Everything You Need To Know About Ezines

What exactly is an ezine and why does your business need one?

Ezines are everywhere – you may even be a subscriber yourself. But for those concerned with internet marketing, the humble ezine offers huge opportunities for business promotion. Over the past few years ezines have become more and more interactive, and are no longer merely web-based versions of print magazines. They offer targeted information in a dynamic, easily digestible format, and hundreds of new ezines are appearing every week.

So how can an ezine benefit your business? Opt-in ezines and e-newsletters are a legitimate way to provide potential clients with sales information. All you have to do is write an article for an ezine – or have someone write it for you if you don’t have the time or the right skills – and include links to your product or service. Submit the article to popular directories for inclusion, and wait for the enquiries to flood in.

Sound too good to be true? Think again. Your market is both large and targeted. It’s not uncommon for a popular and established ezine to have over a million subscribers – these are people who have chosen to receive it. Targeted because ezines cover specific topics, from health to motorsport, from accounting to woodwork – whatever your business there is an ezine out there to match it. Because people have opted to receive information about a topic that interests them, they are more responsive to the recommended products or sponsored adverts that come with the ezine.

Ezine magnates

Certain ezine publications are hugely profitable for their owners. With a mailing list of only 10,000 subscribers an ezine publisher could make as much as $5000 from one mailing. How? Through affiliate marketing; the process where one receives a small percentage of an affiliate’s sale for sending the customers to them.

Producing your own in-house ezine

This would probably start life as a newsletter, emailed to clients and offered free to visitors of your website. By asking potential customers to opt-in to a newsletter you fulfil two objectives:
1 - you capture their name and email address, and 2 – you stay in their consciousness whether they bought from you or not.
In time, as your mailing list grows, your newsletter can also grow into a fully-fledged ezine, with articles sourced from all over the web, and targeted marketing for your opted-in subscribers.

What is the difference between an ezine and an e-newsletter? An ezine is usually web-based, with its own site and associated newsletter for subscribers. Newsletters are shorter and are emailed to subscribers usually weekly.

Getting prospects to opt in

Your newsletter or ezine needs to contain information that will be really useful and interesting. Keep news-style items current and up-to-date and don’t indulge in any blatant advertising or sales-speak. Make your ezine arrival an event your readers look forward to in its own right – when they consider you an authority they will buy from you without having to be coerced. Articles for ezines and newsletters can be sourced free from ezine directories (see below) – but bear in mind the articles will have links to the author’s products or services so make sure they don’t conflict with your interests.

It’s a good idea to let your subscribers know that their information is safe with you by including the following text on the opt-in page:
We will NEVER sell or give away your e-mail address or phone number to anyone. We will always respect your privacy.

This way they will be able to give you their email details with confidence. It is also good practice to give subscribers an easy way to un-subscribe should they choose, usually with a link at the bottom of each newsletter.

Happy zine-ing!

Resources

For professional help writing your ezine or newsletter contact TaskersWebcopy


Ezine directories
www.ezinearticles.com
www.ezine-dir.com
www.bestezines.com


Did you know? The term ezine is a contraction of electronic magazine.

The Future Of Ghostwriting

While the Internet has opened up many new opportunities for ghostwriters, not all of them are welcome. Online agencies like Get A Freelancer and Elance list hundreds of projects under the heading ‘Ghostwriting’, but many of these projects are actually ‘bundles’ of mini-articles for submission to article directories and blogs.

Even sophisticated surfers may not be aware of the amount of marketing that goes into virtually every aspect of the Internet today. Few blogs are written by their named authors. Many forum posts are farmed out to freelancers. And almost all of this content has an ulterior motive – to nudge, coerce or tempt the reader into a loop of viral marketing.

What does this have to do with writers in general and ghostwriters in particular? Surely the increase in the scope and variety of freelance writing work is a good thing? Not necessarily. Not when projects are advertised with budgets as low as $30 for 30 articles, and the writers who win these projects often cut and paste content from elsewhere on the web – content that already falls far short of a professional standard.

While ghostwriting is being expanded to include articles, blogs, ebooks and web content, as well as traditional printed media, the quality of the writing is diminishing – and professional writers will find it increasingly hard to complete with teams of writers working in countries where $30 is a week’s salary.

Find Work As A Writer Now!

There is a virtually untapped market out there that is ripe for writers with our skills and experience. Writing web-articles and content is a huge business, with sites like GetAFreelancer.com, Elance.com and Guru.com providing lists of projects to bid on.

It works like this - visit the site and create your profile. Most of the sites are free to join, you may get a limited number of bids for the basic membership but this is fine to start with. Then browse the projects - you will be amazed at the amount of work that is out there. Check out how other providers word their bids first, then give it a go. I won a project to write 30 short articles within days of joining GetAFreelancer, and this has led on to more work, including ghostwriting an ebook.

A word of warning though - lots of the buyers are looking for content very cheaply, and there are many providers who are happy to work for these small sums. Look out for the jobs where perfect English is required, and include samples to give you a fighting chance. Good luck!

The Radio Play's The Thing

You'll notice quite a few new links appearing under the Writing Resource section: these are some great new sites I've discovered recently during one of my Internet trawls.

First off is the Jacqui Bennett Writers' Bureau. This is a regularly updated site with loads of information for new writers, competitions and links to agents. There are lots of sites out there that claim to offer this sort of thing and, as you know, not all of them live up to it. Jacqui's site does, and she also offers literary critiques at a reasonable rate. Have a look.

Wrekin Writers was a site I came across while looking for competitions. They've just launched their short story comp for this year and there is a really helpful link to previous winners to get you in the mood - and to made you feel quite humble; the quality is really good.

I have always been a fan of Radio 4, and had a stab (unsuccessfully) at writing a radio play many moons ago. I've decided to give it another go now I'm that bit older and wiser and more experienced (!), and I've added links to pages at the BBC I found useful. Channel 4 radio (have you ever heard of them - I hadn't) are running a 'Radio Play's The Thing' competition, along similar lines to last year's The Play's The Thing and I just might think about entering...

Writing A Synopsis

Check out this fantastic article on how to write a synopsis. I found it on the writing world website and it really helped when I needed to write a one page synopsis for the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook novel writing competition. There is a great search engine on the site and loads of articles on all sorts of topics, as well as lots of other useful info for aspiring writers like us.

Good luck with your synopsis...