I Want to Do an Ezine! Part 4

by Terri Seymour

I Want to Do an Ezine! Part 4 How Do I Promote? Copyright 2002 Terri Seymour

Now that you have your ezine named, designed, formatted and ready to go, who do you send it to??

To get subscribers, you need to promote your new ezine. There are several ways to do this that are effective and free. Included in these are:

• Ad Swaps
• Writing Articles
• Announcement Lists
• Networking on Discussion Lists and Message Boards
• SigTag
• Joint Ventures with Fellow Publishers
• PopUnder Window
• Submitting to Directories
• Link Exchanging

Some of these methods take a lot of time, so what you want to do is work out a system and get on a regular schedule to save time.

Ad Swaps - You will need a few subscribers before you can participate in ad swaps. Ad swapping is simply running another publisher's ad in your ezine and in return he/she will run your ad in their ezine. Most publishers will participate in ad swaps, however there are a few that are quite fussy about the number of subscribers you have. In my experience, I have only run a cross a few who will not swap with the smaller ezines.

To find fellow publishers to swap with, you an read other ezines. The publisher will very often have his swap request in his ezine.

To find more places, simply go to google.com or your favorite search engine and do a search for ad swaps.

Writing Articles - This has to be one of the most powerful methods of promoting yourself and your ezine/website. Writing quality articles gets you established as an authority and people will begin to trust you and believe in what you say. Do Not Abuse This Trust!

Publishers and Webmasters all over the web will publish your articles and you will begin making a name for yourself. There are a few things to remember when writing an article.

Do not make the article a sales letter. You want to provide helpful, real information that the reader can actually use. You can put your business info in the resource box at the end of the article.

Provide the links/email so the reader can go directly to the resource and utilize it and the instructions you provided.

Add your own personal experiences where applicable. People are interested and do benefit from others who have "Been There, Done That"! ;-)

Provide basic, real information that can be easily understood and utilized. People are not interested in big college words, they want useful information!

Follow these guidelines and you should be able to write quality, helpful, publishable articles. After you have written your article, you will need to submit it.

Announcement Lists - This is not the most power packed method but for a few minutes work each day it does bring in some subscribers. Subscribe to some lists, get your system set up and send away. I have my announcement for each list saved in a folder on my desktop ready to just click and send. I also keep note of the date each announcement is to be sent so I know exactly which ones go out on which day. Each day it takes me about 5 minutes to send out my announcements.

In the next part of the series, I will discuss networking with discussion lists and message boards and also joint ventures with other publishers. Until then, please feel free to email if you have any questions about this or any other article. Good luck to you and see you next week. ;-)