6 Tips to Selecting an Ezine for Advertising Your Home Business

If you ignore the rest of the tips I give you, this is the one to pay attention to. It's the most important, by far.

When placing an advertisement in an ezine, you want ask yourself, "Who are the readers?" Are they your target market?

The road to success is clear... advertise to people who are interested in what you offer right now. Writing an ad that gets such people to click, and investigate your offer, is as easy as it gets.

If you advertise to people on the fringes of your target market, they're going to require convincing. Extra effort is going to be spent nurturing them to the point that they're interested in what you're selling. Why put yourself through that?

Rather than focus on creating interest, capitalize on the interest that's already out there. There are plenty of ezines on the net, and many will have readers who will see immediate value in your offer. Find them.

Think Different

Many people think too "simply" about ezine advertising to find true success...

For example, if they are in a travel-related home business, they think, "Ok, I need to place my ad in ezines about home business." If they're particularly clever, they might go also think, "Ooo, and travel-related ezines, too!"

But, truthfully, that's about where the creativity ends. And the result is that their ads run in the same ezines as everyone else in their business, who are all thinking the same way.

I'd like to urge you to go beyond the obvious. Get creative. To carry the travel example further, consider advertising in these ezines:

• Golf - Golfers generally have money; it's not a cheap hobby. They often travel to play at different courses, and may enjoy an opportunity to subsidize those trips with a home business.

• Airplane Owners - Airplane owners also have money; last time I checked, owning and maintaining an airplane isn't cheap. Once they hop in their plane and fly off to that exotic destination, they still need a nice place to stay. Maybe your travel business can help?

• Fine Living - Most people who enjoy the "fine living" lifestyle consider travel to be a part of the package. Most of these people also have enough money to join your business without much fuss about the cost.

• Sales & Marketing - People who read these ezines are interested in selling. Some of them are likely to have an interest in travel, too. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

Again, get creative. Don't stop at the obvious because, trust me, most of your competition will.

The quality of the content in the ezines you're considering is important. Believe it or not, people subscribe to ezines to get information, not to be advertised to. If the content sucks, they're going to unsubscribe... and that's bad for you.

Consider asking the publisher how long people have been subscribed to her ezine. "What's the average length of a subscription to your ezine?" Not all publishers will be able to tell you, but if they can... great! The answer matters.

The longer readers stay subscribed, the better the value of the ezine. The better the value, the more loyal its subscribers are. The more loyal they are, the more likely they are to respond to your ad. Long term readers are buyers.

In addition to asking the question above, two more ways to guage the quality of an ezine are:

1. Read the archives. Most high quality ezines will make the archives of past issues publicly available on their site. If you can't find them, ask the publisher to send you a few past issues.

2. Subscribe to the ezine yourself. The best way to see the current quality of the ezine is to subscribe, receive a few issues, and judge the quality for yourself.

If you've ever looked into ezine advertising, you probably know that there are several different types of ads you could run. A common assumption, though, is that all ezines run each of these ad types... and that's just not true.

In case you're not familiar with the various ad types offered by ezine publishers, here's a brief summary:

• Solo Ad - This is the one everyone salivates over. Before I tell you what it is, let me caution you not to stop here. While solo ads are seen as "the best," the other ad types are still effective.
  So what is a solo ad? It's a stand-alone email, sent to the subscribers of an ezine, that contains only your ad. Usually, they are about 500 words, so there's a lot of room to "sell the click." (Which is all you should be selling in any ezine ad, by the way.)

• Sponsor Ad - Many ezine publishers offer various placements for their sponsor ads. The most common are top sponsor, middle sponsor, and bottom sponsor.
  You don't have to be a genius to figure out what the difference is: top sponsor ads are placed at the top, before the content; middle sponsor ads are placed somewhere in the middle of the content; and bottom sponsor ads are placed at the bottom, usually before the classifieds.
  These ads are typically a bit longer than a classified ad, 5-6 lines (around 150 words), but not nearly as long as a solo ad.

• Classified Ad - These are very similar to a classified ad you might place in a newspaper. Short, to the point, and all stacked together with other classified ads. Again, while these may not be as effective as a solo ad, there's still a place for them in your marketing mix.

There is no absolute recommendation as to which ad type is right for your needs. The key point I'm trying to get across, here, is this:

Know which type of ad you want to run, and make sure the ezine you're going to run it in accepts that style of ad. There's no sense writing a big, fancy-pants solo ad when the ezine you're going to publish it in only accepts sponsored ads or classifieds.

Before placing your ad in an ezine, it's important to consider: can you afford it? Unless you're the gambling type, you should rarely spend more than 25% of your ezine advertising budget on a single ad.

What if something goes wrong? The ad goes out on a holiday, or the link is incorrect, or your web host goes down right when the ad is sent? If you blow your entire wad on one "hail mary" ad, you'll have no ability to recover.

It's better to buy two sponsor ads and a few classifieds than it is to buy one, super-fancy solo ad. If something goes wrong, or even if your ad just plain sucks, you'll be able to fix the problem before your next ad goes out. This is a good thing.

The other thing you want to consider is your Return On Investment, or ROI. For every thousand subscribers your ad gets sent to, what is the cost? (This is known as CPM, or Cost Per Thousand.) For every thousand subscribers your ad gets sent to, how many orders are placed, and what is your return?

Pay attention to how much you spend on each ad, and track how many orders you get for each, too. Invest your future money into the ezines that give you the best ROI.

Another important consideration, when selecting ezines for advertising your home business, is this: has the list been "burned out" by a publisher who runs too many ads? What is their advertising frequency?

Again, there is no hard and fast recommendation I can give you here, but I'll give you my rules of thumb:

If a publisher is sending more than three solo ads per week, red flags start to go up. How responsive do you think readers will be to your expensive solo ad when it's the fifth one they've gotten that week? How responsive would you be? Would you even read it? Exactly.

For classified ads, pay attention to the space given to the ads versus the space given to the content. If there are more ads than articles, run the other direction! Remember what I said earlier, "...people read ezines for information." Long-term readers are buyers.

Put your ad in ezines that are providing true value, in addition to the ads they run.

Not all ezines are formatted the same. While it's true that all ezines are sent via email, there are two primary "formats" understood by most email readers today: plain text, and HTML.

There is no right and wrong here... just different. Each format has its own unique advantages and disadvantages:

• Plain Text - While they're not as "fancy" as the HTML ezines, my personal preference is to advertise in ezines that are published in plain text. Why?
  When your mother sends you an email, chances are... it's plain text. When your golf buddy sends you an email with tomorrow's tee time... chances are, it's plain text.
  Simply, plain text is more "familiar," and feels less commercial. It's easier to "slip under the radar."

• HTML - While HTML emails certainly feel more commercial, they have some real advantages. Some things can be done in HTML ezines that are just not possible in their plain text brethren.
  One advantage offered by HTML ezines is inline linking. In simple terms, this is the ability to link to your offer directly from a phrase in your ad. In plain text ezines, you're forced to display your full link in all of its ugly, ad-tracking glory. In HTML ezines, you can hide that ugliness behind nice, pretty words.
  HTML ezines also allow the use of rich text formatting in your ads. Bold, italics, underline, and color are all at your disposal to increase the impact of your ad. Like all good things, you can go overboard with this... but, used tastefully, it's a powerful thing.
  Some publishers of HTML ezines also track how many people open and read the newsletter and/or your advertisement. This can be useful information, especially when trying to guage the effectiveness of your ad copy.

Consider the above when deciding which ezines to place your ad in. Again, there is no right or wrong... just personal preference. Test them both and see which works best for you!

Now that you know the criteria for selecting a good ezine to advertise your home business in, you're probably wondering, "But, Jeff, how do I find these ezines you keep talking about?"

One way is to use Google. Just put your cursor in the search box and type:

"your industry" ezine

So, if you're in the health and wellness business, you might try:

"health and wellness" ezine

Another fantastic resource, which I use myself, is Charlie Page's Directory of Ezines. It does cost money, yes, but I think it's well worth it. Charlie has done a great job finding the best ezines on the net and putting them together in one web site with a search engine.

Another benefit of the DOE is that Charlie has negotiated reduced advertising rates with many ezine publishers for DOE members. Over time, this will more than pay for the cost of the service, especially if you buy the lifetime membership.