An Ezine (let’s just call it that, here; there are lots of names!) is a newsletter that is delivered via email that your customers can subscribe or “opt-in” to.

The feedback we’ve had over the years, and experience ourselves, is that Ezine marketing works consistently well. One element of good business is maximizing your return for effort employed. After all, entrepreneurship is essentially about using and deploying resources for return. For the amount of time you put in to run an online list (relatively little), the return is well worth it.

But, remember: online users will unsubscribe from many lists lately because of lack of quality. You need to be creating quality. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and don’t cut corners. Why would you stay subscribed if you just get bombarded with offer after offer and get no benefit?

If you aren’t producing quality content, then subscribers to your list, no matter what topic you are covering, are going to start unsubscribing in droves. It is now more important than ever to start building a real relationship with your subscriber list and nurturing it by offering serious value.

The people who grasp this concept are going to be the ones making a lot of money with email marketing in the future. And they’ll be the ones who enjoy what they do, too. So far, people have gotten away with low or “no” content, but that is changing. Time are changing (at last).

You need to make your Ezine a worthwhile read for people to want to read it. If you do that, success is likely to follow.

Using Ezines

If you have your own product already, then start an Ezine in that market to help promote your product and future products.

If you do not have a market to publish in yet, don’t worry, you don’t need a product to start an Ezine. However, what you do with that Ezine, and what its goals are, must be fully scoped: do you intend to use it to build and drive readership and sell advertising? If so, plan it. See our post on building your website for advice on scoping and mind-mapping.

It’s a question for debate and planning what your scheduling plan looks like, but from experience in this area we’d suggest you send out an Ezine with a 3-5 page article of good information about once or twice per month at the least with once per week being the most. This may or may not compliment a more regular update (perhaps a mailing list run through FeedBurner or a blog update).  Obviously, Twitter’s an amazing tool in this area, too.

That is all you need to send. When heavily involved in building a list and marketing to it, the ‘formula’ can be to send out one week with a 3-5 page article, and the next week was a solo advertisement for something you want to promote. Then, the week after, you may decide to send another 3-5 page article on something your subscribers wanted to know about, developing their interest and adding real value.

You can alternate successfully between content and advertising, should you wish. Like in most businesses, customers will not balk at advertising as long as the associated content is informative. Remember your brand and don’t damage it.

If you’re going to get into this area of marketing, focus on a content driven Ezine that can help build your business and be a reliable source of benefit for you.

Format

There are various different types of formats that you can use when publishing your Ezine. Focusing on three:

• Put the entire Ezine in an email. This can work well, particularly when people nowadays often read email on mobile devices (Blackberry, etc).

You can put the introduction, marketing/advertising content and article content all in one well-crafted email and send it out to your subscribers.

This is probably the ‘easiest’ way to approach this for newcomers.

We’d advise always sending your email as text and not an HTML page as those can still cause problems with some email readers. But you can give subscribers a choice, obviously.

• Another popular option is to put your article in a PDF downloadable file and then send an email to your list telling them where they can download the file.

This has the added benefit of people being able to save it to their computer and view it later (more views means more people will click on the links in your Ezine which means more traffic for you).

This also has an added benefit of a viral effect. You can put at the bottom (or top if you really want to stress it) of your Ezine that they can pass the PDF file to their friends or make it downloadable on their web site or blog.

This can help introduce your Ezine to people who are not yet subscribed to it. And of course, if your content is good and they like your Ezine, they can subscribe.

A PDF file format is certainly a decent option if you like the ideas above, and you can create PDF file for free with something like PrimoPDF.

• You can use an HTML page where you put your Ezine issue on your website as a regular HTML page, then email your subscribers and give them the link to the latest issue.

This has the same benefit as the PDF file where people can refer their friends, or link to it from their own web site or blog which can generate more subscribers for you.

Plus, it has an additional benefit of being able to use HTML in your Ezine if you wanted to do more interactive content like pictures, flash animations or even video.

If you can add these to your free Ezine to explain your articles/ideas, it will enhance the experience for readers and should attract subscribers. People are drawn to entertaining videos (just look at YouTube’s phenomenal success) so adding these to your free Ezine could certainly help its success.

See Part 2, which will follow soon, about structure, building a relationship with your users and quality of content. Bye for now.

Truth is, it’s a bit of both. The jungle bit can be hard to cut-through, but there’s help out there. And when you’ve cut through it, you start to glimpse the dream part.

If you’re a blogger and you use WordPress, and it’s one of the best, you need the right theme. If you don’t have a custom-coded theme which has been put together for you at your own cost (often substantial cost), you need a theme which works well for a reasonable amount.

There are, as we all know, a high number of templates and themes which promise the world but never quite deliver. They may be free, but your time and effort is not, so use a good one.

There’s a new breed of WordPress specialist who is, predominantly, a marketer first and a blogger second. These are the people who know what they’re talking about. Joel Comm is one such person who falls right into this category. His products have been featured with some of the ‘big names’, from Fortune and HBO through to TechCrunch.

The key with blogging is to start with your objective. If you want to tell the world about your life, or hobby, shoot. You know it well. Tell people in an engaging, interesting way.

But if you want to make money from your blog, then you must really, properly, genuinely understand marketing. ‘Light touch’ understanding will not suffice. However, that said, you don’t have to face this alone. People like Joel are working on products which really help you you to get from your plan to your goals.

In the online world, starting from demand (i.e., understanding your keywords and your market) and developing supply (a product or service you can supply that is quality and people believe in and want to buy) is the magic circle. Apply your killer site (often your blog) and you can really, really, over-deliver. That’s a map to success and it’s rewarding, professionally and financially, in a big way.

Best of luck.

Since many bloggers are using their blogs to attract internet traffic and hopefully send them on to their website (where products or services are actually sold), this article will give you ideas for leveraging the power of your blog as an inexpensive, but effective marketing medium.

Are You Unintentionally Anonymous?

I can’t even begin to tell you how many bloggers set up their blogs and forget to include a way for readers to contact them. I regularly want to contact blog owners who write great content with questions or comments – and can’t because they haven’t included any method for contacting them! My guess is the majority of the bloggers without contact information don’t even realize they’re inaccessible – so make sure you aren’t unintentionally anonymous!

This is especially important if you are looking to generate income from the blog at some point. Don’t hide behind your blog as some anonymous writer – the blog is meant to develop relationships and trust with your readers and you can’t do that if you don’t include an email address, ability to post comments, or other method of contacting you. You might get requests for joint ventures and invitations to online events that would help you get additional exposure and readers to your blog if people are able to contact you, too.

Make Use of Free Article Marketing Resources

As a blogger, you’re used to putting words to paper. Use that skill to bring new traffic to your blog. You can write additional articles on topics your blog already covers, and submit them to article directories like EzineArticles.com, iSnare.com, or GoArticles.com. These sites publish your articles with your author byline information, which should include a link back to your site.

Other website owners and newsletter publishers regularly visit article directories to pick up articles for their publications. They are allowed to re-print the content you submit to article directories on their own sites and in newsletters, as long as they include your author byline and link. Each time your articles are republished, you’ll have a new link pointing to your blog. You can gain new readers through people who click on your link to learn more; and also through the boost all of these incoming links give you in the search engine listings.

You’ll gain the best results with article marketing if you do it on a consistent basis. Try writing an article once a week and posting to several article directory sites, and monitoring your blog traffic for several months to see if it’s increasing.

Become a Carnival-Goer

There are “blog carnivals” on just about every topic imaginable. Blog carnivals give bloggers another method of receiving quality incoming links to their blog. You submit your own blog posts to the carnivals that are hosted by websites on related topics as your own site; and if they publish your link, you’ll receive readers and additional incoming links for SEO purposes.

If you blog about personal finance topics for example, you would submit a link to your recent article to the host of a personal finance “carnival”. If the host likes your article, he or she would include it in their carnival post, which is basically a compilation of links to many blog posts from several different blogs.

You won’t see big results overnight by participating in blog carnivals, but if done consistently, you’ll probably notice improved positioning in the search engines, and an increase in traffic from the readers of the carnivals. It costs nothing but your time to submit. For a directory of different carnivals, you can visit www.blogcarnival.com.

Write a Guest Post for Another Blog or Newsletter

Writing a guest post is the same as writing an article for your own blog, except that it will be published somewhere else. If there are other blogs that focus on similar topics as your own, consider contacting the blog owner to ask them if they’d publish an article you write for them, along with an author’s byline and a link back to your own blog.

As with the other methods discussed in this article, you’ll gain additional incoming links to your site, and the possibility of new readers who click the link to learn more about you after reading your post.

Marketing does not have to cost an arm and a leg in order to generate results. Most marketing methods will be effective if they are done consistently. Make sure you measure and monitor the results of any marketing methods you attempt, to know whether or not they are worth the time and effort.

Debbie Dragon, guesting for ClubBlogger, is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

If you didn’t sign up for it, you think of it as spam – we’ve all experienced this. So why would anyone feel differently about messages you send them if they didn’t sign up for them?

Communicating, and marketing, via email requires a positive relationship. All messages swapped are opportunities to either strengthen or weaken that relationship.  To enhance the relationship, always make sure the content is relevant, useful, and interesting to the readers. You can hardly achieve this if they didn’t want to receive the messages in the first place!

Having and growing a big list of people who don’t want or read your emails gives you no advantage and is a waste of your time. Even if email is ‘free’, your time is certainly not.

You should appreciate and expect that a proportion of manually added email addresses will subsequently unsubscribe. Interestingly, if they do not, expect few of them to ever open your messages!  Remember this: even when someone deletes a message without opening it, they still see who it’s “From”. They are still exposed to your brand. The only take-home message they get is that you keep emailing them even though they don’t want you to! This is 100% actively detrimental to the reputation you have and to the relationship you’re trying to build.

If you’re not sure your approach is the right one, it’s probably not. Remember this, too!

Relationships built on trust will last, whereas those built on spam are bound to fail. If you think someone might like to be on your email list, always invite them to sign up and let them decide.

For a free CD about nailed-on effective marketing, click here.

Step #1: Examine Your Personal Interests

The first step you need to take in order to determine your niche is to examine your personal interests. After all, in order to create a successful blog, you will need to post to it on a regular basis. Ideally, you should post at least once per day while your blog is still in its early stages. Therefore, you certainly want to select a topic that will retain your interest and that you will enjoy writing about. So, sit down and create a list of all of the general topics you would be interested in writing about before you move on to the next step.

Step #2: Fine Tune Your Topics

Now that you have an idea of the topics you might be interested in writing about, it is time to start doing a bit of research. Obviously, you want to write about a topic that will be of interest to as many people as possible. That way, you can bring more traffic to your site and you will have a better chance of making money through your blog if that is your goal.

In order to get an idea of what topics are of interest to people searching the web, use a tool such as Google adwords. Here, you can get an idea of the phrases that people are researching on Google as well as the amount of competition there is for those particular words. While looking at Google adwords should not serve as your final determining factor, it can give you a better idea of how to fine tune your niche. For example, if you listed pets as one of your interests, you may find that there is a great deal of interest in organic pet food. In this case, you may want to focus your blog on eco-friendly pet products or on healthy eating options for pets.

By fine tuning your niche, you can really focus on the topic and delve deeply into it, which will help you establish yourself as an authority on the topic. Later, if you want to address more pet topics, you may add another specialized niche topic to your blog or you may create a sister blog to compliment the first one you developed.

Step #3: Do Your Research

Once you have determined some more specific potential niche areas to explore with your blog, you should do a bit of research regarding blogs that are addressing this topic. Do some searches with the major search engines to learn more about other blogs that fall within your niche. Ideally, you should choose the topic with the least number of blogs already in existence. That way, you can keep your competition down, which will increase your chances of enjoying a larger audience.

If there are already several blogs addressing the topic, see if there is a way you can offer a different angle. That way, you will still have a good chance of carving out your share of the market.

Benefit #1: Performing Market Research

Simply put, surveys and polls help you get to know your audience better. Although you should have already conducted some market research in order to get to know your target audience better, surveys and polls will help you get to know the people who are actually reading your blog. Armed with this information, you can create posts that are more to their liking and you can add features to your blog that will help you keep your audience happy. If you are trying to make money with affiliate products, polls can also help you when it comes to selecting the products you will try to sell on your blog.

Benefit #2: Starting a Conversation

Polls and surveys are often great fodder for getting conversations going. One on hand, you can ask a question with your poll and then ask your community members to explain why they provided that answer. On the other hand, the results of the poll or survey can often stir up additional conversations – particularly if the topic is one that is controversial. In fact, using a poll or a survey is a good way to introduce a controversial subject for your readers to debate without you having to take a strong stance on either side.

Keep in mind that you will have the option to allow your readers to view the results or to keep the results closed as the survey is taking place. If you don’t want the responses to be skewed, you might want to keep this feature closed until after you have conducted the poll.

Benefit #3: Keeping it Simple

Polls and surveys are also beneficial to the blogger because they are pretty easy to set up. So, if you have a day when you really can’t think of anything to write about or you simply don’t have time for a post, putting up a survey or poll will still interest your readers without taking so much time to create.

Although polls and surveys are relatively easy to create, this is not to say you shouldn’t put any thought into the one that you create. Rather, make certain you ask a question that involves a topic that is meaningful to your readers. Also, make certain your answer choices are clear and well-defined. That way, you will get an accurate response to your poll or survey and you may actually be able to use the information to further improve the content of your site.

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

If you don’t have a great deal of money to dedicate toward marketing your blog but you do have plenty of time, social networking is a great way to boost your traffic while also building a community with your blog. In fact, one of the great things about social networking is that it can really help you build a solid reputation within the community of your target audience while also helping you build-up the popularity of your website.

There are many ways you can go about conducting social networking, but the basic premise behind this marketing method is to get out there and interact with others so they will want to come check out your blog. One common method of social networking is visiting blogs that seem to be targeting the same audience as you. Take some time to get to know the blog and its community, then start making your own comments and participating in the discussions. Each time you leave a comment, you can also leave a link to your blog. If the members of that blog community like what you have to say, they will likely click on your name in order to learn more about you.

You can use the same type of technique with forums. With forums, you may be able to set up your account so your forum log-in name is linked to your blog. If not, you can include a link to your blog in your signature. That way, your link appears every time you leave a message on the forum and, once again, those whose interest you pique will click on the link and visit your blog.

Video websites such as YouTube also provide you with great opportunities for networking. If you create humorous videos, instructional videos or informational videos that become popular on the website, you can potentially bring a great deal of traffic to your blog. In fact, any time you create a video to post on your blog, you should also post it on sites such as YouTube in order to get even more use from your video and to increase your chances of reaching more readers.

Sites such as MySpace and Facebook also provide opportunities for social networking. By interacting with those communities on a regular basis, you can build relationships with other people that might be interested in reading your blog.

The key to successful social networking is to leave comments that are meaningful to the blog or forum you are visiting. Simply saying something such as “Great post!” is not going to be enough to draw in traffic. Rather, take the time to build relationships with the communities you find at these sites and you will soon find them coming to your blog to interact with you there as well.