A secret that few people know is that the newsstand price on
most mainstream magazines – Reader's Digest,
Mademoiselle, People, Vogue – is all or nearly all profit for
the magazine publishers. All their expenses are covered by
advertisers, who pay hefty fees to reach the market of the
magazine.
Your little website Ezine won't have the name recognition of
any of these magazines, but you can use some of the same
strategies.
Keep Your Circulation High
The most important element in advertising is the number of
eyeballs you reach. With a high circulation from your ezine,
you can make a profit selling a limited amount of advertising
space to complementary websites (e.g., seed websites when
you're running a landscaping website). You will have to
maintain accurate counts of the number of subscribers, but
once you have an established ezine running regularly to
customers, you can start offering advertising space to your
affiliates and sites that have traded links with you.
The key to keeping circulation high is to consistently offer
content your customers appreciate. If you maintain the
same high quality in your articles, your customers may not
even notice the addition of advertisements.
Finding Advertisers
If you have an ezine serving a targeted market of a
thousand customers or more, you won't have any trouble
finding advertisers. Potential advertisers are your suppliers,
affiliates, webmasters you've exchanged links with, and
business contacts who maintain websites similar but not
competing with your website.
You can also sell space to people who have published a book
attractive to customers in your niche market, and when you
do this, you can even offer to sell the book on your website
as an affiliate.
The one thing you should not do is write articles designed to
sell items for your advertisers, no matter how much they
offer to pay you. Your ezine is designed to support your site,
so of course it's going to rotate around selling things on your
site; however, when you are writing content designed to sell
your advertiser's products, you may be crossing a line your
readers don't like. It's better if you have your advertisers
contribute their own articles, making it pretty clear that they
are also interested in selling their products.
What About Advertising Your Site?
You don't exist in an ezine vacuum; there are hundreds of
thousands of little websites with ezines they send out to
customers who are eager to get them. Some of those ezines
are going to cross into your niche market. These are the
perfect ezines for you to advertise in.
Advertising can take the shape of block advertisements
similar to what you see in the newspaper want-ad section,
or you can offer to run complete articles in the ezine. If you
find someone with a very different subscriber list from you,
you might even suggest trading articles – you write one in
his ezine, and allow him to write one for yours.
No matter how you acquire advertising space in the other
ezine, the most critical thing is that you ensure your website
and contact information is included along with your article.
Other Ideas
Your ezine can be leveraged into other types of advertising
as well. Many large companies spend a fortune on press
releases, gambling that somewhere, one of the newspapers
or periodicals they've sent the release to will publish an
article about their company, giving them free publicity.
You can do something similar, and you might have a much
better chance of placing your article. Instead of sending out
press releases to magazines that cover the same niche
market you're serving, find your best informational article
and send it to the magazine, asking if they'd like to see
some more of your work. For several years now, magazines
have been picking up articles from ezines and running them,
and in a niche market you have a better chance of selling an
article. Yes, selling. You can not only get free publicity, you
can even get paid standard second-rights article rates for
your article. If you do this, read your contract carefully; you
may lose the rights to reuse the article, or even to archive it
on your site, if you're not careful about what publication
rights you're selling. If you have any questions, ask the
magazine editor to explain it to you.
But even if you are selling your rights, having your name
and URL in a magazine focusing on your target market may
be worth losing one article from your treasury. Consider it
carefully.