Marketing Your Ezine

Ezine Ads & Ad Swaps

Ok, now that you've tried out all the "easy" methods of marketing your ezine, we'll discuss the ones that involve a little more effort on your part. One such method is advertising on ezines.

Advertising on Ezines - Why?

For one, the person who subscribes to and reads an ezine, any ezine, is a potential subscriber to your's. He or she is pre-selected to fit a required profile.

Readers of any ezine are potential subscribers to your's.

• They have an email account.
• They use it to subscribe to ezines.
• And they read those ezines - otherwise how would they have read your ad?!

Ezine advertising is an interesting proposition for other reasons too. An ezine ad is inexpensive, simple and instant. It can be directed at a specific target audience (based on interests, geographic location, or other demographics). It can be evaluated by tracking response rates.

How to place an ezine ad?

With the explosive growth of ezines on the internet today, it is a time-consuming and difficult task to find the ezines matching your target audience, get details of placing an ad in it, and actually execute the ad buy.

The beauty of the internet, however, has been the innovativeness that it has spawned. Sensing the need for such information, some enterprising businesses set about the task of gathering it and making it available to ezine publishers. For a nominal fee, publishers have instant access to a database of ezines categorized by subject, and can instantly get details about placing an ad in those publications.

One of the best such services I've come across is Ruth Townsend's Lifestyle Publishing lifestylespub.com. There are many other free sites too which list ezines, along with advertising information. But many of them are outdated, or incomplete. Wading through the defunct or incorrect contact details is a task that would daunt the most tough-hearted. So unless you have time to waste, don't go this route. 

How to write your ad and submit it?

Most ezines have specifications about ads they run. Most adhere to the 64 character-per-line standard, and offer ads of 3 to 10 lines. So your ad should fit this format to avoid being edited or modified by the ezine publisher.

Ezine ads are quick, inexpensive, targeted and can be tracked.

I won't go into details of writing good ad copy. There are many excellent website articles that deal with exactly this topic.

The submission process in most ezines is by email or by filling up a website form. Payment for the ad is often accepted by online credit card transaction on a secure server, or other methods including online checks, conventional bank checks, order by fax, phone and others. In most cases, you can have the ad submitted, payment processed and your ad run in the ezine within a few days!

Some tips about ezine ad placement you may keep in mind are:

• Positioning affects response rate. An ad at or very near the beginning of an ezine has the maximum impact on readers. Because they have high response rates, though, these are the ads priced highest!

• Avoid burying your ad among many others. Some ezines look like a collection of ads rather than valuable content. Don't place your ad among 10 or 20 others - most readers will simply skip ALL!

• Identify the regular advertisers on a specific ezine. Write to them asking about the kind of response rate they got from their ads. This will help you decide whether or not to run your ad in that ezine.

• Try and negotiate a discount for buying multiple ads over a period of time. Repeated exposure of your ad to the same audience will improve response rate.

• Write your ad with the audience in mind. Tailor it for each ezine to fit the readership's interests.

• Track response rates carefully. Make changes in your ad copy and compare the "pull" each change generates.

What is an Ezine Ad Swap?

Ezine Ad Swaps are an economical way to get your ad into other ezines without having to pay for it! It involves exchanging ads for your ezine or website with another ezine - they run your ad, you run theirs.

Swap ads with ezines similar to yours in subject matter and size.

Why should you pay for ezine ads then, instead of just swapping ads? So if there's a method to run your announcement in an ezine without paying for it, why didn't I discuss it first? Well, essentially because there are certain constraints on doing an ezine ad swap.

• You need to run their ad on your ezine. This alone puts a limit on the number of ezines you can swap ads with per issue. If you fix up ad swaps with 20 other ezines, you'll end up running 20 ads on YOUR ezine! Buying this ad space instead doesn't have this limitation.

• Not all ezines accept swaps. An ad swap is a great idea for a new ezine just starting out. But most newsletters with a large circulation already have enough paying advertisers to ignore ad swap offers.

• For an ad swap to be mutually beneficial, both should have a similar ezine circulation. It simply doesn't make sense to swap ads with an ezine that goes out to 500 people, when your's has almost 7000 subscribers! One way to work around this is to run ads repeatedly on smaller ezines, so that the total number of exposures to the ad is equal.

But when you understand these limitations, ad swaps are one of the best ways to grow your readership. You should plan on arranging an ad swap atleast once or twice a month to take advantage of this avenue of getting new subscribers.

How do I arrange an ad swap?

Just a few months back, ad swaps were a tedious process. You had to hunt for ezines to swap with, contact the publisher by email and wait for the reply - which could take as long as many weeks.

Recently, things have changed dramatically. Directories and registries have cropped up which list ezines willing to swap ads with others like them. Finding a suitable newsletter to partner with is now just a mouse-click away!

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