Most Common Ezine Publishing Mistakes
10 Most Common Ezine Publishing Mistakes That You Can Avoid
Introduction
Publishing an Ezine is a lucrative business. More and more people are jumping on the Ezine publishing band wagon. Anyone can get an auto responder and compile their own newsletters and e-courses to their subscribers at the cost of pennies. It is no surprise that Ezines are the choice of medium for list building and selling ad spaces.
However, there are a lot of mistakes made by newbies. Mistakes such as unsolicited emailing and not focusing on their core business are common mistakes committed daily. These must be addressed so that the profits are not wasted.
Therefore, I’ve written this guide on how to overcome these common mistakes.
Sending Ezines from your Yahoo or Gmail
Part of the temptation for newbies is to collect a group of emails and start mailing out from their own personal emails.
At first this may seem quite harmless when you have about 10-20 people in your list, but once your subscriber count exceeds 50 people, you are going to have a very big problem on your hand.
Firstly, you will have to handle people who newly sign up on your list manually. People who wish to unsubscribe needs to be manually removed as well – causing you massive administration problems.
The worst thing is most Internet service providers refuse to let you send bulk emails to many people at once. Of course, they set their own limits so that spammers won’t prey on the unsuspecting through their networks.
If you are not careful, you might even lose your subscriber list as well because your entire list sits within your computer’s hard drive. If you do not backup your computer
You might wind up losing hundreds or thousands of subscribers that you spent all those time and sleepless nights building them.
Don’t be a fool – make sure you get a good and reliable auto responder to handle all the work for you.
Signing up people without getting them to opt-in
One of the biggest newbie mistakes when it comes to Ezines is signing up on other mailing lists without their permission. You think just because they are on one of my list, it automatically gives me permission to sign them up on some other list.
Trust me – Unsolicited signups is a big no-no on the Net, and will get you in deep trouble! In the worst cast scenarios, you will be accused of spamming and you will get your IP blacklisted on the ISPs.
You must do things the proper way. When you want to build your list or invite people to subscribe, make sure you mail them a proper invitation form (or landing page) and when they manually opt in again, then you will have their permission. Bear in mind that you must once again ‘convince’ them why they should opt-in to your new list and never ever take any shortcuts.
Not giving good or useful content
Some publishers are so obsessed with getting traffic and selling things that all they ever do in their Ezines is sell products and talk all about themselves. Use their Ezines to boast about how great they are and how good their JV partners are doing to the point that they bore their subscribers to death.
Another common problem is that the E-zine publishers load their Ezines with so many ads that it disrupts the reading pleasure of their readers.
How would you like it if you were to buy the latest computer gadget magazine (if you are a guy) or the latest beauty magazine (for women) and dig through a haystack just to find the CONTENT page? I am sure you will either have a very hard time looking for the page number or you would cancel your subscription.
Content is king. Never diverge from that. But even more important than that – relevant content for your subscribers should be the main deal.
What you must do for your subscribers is to provide useful content roughly 80% of your Ezine and leave the rest for paid ads. It is a healthy balance.
Not focusing on their business.
On the other side of the coin, there are many publishers who talk about everything under the sun by serving up powerful and useful content for their readers but they forget about the most important thing – making MONEY.
Ultimately, publishing an Ezine is about making money. You can’t do it without promoting yourself or your business. In any business, remember that branding is the most important and you have to create that awareness in your Ezine while providing good content at the same time.
Learn to use strategically placed affiliate links so that your prospects don’t feel as though they are being ‘sold to’. Talk about them first, then talk about a solution for them and then finally talk about YOUR solution for them. End everything with a call to action. That way, you will not be wasting traffic from your subscribers.
Publishing whenever they feel like it
Do you know that you should keep in touch with your subscribers as regularly as possible?
There are millions of people on the Internet. If you don’t keep in touch with them, they will most likely forget all about you and your Ezine. Don’t ever let this happen to your business! It is easier to keep an existing customer or subscriber compared to getting a brand new one!
Publishing regularly suggests to your readers that you are an organized and you are able to meet deadlines and commitments.
You must learn to set aside some time for your publishing schedule. A way to accomplish this is to construct something like an E-course in advance. Then publish them everyday or every three days. Use this time to work on another product or come up with content for your Ezine.
Even if you don’t have any special content for your subscribers, try and stay in touch with them as regularly as possible. Even a simple “Hi” followed by a link to another person’s site (preferably an affiliate program) will also do the job just fine!
Neglecting the older archived issues
Part and parcel of the process of E-zine publishing is that you move from one issue to another. As you progress on, you will find that you have many back issues in your hard drive and sometimes, people tend to neglect the past issues as something outdated or useless.
Unless your information is completely obsolete, there are many things you can do with a back issue. You can offer your archived issue as a sample issue to prospective subscribers on your website or your blog.
People do read older issues and follow your journey. You’ll be able to get more of your visitors that are on the “fence” to join your Ezine, giving you a bigger list to market your products to.
Not only that, you will also attract a lot of new people looking to buy advertising space because they can check out your archived issues and check out how your ads worked out until now.
Forgetting about publish your Ezine in RSS
RSS is one of the many ways people use to access your content without having them come directly to your website or your blog. Most of the time, Ezine publishers want their subscribers to subscribe directly through their e-mails or auto responders because they can keep track of the size of their list.
However, neglecting RSS is very bad. Although you can’t cater to every single subscriber’s needs, enabling RSS is a way to get your readership across many different platforms. There are people out there who are lazy and rather read everything through their feeds. Try your best to meet their needs.
Another advantage of publishing on RSS is that you’ll increase your readership and sales by bypassing all the email filters. If your e-mail for your Ezine is titled ‘make money online’ you can be sure the money word would be captured and thrown into the SPAM or BULK folder as fast as you can say the word ‘spam magnet’!
Therefore, you’ll also be able to make your Ezine’s copy more effective because you’ll be able to use all those ‘taboo’ words such as without worrying about your Ezine getting blocked.
Neglecting the ‘subscriber only’ privilege
There is a tendency for people to treat a subscriber just like any other guy on your mailing list or blog readers.
If you asked me, I believe that E-zine subscribers are one of the most important people on your list. They are people who are genuinely interested in your work and spend time reading it. You should pamper them and treat them with care because that is probably where the money is!
Since they usually follow you from the beginning to the end, you should give them a reward. For example, if you are a selling a product (for example WordPress blog themes) and you usually sell them for $17, maybe you can consider giving your loyal subscribers a $7 discount. They will appreciate it and will gladly refer others to subscribe to your list or even – start promoting as your affiliate because they have been given the special treatment.
Neglecting the personal touch
One of the problems of bulk mailing to many people at once is that we forget to be human. Very often, if I’m on the list of my friend who is an active Internet marketer and we happen to correspond on e-mail a lot, I will receive emails from him and e-mails from his auto responder.
One glance of the e-mail and I can tell whether it is personally from him and whether he is sending out to a large group.
If you don’t know how to add the personal touch to your email headlines, you are missing out on a lot of readers (sometimes, those who are your subscribers as well – they could be busy with other things on their mind).
Always talk in a personal tone rather than selling your subscribers products all the time otherwise they will think you are just trying to grab their money.
Never offering any bonuses
Sometimes people forget to offer bonuses to their subscribers. They forget that once in a while, they should offer free gifts to entice them to stay on. You can also use bonuses to entice people to join as a new subscriber as well.
Try writing a free report – about the latest developments and offer them as a bonus. Tell them how much the report is worth by increasing the value your visitors place on your bonus by telling them how much it would be worth if you were to charge for it.
For example:
“I would normally charge $27 for this special report, but I am giving it away free to my loyal subscribers…”
You would increase the perceived value of your bonus and make your subscribers feel pampered at the same time.
Never neglect this powerful method!
Conclusion
There are many mistakes committed by newbies, but the worst mistake that can ever happen is to repeat your mistakes over and over again. Don’t take this for granted. If you keep on committing mistakes, you will lose credibility in the eyes of your subscribers and joint venture partners (even if you are a seasoned Ezine publisher.
Always be vigilant and keep an eye out for blind spots that you may have missed out. Keep on refining your work and you can be sure that online riches will be heading your way.
Good luck!
