is your brand of product and services? What would be the price?

3.Where— Where is your ideal client? Geographically where are they located? Where will you position yourself for their easy reach? Where will they get you marketing messages from? Will you go through personal conversations, hold seminars or write a blog, newsletter or article?

4.When— How frequent will you be with your marketing messages? When are your clients most likely to purchase?

5.Why— Why are you in business? Why will customers come to you? Why should they not go to your competitors and choose your products?

6.How— How does your customer purchase? How will you reach out to potential clienteles? How are you going to communicate your marketing strategies? How will you provide information to your customers to make their buying decision?

7.Marketing mindset— Try to master a marketing mindset and your small business will move towards profits and success.

Before you launch your first advertisement or campaign, your first email, you need to find answers to two very important queries. Without ad tracking your ad budget is going to go up in smoke!

Who is your target market?

What makes them buy or sign up with any organization?

The fastest as well as least expensive method for you to find out your answer to these questions is through testing and tracking.

Testing

The intention behind testing is to increase the rate of response to your campaign or offer. For example, you could compose a sales letter and try out different headers for the advertisement. Often a good header can make all the impact that is needed.

Many marketers have had their sales raised by almost 200% just because they altered their headlines. Even if your product yields steady and profitable sales, you should always test and experiment. A slight change can alter your measures from steady to overflowing!

Tracking

You must always keep a record of whatever you do in your business, not only of your profit and expenses, but also your promotional and publicity campaigns.

Let us presume you are conducting the campaign for an E-zine advertisement. The most important information that you need to keep track of are:

Where you placed the campaign including the name of the E-zine and the date the campaign was launched

How many subscribers the E-zine has

Your expenses

The number of responses the advertisement brought— once you divide this into your cost you will know how much you paid for each reaction.

The number of sign ups you have achieved as a result of your efforts

Name, phone number and email address for the E-zine

The URL of the advertisement you utilized. This terribly important if you promote more than one business

Headlines used in the advertisement
 
You could also keep trace of other more significant details depending on how thorough you are willing to be. The main thing is to study the numbers. Some ads may invoke great interest but if the interest does not extend to the product and no one buys it, then your profit is zero.

Other ads may produce a handful of click-throughs but they normally generate more sign ups. It is evident that the second ad is the better one.

You may also use other forms of advertising, for example a pay per click program, and it is absolutely essential that you keep an eye on those numbers at all times. Develop a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel or best, write it down.

Every cent you need to spend on the marketing should be tracked continuously so that you don’t waste precious funds on profitless issues.

Also, if you have prospective clients, make sure you keep in touch. They might not be aware of your address. You must absolutely maintain tracks for all your prospects.

Do not undervalue the power of testing and tracking. If you follow these steps, you will be aware at all times of where and when you’re making money online.

Never Do Business without a Tracking System.

If you are serious about wanting to promote your website on the Internet, then going via forums available is the best option for you. These forums are easy to join and require no additional monetary deposit to be a member. Moreover, being a storehouse of information and accessible to anyone, these forums are an ideal way to go about advertising your web page.

These serve as social networking centers, where topics are discussed and information exchanged. Hence if one can search out a forum where discussions held are relevant to ones own product or field, then his chances of getting his website noticed and popularized would be more. So that should be the first step towards establishing your identity on the Internet.

But remember as it is with all kinds of marketing…do not over do anything in your enthusiasm. It is best to act calm and not seem like you are desperate to market your product. Such over eagerness is often the most sure shot way of offending customer sensibility, leading to possible bans against your website with the allegation of spamming.

It is therefore better to leave frequent yet understated messages informing about what’s on offer or rather go to forums, which have questions put up regarding matters close to your product and then respond to them. So go and read the threads posted on the forum, figure out how best you can respond to queries and do that. I will continue with this theme again in another post with these particular marketing strategies.

When you think in terms of low ticket products or services, you are talking about items that usually carry no more than a $27.00 price tag. The most common average range for a low ticket item would be in the $5.00 to $9.95 range.

Of course, in order for those low ticket items to keep a steady flow of basic revenue, there is the need to promote your offerings and entice new clients to give them a try. Here are a few ideas that may help you promote your low ticket offerings to fresh faces.

Special Reports

Spotlighting the low ticket items that are your biggest sellers to a wide range of customer demographics is a great way to get the attention of prospects.

A special report is going to essentially focus on two things: first, this is a product or service that has is being successfully used by hundreds of thousands of people right this very minute.

Second, this product or service can make a big impact in the quality of your life and work. Once you have it, you will not understand how you ever got along without it.

These types of special report promotions are meant to spotlight all the positive attributes of your offering. You want to talk about the great performance, the low maintenance, and of course the low price.

One thing that can help dress up a special report is charts and relevant graphics. Most people are visual in the way they relate to the world, so using a simple chart to illustrate a point, or inserting some other type of visual that is related to the subject matter will help to enhance and hold the attention of the reader.

The broader the use of your offering in various parts of the business world, the more likely a prospect is to see the need to investigate a little more closely.

Special reports are relatively easy to produce and extremely cost effective to have available. The content can be used in a direct mail piece that can be reproduced cheaply.

The special report can be posted online, with a unique URL that can then be distributed far and wide by both manual and electronic means. The result is an effective promotional tool that has a very lost cost to create and has the potential to yield big returns in a very short time.

Short Audio Sessions

Have you ever listened to those short audio clips that are on many web sites? They often are informative and can spur people to look more closely at a product or service.

Short audio sessions are not anything new. For decades, businesses have employed fifteen-second audio sessions to promote their products while callers were on hold, waiting to speak with a customer service rep.

Theater owners have employed them to get in a plug for concessions that are sold in the theater lobby. Who among us have not heard a short audio session while in the grocery store or in a discount retail store?

Given the history of the success of short audio sessions, it is no wonder that they are also working on the Internet as well.

To a degree, a short audio session makes the sales process via the Internet a little more personal, as the prospect hears a human voice. That alone makes the session an appealing way to reach a certain part of the populace.

Of course, a successful short audio session is going to be to the point and informative. It will give the prospect enough to ensure he or she will progress to the next level and seriously consider the offering, rather than simply scanning some text and moving on to another web site.

Settle on the subject for the session, make is crisp, clear, and easy to understand. Then shut up before you get too wordy.

Trial Membership Offers

Everybody wants to get a bargain, but there are those that will sit on the fence forever before making a decision. A trial membership offer can be just what you need to get them to commit.

There are several things that are very attractive to a prospect. Among them are:

There is no long-term commitment. If you don’t like what you see during the trial period, simply move on.

I don’t have to pay full price. Most trial offers will be at a discount, so very little revenue is invested.

The trial offer gives me the chance to test drive and show the offering to other people who would be using it. I can find out up front if they see any advantages to using this new offering

Making Your Headlines urgent

The home page of any site is the key web page, especially if it is where you want a person to take some action, such as buying or subscribing to something.

So, one of the great ways of building momentum, and also increasing the number of people who act on this, is by creating some urgency. There are many different ways in which this urgency can be created, and below are just a few ways to persuasive headlines:

1.Provide them with an offer for a limited period of time.

2.Offer limited supplies of a particular product.

3.Offer them seasonal specials.

4.Why not offer them a free gift when they subscribe or pay for a particular item.

5.Daily deals – this is a great way of bringing in customers.

However, just a word of caution when using these types of tactics: It is important that you are both credible and honest with the visitors to your site. So if you are saying that an offer expires on a particular date or at a particular time, then make sure that it does.

But there are other ways in which you can imply urgency on your site. You could show a page with the prices, and that they are the best prices to be found on the web as at that time. With this method you are not providing a time limit or a limit on how much of the product is available. But by using a time stamp, you are also implying that the prices on these products could increase at any time.

The whole idea of this method is so that you get people moving. So those who would normally be sitting on the fence will actually do something and make that all important purchase.

Headlines: How To Write Them

So just how you go about writing a great headline? It’s quite simple really. What you need to do is spend less time stressing about how to write your headline, and more time on figuring out what it should say.

So just how do you know what to say ?

It is more important that you focus your mind on the desires and wants of your target audience, rather than on either the product or service that you are trying to sell.

Why use hundreds of words when 1 or 2 will suffice? It should also be engaging, interesting so that it excites those that come to your site. It should actually make them sit up and say “yes” to what you are offering.

Have you ever asked yourself how you can we make your advertising or online advertising as effective as possible.

The answer is to test. Test again. And again.

If ad “A” receives a two percent response rate, and ad “B” receives three percent, then we can deduce that ad “B” will continue to outperform ad “A” on a larger scale.

Testing takes time, however, and can be expensive if not kept in check. Therefore, it’s ideal to start with some proven tested known ideas and work from there.

For example, if testing has shown for decades or more that targeted advertising significantly outperforms untargeted advertising (and it does), then we can start with that assumption and go from there.

If we know based on test results that crafting an ad that speaks directly to an individual performs better than addressing the masses (again, it does), then it makes little sense to start testing with the assumption that it does not. This is common sense.

So it stands to reason that knowing some basic rules or techniques about writing effective copywriting is in order. Test results will always trump everything, but it’s better to have a starting point before you test.

I can’t emphasize enough that when using these techniques, you should always test them before rolling out a large paid campaign.

Sometimes a little tweak here or there is all that is needed to increase response rates dramatically.

Focus on Them, Not You.

When a prospect reads your email ad, letter, brochure, etc., the one thing he will be wondering from the start is: “what’s in it for me?”

And if your copy doesn’t tell him, it’ll land in the trash faster than he can read the headline or lead.

A lot of advertisers make this mistake. They focus on them as a company. How long they’ve been in business, who their biggest customers are, how they’ve spent ten years of research and millions of dollars on developing this product.

Who cares is the thought..

Actually, those points are important. But they should be expressed in a way that matters to your potential customer. Remember, once he’s thrown it in the garbage, the sale is lost!

Do you suffer online biz overload ??

Are you obsessed with the so called web 2.0 but do not actually do anything constructive with it ?

It is more confusing than ever before working out this internet business and online marketing thing. However many people listen to this audio or watch that online video and do another dozen things related – all at the same time.

This stops you from moving forward, with a plan of action. unless your web presence is strictly for fun or family related, the main thing you should be focusing on is….

SALES or some kind of revenue. At the end of the day commerce has costs, and if it comes out of your pocket there is a limit to what most people will pay in the current economic environment.

Without direction, a plan and application, where are you heading then if sales are not important ? It is a great web world out there but if you want to earn then you need to stay focussed on that goal and take actions that bring this about. It is easy to be distracted by facebook and all the others.

 If you have an online business then you must have heard about best affiliate marketing programs. For those who don’t know what it is, affiliate marketing simply means promoting other people’s goods or services with the help of your website.

This is done by posting the affiliate links of the merchant sites on your website and hoping that, those visitors who come by to explore your website, click on these links that transports them to the merchant’s home page. If they make final purchases of goods or services from these sellers, you get to keep a commission on the cost.

But how to attract so much web traffic?

One of the best ways of doing this is by article marketing.
And what exactly is article marketing? Well, you write articles about the goods that you are promoting; sprinkle them with a handful of backlinks and submit them with various article directories.

In case the directory does not approve of backlinks, you can simply provide your website address. These directories put up your article/articles, as search engine results when someone looks up the requisite keywords. If the web traffic finds your article to be useful and interesting, they travel straight back to your website and from there, to the merchant sites.

It is not only an easy way of promoting your affiliate links, it also a relatively cheap one.  As such knowing more about article marketing and the various types of articles is indispensable if you want to seriously take up affiliate marketing. This article is an earnest attempt to help you in this venture.

A common problem that writers face when they need to write a lot of pieces is how to come up with newer and fresher content. The best way is to brainstorm and come up with novel ideas. But since that is an extremely tiring exercise I can add a few suggestions in another post to avoid the so called writers’ block.