Ensuring That Your eZine Is Successful

Ensuring Your eZine Is Successful

After over 25 years of writing books, tutorials, User manuals, eZine articles for myself and others I gradually learned what readers like. The type of writing and content that makes them coming back to read more and more of your Articles, Blog posts, Tutorials, eZines or other writing.

I’d like to share with you some of the things I did while I learned to craft a successful eZine. Things that will make your readers happy, because of which they could recommend your eZine to their friends.

Know Your Audience

Once you’ve decided on your eZine’s domain, do a Google search for forums that deliver similar material to what you’ve decided to address in your eZine.

Carefully read through the heaps of questions that people are posting on those forums.  See if you can recognize any ‘Related Patterns’ in user questions.

If you place material in your eZine that answers such questions ( i.e. based on the analysis you’ve done of various forum posts )  your are consciously crafting your eZine material based on what readers want, hence your eZine will automatically become interesting and useful to such readers.

Joining such forums offers two advantages. You know the kind of stuff that puzzles people based on the questions they are posting on the forums, you can then write on the very same topics in your eZine.  You can inform forum members of the existence of your eZine and what it contains.

By watching the forum posts you are getting suggestions from forum users themselves about what they would like to read about.  If such material is in your eZine, you bet people from that forum will be willing to subscribe to and read your eZine.

If the quality of your visuals and the material is excellent it’s likely that your readers will accept you as a domain expert./p>

It is then just a short jump away to convert this acceptance into money in your back account.

Analyze Your Competition

Do subscribe to your competitors eZines. You should know what your competitors are doing in the same domain. Read each eZine carefully and take notes on how their topics, paragraphs, visuals are structured in their eZines.

eZine Layouts that are really appeal to you, can be cloned and then tweaked to be made them into your layouts. Your goal is to have a different layout with the same kind of great appeal in Visuals & Content.

Never forget to go through your competitor’s eZine archives.

Definitely register readers comments, and if available, the kind of action / reaction from your competitor to these comments. Also take a good look at reader feedback to your competitors. Your competitors are definitely digging within your eZine archives and learning from there.

Fun Section

Add a section in your eZine devoted to fun. This does help your eZine stand out from other eZines. Music reviews, Movie reviews, a relevant quiz with a small prize, Trivia associated with your eZines domain and so on. All of this helps ensure that your eZine is ‘Different’.

Reader’s Feedback

Engage with your readers. The size of your Email list does not matter. Irrespective of whether your mailing list is small or large, do your very best to engage with your readers in some way.

Make it worth your reader’s while to leave comments and make suggestions.

Set up Polls in your eZine now and then and generate subtle feedback from your readers.

Run a contest and give a freebie as a prize for your reader’s time and opinions.

Have a Table of Content at the start of your eZine so that your readers can quickly jump to material that is of prime importance to them.

In Conclusion

There are several other things your can do to make your eZine much sort after.

Ensuring a readable font size, crafting great visuals, inserting podcasts or video casts and so on.

However, I’m thinking that you’re already chaffing at the bit to begin the change to your eZine. So I shall stop now rather than take up a lot more of your time.

I’ve shared stuff that I believe will make a difference to your eZine when implemented.

If you would like to add your comments, suggestions and experiences to this list please do so in the Comment section below I welcome it.

Suggestions, constructive criticism, praise from my peers has always taught me a heck of a lot more that anything I learned entirely on my own.

Ivan Bayross
Open Source Tutorials | Open Source Training