Ezine (electronic magazine) advertising is a great method for exposing your offer to a targeted audience (niche). This type of advertising can be quite expensive though if you don't know what to look for. Two years of experience advertising in dozens of ezines has revealed a few money saving trends and commonalities. These tendencies will save the ezine marketer a considerable amount of money, especially when combined. You may not realize it, but ezine ad specials and deals are fairly common if you know where to look and what to look for. In this article, I will show you how to find these specials, what types to look for, and the details you need to know about each one in order to take advantage of these offers. Subscribe This may seem obvious, but I never subscribed to ezines, simply because it wasn't necessary in order to purchase an ad. I would go to the website, fill out the ad form, hit the PayPal button, and submit the ad. What I didn't know was that, though sometimes ad specials are available on the website, the best ones are usually offered to subscribers. With that in mind, always subscribe first. In fact, I recommend subscribing to about 20 or more ezines in your niche if you can find that many. Why the large number? This is to insure a greater chance that one or more specials will appear in your email with regularity. It's a good idea to set up a separate email account just for these subscriptions. The following are some of the special offers you'll find as a subscriber. Free Classified Ads A few of the ezines you subscribe to will allow you to submit a free classified ad as a bonus for subscribing. Some even allow you to submit your ad every week for free. If you take advantage of these freebies, you'll find a few gems that do pretty well and are worth the effort of submitting. Additionally, many ezines post their ads online. I receive a steady trickle of visitors from such ads. Subscription Specials From time to time, you'll receive some great advertising specials. The key here is to keep your eye out for them and be ready to respond because these deals are usually limited in number and time of availability Some common specials you'll see are buy one get one free solo ads (your ad alone goes out to the entire list of subscribers), volumn ad discounts, and ad packages. The ad packages usually have a mixture of ads for example, a solo ad, top sponsor ad, and a classified ad. Off Season Ad Specials Summer and mid Winter (December and January) are usually slower months in terms of advertising. Many ezine owners who don't normally offer ad space in their publications will offer special deals to subscribers. These advertising specials are limited in number and may sell out quickly. A recent ad I ran in one of these ezines produced the best response I've had yet. Submitting Articles As a subscriber, you'll get to submit articles to some of the ezines. This is an increasingly popular method of getting your message prominently in front of ezine subscibers for free. The key to this method is to offer quality information and then put a subtle pitch for your website at the end in the author's bio. This method works best if you own your own website versus affiliate or replicated web sites. Additionally, you can submit your article directly to other ezine publishers who accept them, to article announcement lists, and to article directories. I highly recommend that you do not miss out on this type of promotion. In fact, hire a ghost writer if you have trouble writing. There are hundreds if not thousands of places online that will accept articles for free. You'll recover your investment. If you want to save money and put your ad campaign in high gear, employ the methods mentioned and keep a sharp eye out. The combined savings will be quite substantial. Of course, that means an increase in your profit margin. |
