Small Business Ideas & Small Business Marketing: Promoting your Business using an Ezine

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August 6, 2007

Promoting your Business using an Ezine

As the owner of a small online business, you're always looking for new approaches to promotion. Here's a great way to promote your site, increase your customer base and sales and profit from advertising promotions all in one go. How? Get started with some regular communication and publish your own electronic newsletter or ezine.

If you can write a letter, then you can write your own newsletter. You know your product better than anyone and even if writing isn't your thing, there are ways to get content written for you. How about offering the opportunity to a journalism student at your local university or simply outsource it for a very modest fee. Students are always on the lookout for ways to generate additional income.

Some tips to ezine writing success:

Establish a schedule for publication and stick to it not only for self discipline but mainly because your readers will be looking out for it. Once a month is sufficient for most small businesses but be prepared to test what frequency works best.

Provide useful content in each issue. Let's say you sell pre-owned books. Your content might focus on book reviews, regional news or local history (read local niche), markets, ways to use journals, or how to effectively use on-line resources to locate hard to get publications. Any of these topics could be a feature article, which is really just what you need in one issue.

In addition to creating your own content, you can use free content too. Free content can be obtained from article directories. Be careful though as there is great variation when it comes to the quality of free content.

How article directories work:

Subject matter experts and business owners submit articles to the various article directories in exchange for their byline being included with their article within what is commonly termed a resource box. It's free publicity for the author's website and helps drive traffic too.

Once you have suitable content, you can make a template from your first magazine and publish each issue in that format and thereby maintain a consistent look and feel.

There are many excellent free online tutorials and templates available so look around as these can be a real help. They provide detailed information on ezine writing conventions, such as the 65-character line limit, and the pros and cons of a HTML versus TEXT publication.

So what advantages does producing an ezine or newsletter for your business bring?:

You'll have regular contact with your customers. You'll remind them of you and your business without the need for a hard sell approach. They'll receive timely and useful information that they can relate to your products or services and you will have repeat opportunities to send them back to your site.

Once you build your readership into a sizeable list, you can solicit other newsletters for exchange advertising. The larger your subscriber list, the more attractive your publication becomes for paying advertisers. You may also have the opportunity to negotiate commissions on sales from their sites resulting from click-through's from your magazine.

Your subscribers can forward your magazine to friends who may in turn become subscribers. Why not include a statement up front, inviting your readers to pass your magazine onto others, but only in complete form. This ensures all recipients get the opportunity to subscribe and help grow your list.

Creating your own online magazine can be quite profitable. Yes it takes work and dedication, but properly done the results are well worth it.

Posted by David at August 6, 2007 10:28 AM