Why Publish an eZine?

On the Internet, it is very possible to make money without selling any product.
One way of doing so is through starting your own eZine, also known as an
electronic newsletter.

In a nutshell, you send out your eZine issues on a periodical basis to your
subscribers. The good part is that you have a flexible choice in automating the
process of sending out your eZine issues for you or manually sending them on a
periodical basis.

As an eZine publisher, not only can you easily achieve the benefits a
conventional newsletter publisher enjoys without having to chop down several
trees in the process, you can easily and conveniently spread your marketing
influence and expertise to your base of subscribers from the shoes of an
ordinary individual.

In other words, you do not have to invest in expensive printing equipment,
brick and mortar business, and hiring staff just to run your own newsletter
publication, resulting in a lot of time, money and effort saved.

Basically, all you need to start your own eZine are an auto responder and
broadcast feature to go with, enabling you to reach out to your massive
subscribers whom you can regard as your prospects, too.

All in all, if you do not have the commitments of creating your own product for
sale, then publishing your own online newsletter can be one of the wisest
decisions you will ever make, given the benefits of impressive marketing power
and influence it can offer to you.

Making Money from Selling Advertising Space

If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep
for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher
hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and
deliver the papers to their readers.

In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in
heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a
daily basis.

And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher
appoints agents at every part of the covered territory.

So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a
copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund
the operations.

The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of
advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space
in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on
the paper's high readership.

On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter:
simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers!

If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and
beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad.

In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a
profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of
advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day
in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities.

Mailing List for Affiliate Marketers

If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from
referring your prospects to other people's product or service for decent
commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.

Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best
investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on.
When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to
endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

Granted, that most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not
making money from affiliate programs, but this often results from the same
amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list is, by a long mile, not the only effective
affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in
the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing
list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse
products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other
affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who
owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

Which One is More Important -- Product or Mailing List?

If you would ask this question, "Which one is more important -- the mailing
list or the product?" any savvy marketer would answer you, "The mailing list".

Principally, any wise business person puts the importance of hungry demand (and
not just any demand) in front of the product. In other words, there is no
product if there is no demand! And a mailing list represents the demand or your
business if you would like to call it.

If you frequent the Joint Venture forums and membership sites of any kind, you
will find that product and service owners need mailing list owners more than
the other way round. This is because the mailing list owners have the prospects
that the other type of partner is looking for to sell to.

And if you are a mailing list owner, you do not have to necessarily make money
from selling your own product. You can sell advertising space or craft a Joint
Venture with product owners in return of commissions, recurring or not.

Most of the biggest success web businesses on the Internet today often
establish the mailing list (or subscribers) first before the product. One fine
example is Friendster.com.

Friendster.com, in the nutshell, is a website that connects friends and
potential friends from around the world through a free membership access.

While Friendster.com does not make money from the number of members who join
the site, the business makes money from selling advertising space and
partnering with other big time merchants and businesses, owing to the
established number of members Friendster.com has recruited.

This business is perfect example that demonstrates why every business should
establish a need or demand before the product itself, and why you should do the
same, whether you run a friends site or not.

Publishing Your eZine -- the Pros

There are several advantages publishing your own eZine can offer to you. Thus
if the pros appeal to you, then publishing your own paperless newsletter can be
ideal for you.

The most obvious reason publishing an eZine can be the most ideal business to
you is that it is so easy to start that any individual can do. There is no need
to invest in starting a brick and mortar business or even staff and heavy
machines for that matter.

In fact, you can do this from the comfort of your home as the most important
thing you will need is an auto responder equipped with broadcast feature. Auto
responders such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com are highly recommended when
it comes to publishing your own eZine.

In spite of the low start up cost and monthly fees, you can make money from
several profit centers within the spaces of your eZine issues. You can make
money from selling advertising space, just to name one.

Most importantly, you get to build your own personal media and spread your
marketing influence, making you more valuable to product and service owners
thus do not be surprised if you receive Joint Venture proposals every so often.

Given some of the best reasons in the world of Internet Marketing, publishing
your own periodical eZine can one of the best money vehicles you will ever
acquire or even build.

Publishing Your eZine -- the Cons

As with any other types of businesses, publishing your own online newsletter
a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it
offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of
publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However,
I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One obvious challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of
eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are
not a gifted writer and that you run out of ideas every so often that your
publishing schedule is threatening you.

A way of taking care of this problem is to create your content in advance. You
can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not
blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable
freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/
or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are
at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as
http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content,
provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the
article has republishing rights conveyed.

In conclusion, you can easily tackle the content creation challenge using the
mentioned methods that do not require writing on your part, free or paid.

Deciding the Nature of Your eZine

When choosing a topic to publish your eZine on, you must consider some
important success factors that can determine the flow and goal of your eZine.

You are encouraged to write non-time sensitive contents such as short tips,
mini stories and interviews. Doing so enables you to create content in advance
so that you can conveniently dispense to your subscribers at a later schedule.

Topic-wise, you will do well to cater to a starving market that will always be
on demand for the kind of content you offer. And by this, I mean that you
should zero in onto a demand that has been, is and will always be there.

Relationships and dating are niches that have been on Earth long before the
World Wide Web came up, for example. The food niche will always be there as
long as there are chefs cooking for anyone with a stomach to fill.

Having said that, you also want to have a steady stream of products or services
of your own or an affiliate for you can endorse to your mailing list and make
even more money.

This is also the reason why the Internet Marketing niche will remain one of the
hottest niches there is, as products and services are created almost around the
clock. As long as there Internet Businesses cropping out, there will always be
needs to be fulfilled.

Churning out eZine Content

Creating your own content can be a challenge if you publish your own online
newsletter or eZine.

However, regardless of any topic you are publishing on, types of contents can
be generally divided into four categories, namely factual content, short tips,
mini stories and case studies.

Other than writing your own content, you can get your own unique content the
quick and easy way by organizing an interview with an expert or leader in the
topic.

Very often, this can be done for free and since the interviewee is writing out
most of the content, there is nothing else for you to do other than giving the
interviewee something valuable in exchange (maybe a meal!).

Now if you have money to spare, you can hire a ghostwriter to write your
content for you without taking any credit. Recommended professional
marketplaces where you can seek ghostwriters include http://www.elance.com/ and
http://www.rentacoder.com/.

Another little known and underused method in getting your own content is via
public domains. If you are not familiar with the term "public domain", "public
domain" simply means anything that is NOT protected under US copyright law.

This includes ALL works published before 1923 and, under certain conditions,
works published up to 1978. And in this case, we are referring "works" to
written materials such as reports, articles and books.

Republishing and repackaging public domain information can help you save time
and effort from creating new ideas and content as they are readily available.
On top of that, you do not have to pay royalties or copyright fees on that work.

If you fancy the idea of publishing content without any writing on your part,
this method is for you.

The 3 Best eZine Formats

eZine publishers today use any one or more of the 3 most commonly used eZine
formats which I am about to describe to you in this article.

Ultimately, you can decide which format is the best choice for you, though each
winning format has its pros and cons.

The text eZine is the most commonly published. The advantage of this format is
that other than writing, you do not require any special skill to use a Word or
Notepad program.

While the HTML eZine format requires a certain degree of HTML skills on your
part, you can add more sophisticated features to your eZine issues, making them
more appealing to your subscriber thus increases your readership value,
something that text eZines do not have.

You can decorate your eZine format, change your fonts, include pictures, and
more. However, the drawback often faced by HTML eZines is that they often get
trapped into spam filters before they reach their subscribers' inboxes.

The third and least used among the 3 formats is the PDF eZine. Publishing your
eZine in PDF format can consume a lot of time and effort on your part but often
make up in quality readership

Due to the commitment, PDF eZines are usually published on a monthly basis. The
great part, though, is that you can put in your affiliate links in your PDF
eZine issue and allow your subscribers to pass the eZine issue around.

Given the choices, however, you do not have to necessarily choose strictly one
eZine format, as some eZine publishers today do publish in more than one format.

What You Need to Start an eZine Publication

Starting your own eZine can be a lot easier than you think. This is because in
the most basic necessity, all you really need to get started publishing your
own paperless newsletter are wealth of content, auto responder with broadcast
feature, and a website (which is optional).

Content. You can compile weeks of content ahead in advance and slowly dispense
them to your subscribers. For example, you can compile 100 short tips in one
day and dispense 10 tips once a week. In other words, you can compile 10 weeks
worth of content in just one day!

Auto responder. Your auto responder is your asset. You need an auto responder
to send your mails and eZine issues to your subscribers and store your data
base of people subscribed to your newsletter. Some recommended auto responders
include GetResponse.com and aWeber.com.

Website. You may be surprised that this is actually an optional component. In
short, there are eZine publishers publishing their newsletters without a
website! But of course, having your own website can offer you tremendous
advantages, such as the ability to bring in more subscribers and having your
newsletter indexed in the top Search Engines.

These are the things you need to get started on publishing your own eZine at
its bare minimum. Do not underestimate the little you need, though, because
several eZine publishers today succeed well with only an auto responder and
contents, with or without a website. And you can, too!

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