Download - Ezine Advertising Live
Charlie Page’s
Ezine Advertising Live!
FFIINNDDIINNGG TTHHEE RRIIGGHHTT EEZZIINNEESS
The Right Ad The Right Ezine
The Right Offer The Right Timing
EZINE ADVERTISING LIVE
© Charlie Page Page 2
About Charlie Page
Charlie Page is the author of over 10 eBooks on Internet marketing and
the owner of the Directory of Ezines.
The Directory of Ezines is the world's first and best online resource for
advertising and article marketing with ezines, also known as
newsletters.
He is considered the leading expert on marketing with ezines.
Charlie began his online career as a copywriter. His specialty as a
copywriter is writing sales letters, selling emails, and autoresponder
messages that cause readers to take action in record numbers. One of Charlie's sales letters
garnered an amazing 34% conversion rate during the introduction of a very well-known
eBook about Internet marketing.
In 2000 Charlie joined the Directory of Ezines as a member and began using ezine
marketing to grow his business. The result? 18 months later he bought the company! He continues to teach his DOE members how to create their own success story using ezines.
Charlie has contributed to books in print as well as eBooks, helping Robert Allen complete
Multiple Streams of Internet Income as well as working with Jay Aaron and Jay Conrad
Levinson (the father of Guerilla Marketing) to create their web and print project called Guerilla Marketing to the Masses.
Important note from Charlie
Before reading the transcript below please download and print the Success Guide for this call.
The Success Guide is an interactive document that will help you get the most out of
this transcript and help you quickly and easily apply what you learn here.
The Success Guide is free – my gift to you.
You can get the Success Guide now by visiting this link.
http://www.EzineAdvertisingLive.com/guide
EZINE ADVERTISING LIVE
© Charlie Page Page 3
The Eight Ezine Advertising Live Modules
1) Ezine Advertising Secrets Revealed: “Make Ezine Advertising Work for You”
2) The Right Ezine: “Endless Pools of Pre-Qualified Prospects”
3) The Right Ad Part I: “Write a Power Ad & Get It Seen By Millions”
4) The Right Ad Part II: “Advanced Ad Writing Techniques”
5) The Right Ad Part III: “Where and how to submit your power ad”
6) Track & Analyze Results: “Repeat the Winners and Achieve Real Success”
7) Advanced Techniques: “Expert Methods That Give you an unfair advantage”
8) FAQ: “Your Ezine Advertising Questions Answered By Charlie Page”
EZINE ADVERTISING LIVE
© Charlie Page Page 4
This is Charlie Page, and this is the second call of Ezine Advertising
Live. I really look forward to sharing with you the many proven ways that
I've discovered over the years to find just the right ezine for any product
that you're promoting. This is really important - matching the ezine that
you use to the product that you're offering is a highly important thing.
Over the years I've promoted many products myself and for my
clients, and while preparing for this call, I was making a mental list of just
how many things I've promoted with ezines. And the list became very long
indeed.
Before I go farther, let me stop here and remind you to have your
success guide for this call ready for note taking. The success guide for
tonight will be very helpful as we go through the ways to find the right
ezines for your offer. If you don't have the success guide right now, you can
go to www.EzineAdvertisingLive.com/guide and get it. Let me repeat that
URL – www.EzineAdvertisingLive.com/guide
As we go through our live calls, you should know that you can always
get a copy of the most current success guide at that URL. In addition, you
can login to the member’s area and get a copy of any of the success guides
by clicking on the number of the call you're interested in.
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While we're doing a little bit of housekeeping, let me remind you that
the audio and transcript for Call One can be found in the member’s area as
well. If you didn't make Call One and haven't had time to read the transcript
or listen to the audio, please do as time allows. I've created Ezine
Advertising Live so that one call builds on the next, creating an easy-to-
follow, step-by-step system for successful ezine advertising. Of course, you
can listen to the calls in any order you'd like, but they do flow nicely if taken
from Call One through Call Eight.
Now, where was I? The products I've promoted using ezine
advertising include: health products, information products, business
opportunities, promotions for charity events or charity organizations, selling
membership sites, responsive to natural disasters to solicit money, building
mailing lists, selling tangible goods like cookbooks and care, selling legal
services, and much more, really too many to count. After ten years, it's
been a lot of different products.
So why does that matter? Why mention it? Because I want you to
know that what you are selling can be on that list. No matter what you're
promoting now, I promise you that we'll find profitable ways to promote it
using ezine advertising during our Ezine Advertising Live course.
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And don't forget that you can ask questions any time you'd like, as
well. You can enter your questions on the pages for each call. You can use
my support center, whichever you prefer. A link for the support center is on
just about every webpage I have. http://www.realworldtactics.com/support
No matter how you get in touch, I do want to help you personally, one on
one if I can.
So let's look at some ways to find ezines that are right for your offer.
The first thing I want you to do is to have in mind a specific product,
something you want to promote. Write it down. If you have your success
guide handy, go ahead and write it down. If you just have a legal pad or a
piece of scratch paper, go ahead and write it down. I know you might be
promoting more than one product right now. Many people are, and that's a
good thing, but having one product in mind will make the examples we
share tonight more vivid and provide you with the best understanding of the
process to follow when finding ezines in which to place ads.
If you know me, you know that I'm a big believer in processes. I
believe that if you find or create a step-by-step process for a task, especially
a marketing task, the odds of finding repeatable success go way up. And
the key word there, of course, is "repeatable." That's my goal for you with
Ezine Advertising Live, to help you discover a repeatable way to advertise
any product you want, any time you want, and create the highest
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return on investment possible. Pretty good goals, so let's find out how
we do that.
Of all the mistakes I see people make with ezine advertising, one of
the top mistakes is choosing the wrong ezine in which to run their ad. I
think it's a mistake we all fear making. You know, it's a natural thing to be
afraid of making that type of mistake, because the result of choosing the
wrong ezine is clear. The ad won't work as well as it should, if it works at
all. The money you spend will be wasted, and that's not what you want.
Now, on the last call I mentioned not spending more than 25 percent
of your budget on any one ad, and if you follow that rule, you'll find that the
fear of making a mistake is taken out of the equation, because even if
you do make a mistake, it's not a mistake that puts you out of the game. A
big mistake that people make with ezine advertising, and one of the
promises I made you before you signed up was I was going to help you
avoid embarrassing and costly mistakes, as well as teach you the things to
do.
So let me say this about mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes is
choosing the wrong ezine. We're going to fix that tonight. Another is using
your entire budget on one ad or at one time. That's something I want to
really emphasize. It's a big mistake to use all your money up front, because
then you don't have any go back position. You don't have any second
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chance, and I don't know about you, but every time I do something, I do it
better the second time than the first. And I said in the last call, and I'll say
it again, I think if that idea wasn't true that we get better with time, very
few of us would be married.
So if choosing the wrong ezine is a problem, how can you know
what ezine is right for you? Let's look together at six ways that you can
know if an ezine is right for you. Now, if you have your success guide
handy, please turn to the second page and get ready to fill in the blanks and
make some notes. If not, just jot these six ways down, and you can fill in
the success guide later if you like. Using the success guide for each call will
create a powerful reference library for your future ezine advertising
efforts, so I encourage you to get each one and fill it in.
Let me give you the number one way to know if any ezine is right for
you. If you have your success guide, this is the first one. An ezine that is
right for you will have the right readers. So number one is the right
readers. Now, what do I mean by the "right readers?" I mean this. The
right readers are people who are interested in what you offer right
now. You don't have to get them interested in your product. You only
need to capitalize on their existing interest.
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I want to emphasize that point. That's really important. There's a
huge difference in selling between trying to create interest in a product
and capitalizing on existing interest in a product. Much harder to
introduce a new idea to someone, get them interested in it, and bring them
to the point where they will take action than it is to find people who are
already interested in a particular product or thing or idea and then cause
them to take action on yours.
So how can you know what these readers are interested in? You can
know by what they are reading, by matching the subject of the ezine
they've subscribed to with the product that you promote. Now, that's not as
simple as it sounds. Remember last time we talked about Einstein saying
things should be simple but not any simpler than they have to be? Let me
explain what I mean by this a little bit by matching the subject.
If you're selling memberships to an investment website, the odds are
that buying ads in an ezine that goes out to skateboard enthusiasts would
not be a very good idea. Now, I know that's an extreme example, but I've
seen mistakes like that made in the past. You see the key is to find readers
who are interested in things that complement what you are selling, as well
as topics that are specifically about what you're selling.
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That's really important, so I'm going to repeat it and get you to write it
down if you're the type who likes to make notes. The key is to find readers
who are interested in things that complement what you are selling, as well
as topics that are specifically about what you're selling. So "complement" is
the key word there.
Using ezines that are only about the specific topic of the product you
are selling is too narrow an approach in my view. It's a very common
mistake. I often hear people ask questions – in fact, we got nine questions
on this one topic alone a couple of weeks ago – well, about a month ago
during the preview call. I hear people asking questions about ezine
advertising being saturated, that too many people from the same business
opportunity or are selling the same product are running ads in the small pool
of available ezines, and that is making those ezines saturated. But nothing
could be farther from the truth if you follow the advice I'm giving you right
now.
You see, if you limit your advertising exposure only to those
ezines that are specifically about the product you are selling, two things will
be true. One, you'll have more competition, because most people make
that very mistake. They limit their exposure. Two, you'll miss the easy
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sales, the ones where a reader is reading an article about a particular topic
and then sees your ad for a complementary product and becomes curious.
Now, I think a case study is going to help illustrate this point, and
while we're on the topic of case studies, I want to say something to you
about the membership area with Ezine Advertising Live. I'm going to be
asking you – in fact, if you want to not wait, you can just submit a support
ticket in the next day or two. I'd like to know the business that you are
in. I'd like to hear from each of you and find out what business you are in
so that when I am putting together case studies, I can put together case
studies that are meaningful to you.
So put in a support ticket and let me know what business you're in.
Be sure to choose Ezine Advertising Live as the department. That's what's
really important. When you go to the support center, you don't have to
login. You don't have to register. Just click "submit a ticket," and then
follow the steps. But be sure to choose Ezine Advertising Live as the
department. Just do this any time you want to, and I will reply to you
myself and start using case studies that are based upon the industry you're
in.
So for now, let's take a look at a case study that illustrates the point
that we're making about complementary products and how to choose ezines
and that type of thing. Let's say that you're selling a travel business
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product. This product allows you to travel at a discount, and it's a business
that you can sell. There are some very popular programs online right now
that are just like this. I'm sure you know the names. Some of you are
probably involved in those businesses.
So the first to ask is who are the people that might buy this product?
What common characteristics might they share that will help you find
them using ezines? Because that is the goal - the goal is to find them, so I'd
like you to write down, if you're a note taker, common characteristics,
because we're going to make a list now of some common characteristics.
That's going to help us choose the ezines that are going to work best for this
product.
So let's first look at their personal makeup, and then we'll start
talking about some specific ezines that might work and talk about some that
might fail. The person interested in this business can be a man or a
woman. That's the first thing to consider. Some product offerings really
are gender specific. This particular product, be it the travel part of the offer
or the business part of the offer is really not gender specific. So the person
interested in this business can be a man or a woman. So we can write that
down – man or woman. That helps us choose the ezines correctly.
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The person interested in this product can be of any age but is likely
to be middle aged or younger. Now, remember I said "likely." We're not
ruling out any age group for this offer, except the very young. Probably 25
is a good starting point on this. It's unlikely that people younger than that
are going to be buying much travel or buying a travel business. It can
happen, but it's unlikely, and today's seniors do travel. It's not like it was a
long time ago when "senior citizen" meant that you stayed home forever. I
mean, it's a whole different world now, so you can't really rule people in or
out. But it's likely to be middle aged or younger.
What's next? The person interested in this product wants their own
business and probably want an online business so they can experience
the freedom an online business offers. That's an important common
characteristic to write down. So we've got …
Man or woman
Probably middle aged or younger
Somebody who wants their own business.
The person interested in this product needs to have some
resources so they can afford to provide the travel product or to travel or to
pay for the business or all of that. So we're not looking for freebie seekers
on this offer.
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Now, let me be clear, and I always try to define this carefully. I don't
think "freebie seeker" is a dirty word. A lot of people say, "Oh, I don't want
any freebie seekers." I don't think there's anything in the world wrong with
people who are looking for resources that don't cost any money. I do think
that that mindset doesn't lead to success online, and I do think that that
mindset meant that people in that group will behave a particular way. But I
don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But for this particular offer, this is not who we're going to look for. So
we're not going to look for ezines that talk about free stuff. We're
going to look for different types of ezines. It's important to write this down.
I would say not freebie seeker. I would say person with resources.
What's next? The person interested in this product is probably
interested in travel but might only be interested in the business aspect.
You never can really tell for sure, but you have to make these choices. Now
my experience tells me that they're interested in both even if they can't do
both right now. I know a lot of people in these type businesses, and
generally they say to me they would like to travel but can't right now. And
so they want to use the business aspect of it to make some money, and then
when they're situation is right, they will travel. So I would, if it was me
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doing the ezine advertising, I would write down both interested in travel and
interested in the business.
So that's what I would write on my particular profile. Now, we've got
a fairly decent profile built, and I know that profile is not a politically correct
term these days, but that's not the kind of thing we're talking about. We're
talking about drawing up a snapshot of a person who we're trying to
watch online. There's nothing wrong with that.
So here's what we've got:
Man or woman,
Probably middle aged or younger,
Probably wants their own business,
Probably an online business.
They need to have some resources so they can buy what we're
selling, because this is not a cheap offer, and
They're probably interested in travel.
So that's what I would write down on my sheet as far as drawing up
common characteristics.
Now, what types of ezines might work for this particular offer? Which
ezines are going to reach readers that have these characteristics?
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Here's the list I would use. First and obviously would be the business
opportunity ezine.
You would be shocked at how many people stop right there.
In other words, they have a travel business opportunity that it offers
both the business opportunity aspect of it, and it also offers the ability to
travel. And they absolutely stop after they consider looking at business
opportunity ezines. I've seen this mistake made with travel businesses that
are also an opportunity, health businesses that also offer an opportunity,
and a range of others.
Sure business opportunity ezines are our first best choice. I mean, it's
logical. It makes sense, but you'd be shocked at how many people stop
there. And if you're selling a business opportunity, you know you do want to
reach people who are looking for a business, but there are so many more
that you can reach. So let's, continuing with our travel example, our travel
business case study, let's take a look at what else we could find.
Next and pretty obvious would be travel ezines, because we believe,
at least I do, that our person is interested in travel. So it would be a very
easy approach to make to say, "Hey, traveler, how would you like to travel
for less and even make money by writing reviews of where you go or taking
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video when you're on your trips or those type things?" A very logical
approach is to reach out to travel ezines.
Another would be golf ezines. Now, if you know me, you know I'm a
little golf crazy, and that's what's coming out there. There's some method
behind the madness. You might be surprised to hear me say golf ezines, but
here's my reasoning. Golf is an expensive hobby. It's one of the more
expensive hobbies, in fact. Golf clubs can easily cost $1,000, and a round of
gold can cost anywhere from $25 up to several hundred. Many golfers pay
these fees twice a week or more, while others belong to country clubs where
they can play golf as much as they like. But these country clubs aren't free.
So they are spending money. Everything about golf is expensive.
Golfers pay three bucks for golf balls that they lose by the dozen, and I'm
talking three bucks apiece if they buy the premium ones. And they lose
them by the dozen, so we know they have some money. But what about the
travel aspect of it? They meet one criterion, but do they meet the other?
Well, the fact is that golfers love to travel. Many, if not all, travel
websites offer gold getaways, golf packages for groups, and more, and this
is one of those secondary considerations that really help you zero in on the
ezines you want to find. When you see other sites making certain specific
offers, like you see the big travel websites offering golf packages that tells
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you something. And what it tells you is that golfers travel. If they didn't,
they wouldn't be targeting them.
So you can kind of piggyback on the research of these big websites by
noticing what they sell and then targeting similar products to the same
market. Does that make sense to you? It's a very common approach
among professional marketers but a very uncommon approach among
people who are just starting out or who are having a hard time finding their
way.
So there's a little inside tip that can help you a lot. If you go to big
websites and you notice the type of things they are advertising, the type of
packages they sell – I'm not talking about people who run ads on their sites,
but I'm talking about the type of packages they sell, if you notice what those
are, you can know they're targeting the people who come to their site, and if
you can think about who is that, you can target them too.
Now back to golfers. Golfers love to travel, so I think there's
something there. There's the attraction of playing golf courses that golfers
watch people play on TV. They'll visit Scotland, the home of golf. There are
just a lot of reasons that I believe personally that golfers are a good market.
I think they're a great target for this, as a matter of fact.
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But you know, I subscribe to a bunch of golf ezines, and I have yet to
see an ad for one of these travel business opportunities in one of these
ezines. Talk about unchartered territory. My goodness! I believe that's an
opportunity just waiting to be seized.
Let's move on. There are ezines about owning airplanes. Odds
are somebody who owns an airplane might like to travel somewhere. If your
travel business or your travel business opportunity is one that offers
packages where the person has to get themselves there but once they get
there they get like this huge week in a resort type thing, then that would be
a perfect ezine, because they've got the transportation problem licked but
they have to pay when they get there to stay. So there's an opportunity.
I think ezines about tennis might work, because tennis players do
travel around. They especially go to tournaments. That might not be
perfect, but I think there's something there. Ezines about sales and
marketing would be another category that I would look strongly at. Now
why would I do that? Because our person is going to need to market their
business, right?
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If they buy the business opportunity, if they buy the product to travel,
not so much, but if they buy the business opportunity, they're going to need
to know how to market that business.
And it doesn't matter what kind of system they get into, I think
everybody knows that you're also going to have to make some of your own
efforts. And so they're going to have to learn something about sales and
marketing, particularly on the Internet. So that leads us to Internet
marketing type ezines or ezines about advertising or any business
related ezine.
So there are bunches of categories right there. I can't even count how
many I listed. One, two, three – it looks like six so far or seven. Here's
another category that people would miss, and I'll make this the last one,
because it could be a long list, but I really want to give you only the ones I
would spend money on. I don't want to give you this, "Well, it could be this,
and it could be that. And it could be this other thing," list. I want to give
you the list I would create, the list I did create this afternoon, as a matter of
fact.
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And here's the category a lot of people would miss, and that's the
category of fine living. There are ezines out there that are dedicated to the
idea of find living, and people who are into that fine living like to travel.
They love to save money, too, even if they won't admit it. So as you can
see, the list is plentiful. There really is a good list there, and we've identified
six or seven, I think, categories that you could look at. Now, you're going to
definitely find ezines in these categories.
Now, let's look at some ezines that would be a mistake. If you're
a person who takes notes, you might want to draw a line and say, "These
are mistakes," or "no-no's," or however you do it.
I would not advertise this product in a parenting ezine, because too
many parents with young children, and that's who typically reads parenting
ezines, don't have the money to travel, and they stay close to home due to
financial pressures or because traveling with children can be challenging.
Not everybody does it well.
Now, this is not a blanket statement. There are exceptions, of course,
but not enough exceptions for me to spend my money on ads to this group,
especially when we've seen that there are really great groups that we can go
after.
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Another group I would avoid is gardening ezines. Gardeners
generally like to be home which is why, in part, they garden. Other groups I
would avoid are joke ezines, recipe ezines, and general interest ezines.
Even though general interest ezines – and by general interest, I mean the
ezines that go out with a wide variety of topics in them. They're not topic
specific. They're just of general interest. Those are too broad for my tastes
for this. There are just too many good resources to risk precious advertising
budget on any group that's not targeted.
So do you see the process at work? It does work. It will work for
you if you apply it. You create a profile for your customer, and again, we're
using the word "profile" just to bring common denominators, common
characteristics. And then you look at ezines that that person might read.
It's really a very simple process, especially after you've done it a few times.
It just makes all the sense in the world.
So I hope that helped you see the process I use when choosing ezines.
Now this is just the first cut. In other words, these ezines are going to have
to meet certain criteria that we're going to speak about in just a few
minutes. But this is how you start choosing ezines.
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You see that the universe of possible ezines for your offer is much
broader than you first imagined if you follow this process.
If you want to stay limited, just sell business opportunities in business
opportunity ezines. But that means you're going to go head to head with
everybody else who only does that and stops, and I think that's a
mistake. I think it's too competitive. I think there's no point in not going
after more fertile fields, as they say.
So finding the right readers is a major key in choosing the ezines in
which to place ads. If you have any questions about what I just covered,
please contact me and let me know. Send me your product – I mean, not
your product itself, but let me know what product you're doing, you're
working with, so I can do a case study for that. And let me help you find
ezines.
Now, point number two – and the rest of the points aren't going to
take quite as long. That first point – very, very important, the right readers.
Obviously, you're going to sell your products to people, and the people are
the readers. So knowing something about the people that you're interested
in reaching is very important.
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Point two is the right articles. So if you're following along the
success guide, write down "the right articles." Now why would I say the
right articles? Here's why. The quality of the articles, the quality of the
articles is what keeps people reading ezines. That's not how they start
reading ezines, but it's how they keep reading ezines, and it's an important
distinction.
Everyone, or almost everyone, goes through the same process when
they subscribe to an ezine. I'll bet you went through this process when you
subscribed to your ezines, however many you read. They're giving it a try
for a while to see if they like it. Ezines are free, by and large, so no harm
done in trying. What happens over the first few weeks or months,
depending upon the frequency in which the ezine is published, will determine
if the person who subscribes stays a subscriber or they leave. And that has
to do almost exclusively with the quality of the articles in the ezine.
I would say this, that in my own ezine, which I think I've published for
six years now, I believe it's six years, I have subscribers that I know have
been with me since I began. And I believe that what keeps them coming
back is that the quality of the articles is high. Now, I'm not patting myself
on the back and saying that I'm some great writer, but what I'm saying is I
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try to give helpful information in my ezine. So the quality of the articles, as
judged by the reader, is what matters.
People subscribe to get information. If the information is good,
they stay. If the information is bad or there's not enough of it or it's
disproportionate to the number of ads that are run – we're going to talk
about that tonight, too – these people will leave. They will go away. One of
the real things you want to look for, I mean, it's a super key to ezine
advertising, is how long have people been subscribed. Some publishers can
tell you. Some publishers can't. But if you find a publisher who can tell you
authoritatively that, yes, my subscribers have been around for X period of
time, then that's going to be a very good thing for you.
So how can you know if the articles in a particular ezine are any good?
There are three ways to know. First, look for online archives. Online
archives are a wonderful thing, and some publishers provide them, some
publishers don't. If you were on Call One, the last call, you know that we
looked at the site of an ezine publisher named Abby Drew who publishes an
ezine called DEMC. Now that's David, Edward, Mary, Charles. That's four
initials, so her URL is www.demc.com .
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If you've seen her site when you were on the call last week, you know
that her articles are right there on the site. They're on the very front page,
as they should be, so you can quickly determine the quality of the articles.
Because the article is the heart of the ezine. The ezine is not about
advertising. It's about information. She also lists who her main
contributing authors are. So you can get a sense from that of how good the
quality of the articles will be. That's another important consideration. If you
can find a publisher who lists who their contributors are, that's a really good
sign, something that should be paid attention to.
Now here's a second way. The first way is to look for online archives.
The second way is to subscribe to the ezine, and I know that probably
sounds like, "Yeah, I knew that," but it's something that a lot of people miss.
Subscribing to the ezines that you're interested in is very important. In fact,
I recommend it for every ezine you are considering spending money on. If
you're considering buying ads in an ezine and spending your hard-earned
money, now you worked hard for that money, and you need to know what
the ezine looks like and whether you like it before spending your hard-
earned money.
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You absolutely can subscribe with a Gmail address or a Yahoo! address
or whatever you want to do. I use my primary email address, and I filter
things out. I get lots of email every day. I really don't have that hard a
time managing it, but however you do it, you've really got to subscribe to
these ezines so that you can get a look at them. You can read an article or
two, and you can know, yeah, this is somewhere I would be proud to have
my ad show up. I feel like this is going to be effective for me.
Now, here's a third way. It's not really recommended, but it can be
done, so I'm going to mention it, and that is to email the publisher directly
and ask for a recent copy of the ezine. Doing this helps you know if the
publisher replies to email, but in fairness, publishers don't often respond to
these kinds of requests, nor do I think they necessarily should.
I think if the standard is that the ezine publisher answers every single
email that comes in, then that indicates that their boundaries are a little out
of whack and they're not spending time on things they have to spend time
on. They're busy serving existing subscribers. They're busy making sure
that things that need to be done get done, so if you send an email like this
and a publisher doesn't respond, I don't consider that to be a red flag.
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Now, if you've purchased an ad, you've been a subscriber for a long
time, you send an email that makes sense, and you're asking a question and
you don't get a response, I think that's a red flag. But sending an email
saying, "Hey, can I read one of your articles," it's not recommended, but it is
a method some people use.
So always remember to look at the quality of the articles. Quality
articles create long-term readers, and long-term reader buy better than any
other group available. It takes time for the reader, the subscriber, to trust
the ezine publisher enough to relax and consider offers that are sent to
them. It's just a fact of life. You probably won't hear anybody else ever say
that, but it's true. So the longer term the readers are the better the
response will be. I think that's one reason DEMC and others respond so
well.
Now, point three, write down "the right ad," if you want to take notes.
If not, that's okay – the right ad. Now what do I mean by the right ads? I
mean do they sell the type of ad that you want to buy? Some ezines only
sell classifieds. Some sell solos and classifieds and sponsors. Some only sell
sponsor ads. But the ones that only sell one type of ad – let's say they only
sell classifieds and you're wanting to buy solos, then that's not a good fit for
you.
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So you have to make sure they offer the right ads before spending any
time considering them. That's something that needs to be put – I put it on
point three on purpose, because I kind of take these one, two, three. This is
the process I use, and I've seen so many people over the years get excited
about a particular ezine only to discover they don't sell ads or only to
discover they don't sell the type of ad the person wants to place. They went
out and bought themselves a nice solo ad by a professional copyrighter, and
now they discover the ezine only takes sponsor ads.
There's nothing wrong with that. The publisher has the right to do
whatever they want to do, but it's really hard for a person to take that solo
of 500 words and squeeze it down to 150 words in a sponsor ad. So they're
kind of stuck. I think looking to see if the ezine sells the right type of ad is
an important factor.
Here's point number four – the right price. I'll bet you could deliver
this information better than I could. I mean, you know what I'm going to
say before I say it, but I'll say it anyway. An ezine can be perfect in every
way, but if the ad costs too much, then it just costs too much. And that
ezine is not right for you right now. There's nothing to say that I won't be
right for you in the future.
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So if you find the perfect ezine but can't afford it today, by all means
bookmark the page so you can return. And so you won't run into this very
often, but it does happen.
So for an ezine to be the right ezine for you, it has to be affordable.
I'm going to make this point one more time, and I don't want to be on a
soapbox about it, but I'm recommending that you spend no more than 25
percent of your ezine advertising budget on any one ad. So bear that
guideline in mind when considering costs. There are exceptions, but that
guideline will protect you over time.
Now, point number five is the right policy. The right policy – what
does that mean? You know, believe it or not, it is very important to get this
one right, and I'm going to show you why. What I mean by the right policy
is this – An ezine publisher must not send so many ads that they burn
their list out and cause the ezine to become ineffective for advertisers. This
is very important. I'm going to say that again. An ezine publisher must not
send so many ads to their list that they burn their list out and cause their
ezine to become ineffective for advertisers.
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Now, I know ezine publishers want to sell ads, and I respect that. But
there is a line. There is a boundary there. I see this with a lot with ezine
advertising co-ops. If you don't know what a co-op is, let me refer you to
the free ezine advertising glossary that I provided in the member center of
Ezine Advertising Live. A co-op is a site that sells ad packages comprised of
ads from small ezines, and those ads go out to small ezines for one low
price. The co-ops often sell classified ads, and a lot of times they sell solo
ads.
The ezines are usually bundled by subject or size of subscriber base –
usually by subject. So for one price you're buying an ad in between 20 and
50 ezines, which sounds like a great deal and it can be. I want to be very
clear about this. Co-ops can be good. They can be profitable. We're
going to talk about co-ops a little bit later tonight, but here's the problems
with co-ops that I want to cover right now. I call it cross-pollination, and
here's what I mean by that.
An ezine publisher wants to sell ads, so he or she lists their ezine in as
many ezine co-ops as they can. It makes sense, right? They need to sell
ads. These co-ops are going to sell ads for them, and so they list it in as
many of these as they possibly can.
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What happens next is that the co-op does their job. The co-op sells ad
space, and begins sending the publisher many more ads than he or she
anticipated, but the publisher has to run them, because that's the deal.
That's the agreement, and so they do.
If this continues very long, the publisher will burn out their list, and
response will drop to near zero. But get this, because here's the important
part. The publisher will never know that, because the ad they run is also run
in 50 other ezines or 20 or whatever the number is. But it's usually 12 or
more. That's the nature of a co-op, and the publisher never knows that the
ads don't work, because the advertiser never knows.
Now, why is that? It's because the advertiser can't track response
in any one ezine. Does that make sense? If you go to a site and it says
for 20 bucks I'm going to place your ad in 50 ezines, you're going to fill out
a form. You're going to fill out a form. You're going to fill out the ad, and
you're going to pay your 20 bucks or 50 bucks or whatever it is, usually by
PayPal, and you're going to place that same ad in a bunch of different
ezines. It is impossible to track the response of any one ezine in that
scenario. And if you can't track it, you can't know if it worked.
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So if you get response – let's say for the sake of discussion that you
place this ad in this co-op and it goes to 20 ezines and you get no response.
Does that mean all 20 ezines are bad? No, not at all. Let's say that you get
some response. Let's say that you place and ad in a co-op, and again, I'm
going to say co-ops can be good. I'm going to talk about how to use them
in a little while, but if you place an ad in a co-op here's the risk you run.
If you get some response, you can't possibly know where it came
from, and so you can't repeat your success unless you buy the same
package from the same co-op going to the same ezines. That is inefficient,
and you'll never receive the higher return on investment by doing it that
way. Now, can it work? Sure it can work, but if you can't track it, you
can't repeat it, and that's a bad thing.
Back to the right policy. If an ezine contains too many ads or sends
solos out too often, then that ezine is not going to be effective for you.
There's no hard number I can give you on this, but my personal rule is that
any more than three solos a week is too much. Again, that's not hard
and fast. I have run ezine advertising in ezines that send more than that
and done well, but my general rule of thumb when I buy ads is if they send
three solos a week and an ezine, they're talking to their people four days out
of the seven, anything more than that's too much.
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As to classified ads, how can you know if the classified ads are too
much in an ezine? Again, it's not a hard and fast rule, but here's what I
generally look at. If the classified ads take up more room than the article
that's in the ezine, I'm going to be a little bit careful. I have no problem if a
published wants to sell ads all day long. That's perfectly fine with me. This
is how they make their living. I respect that, and I have no problem with it
at all.
But when they load up and ezine with so many ads that you have a
little tiny article and a big block of ads, then I think there's a problem there.
I think there's a problem of reception among the readers, because readers
want information. They want the article.
Now, here's something else I'll say just flat out. In my opinion
sending solos every day to a list is too much. I will not buy ads in
ezines that send solos every day. I never will. I have. I've tested it, but I
won't spend my money that way.
So the right policy is this. The publisher must not send so many ads
that you will get lost in the clutter. That's really important.
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Okay, number six, the right format. The right format – what is the
right format? I'll be candid. I'm not sure there is a right format
universally, but formats matter, so we need to talk about it a little bit.
There are two formats for ezines, plain text and html. If you don't know the
difference, you can consult the glossary, but suffice it to say that HTML
ezines look like web pages when you read them in your email program,
while plain text are, you guessed it, plain text.
There's been a debate about which format is more effective for a long
time. Ever since email programs became html compatible so that they could
view html email, as well as plain text, there's been a debate about which
format is more effective. There are pros and cons to both, and while it's
true that almost everyone can get html email in their email program, I still
prefer plain text ezines for advertising for my ads, and I'll tell you why.
When my daughter sends me an email, it's in plain text. When my
golfing buddies want me to make a tee time and they send me an email, it's
in plain text. There are no banners. There are no moving arrows, not bold
or italic text, it's just information. When marketers send me messages
trying to get me to buy things, the messages are often in html. They look
like a web page. Some of the best ezines I get, and I read a lot of ezines
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every week, are in html. They're fun to read. They're entertaining. They're
colorful. They're clearly trying to sell me something.
So you see the connection there? They're colorful. They're fun. They
got all the widgets and gadgets, and they're absolutely trying to sell me
something. So for me plain text email is friendlier. For that reason I try to
place ads in ezines that are published in plain text. But that's not to say
that I won't place ads in html ezines or to say that I don't know the
difference. There is a difference.
There are huge advantages to html ezines, including the ability to
track open rates, to include links that are not clearly links so that you can
have any of the wording that you're talking about in your article to learn
more, you know, just, "If you want to learn more, use this link." You don't
even have to say, "Use this link." It's just like a web page. Any text can
become a hyperlink.
You can use color. You can use graphics. You can use movement.
Again, you can track the open rate so that you know how many of the emails
are opened out of all the ones that are sent. You can't do that with plain
text. But for me, those factors are trumped by the fact that plain text looks
friendlier. And that really matters to me.
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So what matters to you? All you need to do is know what your own
preference is and you'll have figured out how to choose the right format for
you.
So I hope you've got all six written down somewhere or, if not, get the
transcript, because it's really helpful to have the ability to look back and to
see what these points are kind of in an overview sense. I always think that's
a really good thing to be able to do.
Okay, let's shift gears a little bit, and if you have the success guide, go
ahead and open it up to Page Three. I'm going to do that right now, and I
want to talk to you a little bit about media kits. Now, last week we talked
about the four types of ezine publishers. One of the types of ezine
publishers that we talk about was the professional publisher, the publisher
that publishes for a living. They sell advertising for a living. They create
unique content, and they're very adept at sending out emails in such a way
that they get opened, that they get read and get acted on. These are top
tier ezine publishers, and there are lots of them out there.
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Most of these are going to offer you what's called a media kit, and so I
took some time to put together some pieces of a media kit in order to show
you what that looks like, and then I also did this other thing which is that I
uploaded to the members area two full media kits from very professional
ezine publishers so that you could download them and look at them at your
leisure. They both are from professional ezine publishing companies, as I
said. They both have the ability to send email out to literally millions of
people. They are very professional and very good at what they do, and they
provide a media kit to help you.
So if you have you success guide, take a look at page three. If you
don't, that's okay. You can still follow along and it won't be any problem at
all. Here is what a media kit will do for you. Now I'm not going to cover
everything that it will do, but I'm going to cover the most important things
that it will do.
The first is it will show you the reach of the publisher and the
publications. Now, the media kit that I used in this example is for a
company called ArcaMax. ArcaMax is a great ezine publisher who publishes
75 newsletters believe it or not. It's what they do, obviously, for a living,
and they do it very well. And here's what their media kit says.
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"Every day we send more than five million online newsletters to our
loyal readers who enjoy our family friendly, consumer-oriented editorial
content. ArcaMax offers 75 newsletters, including both original and
syndicated content, on a variety of topics from humor to current events. We
also boast a growing audience on ArcaMax.com, which delivers 15 million
banner impressions every month."
Not a bad opening paragraph. Five million online newsletters a
day, 75 newsletters to choose from total. So that paragraph which is at the
beginning of the media kit talks a little bit about their reach. That's very
important. You don't want to have to guess all this. You want to be able to
find it quickly and efficiently and make your decisions and move forward.
Now there's a second thing that a media kit should tell you which is
the types of ads available. If you have the success guide, on Page Four
you'll see that I have little screen shots showing that ArcaMax offers
newsletter banner ads, in other words banners that appear in their html
newsletters. They offer solo emails so that you can send your solo email. It
will stand alone and go to their list. They also offer newsletter text links.
This is something that publishers of html newsletters will offer. It's a little
box that will contain four or five text links. Very inexpensive and very
effective when you match the ezine to your offer.
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So a media kit is going to talk about the types of ads that are
available. Again, this is not everything in a media kit. It's the most
important thing.
The next thing and the last thing is that it will talk about pricing. If
you have your success guide, you'll see on Page Five the exact price of solo
emails to ArcaMax subscribers. Now, if you don't have the success guide, I'll
tell you what that is. It's $2.50 per thousand. "Your solo email," here's
what it says, "will be distributed to ArcaMax subscribers who had opted to
receive special offers from ArcaMax advertisers. This high-demand
opportunity has limited availability in 2008, so contact us today to reserve
your spot."
Now a good media kit also going to very clearly show you how to
contact that company. And when you contact them, they are going to be
highly responsive to your request, highly responsive. So $2.50 per
thousand is well within the range of what we've talked about in Ezine
Advertising Live. It's a great price. Now, not everybody can afford to do
this on a mass scale, but my goodness, these ezines are highly responsive
ezines.
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So download those media guides. Take a look at the media kits if you
have time. Take a look at the success guide if you have time, and get
familiar a little bit with media kits. Not all publishers use them, but the big
ones do, and that's a very good thing. It's a situation where it's very easy
to understand. All the information is in one place and it can really
benefit you.
We've spoken about a great many things about how to find ezines,
how to know which ones are right for you, how to match the ezine to your
offer. Very important to go beyond the obvious and consider ezines
where the content of those ezines is complementary to the product that you
sell, not only directly about it. Sometimes I think we forget this – we are
reaching out to people. Those people are just like you and me. They have
needs, and they have wants and desires and fears and things that excited
them and things that motivate them. And the more that we can tap into
these things with our advertising, the more effective our advertising is going
to be.
So if you have your success guide handy, turn to Page Six. And we're
going to start looking at the six proven ways to find ezines once you
know the type of ezine that's right for you.
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The first way that we're going to talk about is the Directory of Ezines.
Now, this is not a sales pitch for the Directory of Ezines, but I truly believe
the Directory of Ezines is the best resource on the planet for finding ezines
in which to advertise. We're working very hard to make that even better,
and let me tell you a little something about that for just a moment.
I feel comfortable speaking about the directory, because I checked
today, and 99 percent of the people on this call right now are lifetime
members of the Directory of Ezines. Over the years, we have decided that
we want to change the programming in the Directory of Ezines. And since
January, we've been working on just that very thing. In the next few weeks
we're going to introduce a new and improved Directory of Ezines that will
have different ways to search for ezines and make your searching tasks
faster.
In addition, we've taken on a researcher to find ezines to add to the
directory and a person to review the ezines that are in there now and update
them. So we're not relying on other people to update the directory or to add
ezines to the directory as much as we were before. I think you're going to
see some improvement in the directory in the next few weeks.
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It's a great resource now, but our obligation, our desire, our mission is
to make it the best that it can be. And we're working hard to do that.
So what I'm going to say next speaks to almost all ezine
directories, because there's a lot of ezine directories out there, but I'm
going to use some information from the Directory of Ezines, because it really
it the best resource for this type of thing. So the first proven way to find
ezines is the Directory of Ezines, and if you have your success guide, turn to
Page Seven, and you're going to see how to find ezines in four steps using
ezine directories, again, any ezine directory.
Here are the four steps.
The first consideration is category. As you've heard on this call
tonight, category is a very important thing, and that's the first best place to
start finding ezines. When I need to find ezines for the ads I place for
myself or for clients, the first place I look is category. But as you've heard
tonight, I don't stop with one category. I don't stop with the obvious, and I
think that if there was one thing that I could tell you tonight, one piece of
information, one nugget of truth that I'd have you take away from this call it
would be, "Don't stop with the obvious."
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Obviously you don't want to keep going too far, but you don't want to
stop with just the obvious category. So category is the first step that I take
in looking for ezines using a directory.
Now the next step is do they sell ads? The Directory of Ezines
makes this very, very easy to determine, because we list ad content. We list
the ad costs, the sizes, the times they run. We just list everything. We
have so much information in the directory, so the first step I do is I look at
category. Secondly, do they sell ads? And specifically, are they selling the
type of ads that I want? Not everybody sells solo ads. Some people only
sell classified ads, as we covered. So do they sell the ads, and do they sell
the size that I want?
I'm a little but careful with ezines, even the ones in the Directory of
Ezines, that offer free ads. That concerns me a little bit in the respect that
they can become so overwhelmed with requests for free ads, that their
content becomes a little out of balance. So sometimes when I'm searching,
I will say, "Free ads – no." In other words, I want an ezine that doesn't
offer free ads, that only offers paid ads; because the fact of the matter is
free ads don't work. They can work for doing some testing, but they don't
work as a marketing method, and they don't work to sell products generally.
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So I will choose, "Free ads – no." And then I'm looking for the other
types of ads that I want to find. I only choose one ad type at a time,
because I'm only interested to know do they sell solos or do they not?
So after I'm doing with that, you can turn the page if you have the
success guide, I want to look at ad costs. Now again, we're talking about
how to use the Directory of Ezines. Since the Directory of Ezines lists all of
this information where you can find it quickly, I'm able to quick determine
which ezines I want to use. As you'll see in a little while, it's much harder
when you're using other resources, which is why we exist.
But inside the directory there's really only four steps for me –
category. Secondly, do they sell the ad that I want? Third, what are the ad
costs? Now happily inside the Directory of Ezines we list exact ad costs. We
don't allow publishers to say, "Go to the site, and check the ad costs." We
want member to be able to quickly find exactly what they're looking for. So
I look at the ad costs and determine are they within my budget? Are they
within the budget that I have for this particular campaign?
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The next thing I want to do is determine available dates. Inside the
Directory of Ezines, you will see that we have a section that talks about how
often they run ads, where to submit ads to, and that type of thing. But if
you want the next available date, you'll need to either contact the publisher,
or you'll need to visit their website.
Happily, we make that easy, too, because we list full contact
information for publishers as often as we can. We get phone numbers, fax
numbers. We get a contact email for the publisher himself or herself. We
even get addresses. We try to be very thorough. We can't always get all
the information, but we try to be very thorough in getting the information
that you need to contact the publisher quickly.
Now I do have members that say from time to time, "You know, I
emailed this publisher and the email bounced." Or, "I emailed this publisher
and never heard back. The email just went into the ether." In that case, I
recommend visiting their website. Or if you're comfortable making a
phone call to them, make a phone call, but I recommend you visit their
website.
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Because of the proliferation of spam over the past few years,
publishers do sometimes stop using an email address, but they don't notify
us about it. So an email address that we might have listed temporarily
won't work. They've gone, instead to a contact form or, like I have, to a
support center. So if you find an email address that won't work, let us
know, but mostly go to their website. We list all of the details of how to
contact them.
So on the Directory of Ezines it's really a four-step process. Find the
category. Find the type of ads. Determine the ad costs. Determine the
next availability. From there it's a very simple matter of placing the ad.
Very quick. Very easy. I was a member of the Directory of Ezines. That's
what I liked about it, and as the guy who owns the place, that's what I like
about it, too. And I'm putting new programming in place to make it even
better. So that's how you use the Directory of Ezines.
Let me stop and say at this point that I'm going to make a video about
almost everything I'm talking about in the second half of the call, how to
find ezines with the DOE, how to find ezines using other ezine directories,
how to find it using search engines, etc.
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I'm going to make videos about almost all of this over the next few
weeks, and as those are made, I'm going to put those in the members area
of Ezine Advertising Live. And of course, for the Directory of Ezines, we're
going to put them in the new pages of the Directory of Ezines. You're going
to see a lot of changes coming up pretty soon.
Now, you're on page eight of your success, and just stay there for a
moment. The next way to find the right ezines is other ezine directories,
and I'm going to talk about these, because I think it's only fair to not talk
about only the Directory of Ezines. Some people make a mistake and think
that the Directory of Ezines tries to list every ezine in the world, and we
absolutely don't do that. In fact, we're a little bit hard to get into in the
respect that publishers have to meet certain criteria before we'll list them in
the Directory of Ezines. Those criteria are found on the page that we have
on our site for people who list their publications.
But basically they have to publish articles, or they have to sell
advertising. We have to see back issues. We have to communicate with
them, things like that. And those criteria are very important to us. Other
ezine directories – not speaking badly about them at all – just saying that
they don't necessarily follow that same routine. So let's talk for a moment
about other ezine directories.
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Free ezine directories are advertising driven. In other words, they
display AdSense ads on their site, and that's how they make money. So if
we think about this for a little bit – now you know me well enough to know
that my motto has always been that quality is more important than quantity.
And while I'm on that, let me just say that your goal with searching for
ezines is not to find 50 or 100 or 150 that we might advertise in. When I go
looking for ezines, I'm looking for five. I'm looking for three. I'm looking
for maybe seven at the most if I have a big budget, because what I
want to find is the right ezine for the offer that I have, not a cornucopia of
ezines that might be right. I find that to be wasteful from a time standpoint.
So I'm looking for the quality ezine, the one where I feel like my ad is
going to have a good chance of bringing me a return on investment. The
reason I bring that up is this. Free ezine directories are perfectly fine, but
they exist primarily to make money for the owner of the ezine directory by
displaying AdSense ads on their site. So follow this logic with me. If they
have more pages, then they can display more ads. So if they lower the
threshold of what they will accept as a listing, they'll get more pages and
be able to display more ads.
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This is one reason we have never gone towards a free ezine directory
model, even though we certainly have the resources to do that, because
what we're about is the quality, not the quantity.
So when you go to a free ezine directory, one of the challenges you'll
face – and please understand, I want to be careful here. I am not in any
way talking bad about these people or these ezine directories; because they
can be useful, but one of the challenges you will face is they have many,
many pages.
One of the reasons for this is that they will list any ezine, even
those that have five subscribers. Now you know and I know and they know
that placing an ad in an ezine with five subscribers is ridiculous. It's not
going to happen, and if it does, it's not going to do you any good. But you'll
have to weed through those in order to get to the nuggets that you are
looking for. So that's something to be careful about, because I don't want
you to waste your time.
Another thing is that most of these listings are not checked by hand.
They don't determine if there's actually a website, and they're not updated
very often, if at all.
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One thing, too, about free ezine directories are that you will find many
times people will list ezines that aren't really ezines but actually sales
letters. That's a very common problem in the ezine directory world.
In fact, let me tell you what happened to me last week. There's a
fellow who listed his "ezine," and I'm saying ezine in quotes, and he listed
that he had 13,000 subscribers. Okay, that's fine. He listed that he sold
solo ads for a particular price, classified ads for a particular price. He
accepted articles. He put all his contact information in there, and when I
checked the link, when I clicked the link that he listed as his ezine home
page and the page you could subscribe from – he even listed that he'd had
this ezine for three years. Sure enough, it took me to a sales letter for a
product. No ezine in sight. No nothing anywhere.
This guy absolutely didn't publish an ezine. All he did was tell a
bunch of lies in order to try to get listed in the Directory of Ezines, because
he thought that would drive traffic to his site. And he was right in that
regard. If he had successfully listed with us, he would have driven traffic to
his site, but we preempted that, because we're not going to waste members'
time. So we deleted the listing, and I wrote to him and said, "I think we
both know you don't have an ezine, and that's okay. But you know, don't do
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this again, please." And of course I never heard back, and these things
happen, I'm not exaggerating, five to seven times a week.
People will list an ezine that's not their own thinking they'll get traffic
to their affiliate link. They'll just blatantly make up information and try to
list what they're calling their ezine. And then there are some people who
honestly misunderstand. They take the time to fill out the forms, and they
list their ezine not understanding what they're doing. And we communicate
with each one of them. One of us communicates with them via email
or phone every time, but we check every link, and we're not letting them
in.
So that's something you have to be careful with. With a free ezine
directory, you're going to bump into a lot of sales letters, even
though the listing is going to look very legitimate.
Unfortunately, you'll also find porn sites and gambling sites and things
like that. Most of these sites are fully automated. That's why. You put this
site. You put a little programming in place. There's no approval process.
There's no review process, so it's just boom, boom, boom. You list whatever
you want, and you're listed.
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Another thing is that publishers will list on every possible directory
they can, and when they find that these free ezine directories will list them
immediately, they list on all of them. That's fine, because the publisher's
job is to promote his or her publication, but it wastes your time because
you're going to see that same ezine in many different places.
So these are the downsides to free ezine directories. The upsides to
them are they do contain a lot of information. Some of it is very good. I
would use the search facility that they offer as much as you possibly can,
and when searching on free ezine directories, I would be very careful to look
at the date that they listed. I'd be a little careful, although one click to the
site will generally do the trick. It just takes time.
Method number three is ezine advertising co-ops. Now we talked
about co-ops a little while ago, and we talked about cross-pollination. And
we talked about being careful of ezines that put out too many ads to their
readers, and all of these things are true of ezine advertising co-ops. You
have to beware of the quality. You have to know that they are often
going to have very small ezines, not necessarily five subscribers like with the
free directories, but sometimes 150, an ezine with 150 subscribers will be
listed, and they often have outdated information.
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Now, I'll be the first to tell you, it's hard to keep up with information.
It's hard to keep up with big masses of information and keep it updated, but
some of these haven't updated since 2002, and that's a long time. So you
have to be careful with the ezines you find within the co-ops.
I want to be careful to make the distinction here. I'm not saying the
co-op is doing anything wrong or that they'll take your money and run or
any of those things. What I'm saying is that the ezines that exist within the
co-op, the ones that they list in their co-op, can be questionable. That's why
I recommend that if you're serious about a co-op, you go ahead and click on
the links for the individual ezines.
Now, this is time consuming, and you should know that the ones in the
co-ops that check out are mostly in the Directory of Ezines but not all of
them. So you could find ezines that you don't find in the DOE by using
these co-ops. And I will say also that it's an incredibly inexpensive way
to reach a large number of subscribers. It's good that it's a very large
number, because I question how much deliverability is going on, but that
said, I want to be 100 percent clear that co-ops can work. I'm not saying at
all that you should completely shy away from them.
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Method number four is search engines, and I want to dig into this
a little bit and talk about search engines, because they can be very helpful
for finding ezines. We use search engines all the time. We use them as a
tool of research all the time. In fact, I have people who are just very good
at using search engines to find exactly what they're looking for.
If you have your success guide, you'll want to turn to Page Nine, and
you'll notice that some pages that follow are about search engines. Now this
information is an excerpt of a book that I've written about search engines
that I'm going to provide to Ezine Advertising Live members at no cost. But
I want you to have some of the information now, because the book's not
ready yet. It's simply a book about how to use search engines to find what
you're looking for. It might be ezines. It might be the right Weed Eater.
Nonetheless, search engines are very helpful.
Now you use a search engine – I'm sure everybody listening to this
has been to Google many times, and you probably know how to use Google,
but what you might have never done is you might never have clicked on the
little tiny link next to the search box that says "advanced search." I'm
going to make a video about this very thing, because I want to show you, as
well as talk to you, about how to use search engines to find ezines. For the
moment we'll talk about it.
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The first thing to d when you go to a search engine is use the
advanced search feature. I suggest that you click that link and learn
something about advanced searching. And certainly the information that I'm
providing in the success guide will help with that, but the first thing you're
going to want to do is to enter a search phrase that's as descriptive as
possible about what you're looking for.
Now let's say for the sake of discussion that you're in the financial
industry, and you want to find ezines about financial matters to see if you
can purchase advertising in them and promote your financial-based product.
The first thing I would do is I would enter into Google the term "financial
ezine" in quotes. Now, if you're near a browser and you want to do this,
you can certainly follow along. There's nothing wrong with that at all. I'm
going to put in the search box "financial ezine" and then look for the
search results.
I've got quite a few, and what we're going to want to do is try to
determine do they sell advertising. So if you pick the page that you want to
go to – here's the secret with this. This is a little trick. It will come across
better on the video, but this is something I have found to be true across the
board when using search engines. The first thing you want to look for when
you use a search engine and you've clicked on a link that you suspect is a
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site that will sell you advertising is you want to go to the bottom of the
page and you want to look for the word "advertising."
If it's there and you click that link, you will then be taken to a page
that will explain what type of advertising this ezine offers. Sometimes
it's a little hard to figure out. Sometimes and most of the time, I have to
say, it's very obvious. But the first thing to look for is a link that says
"advertise."
Now when I do research using search engines and I'm trying to find
ezines in which to advertise, I look for that advertise link first, and if I don't
find it, I'll be candid, I move on to another site. You may want to be more
persistent than that, but I tend to move pretty quickly when I'm doing this
type of research using these methods, because I can find what I need in the
Directory of Ezines. But I'm also looking for other things, so I'm going to
move pretty quickly. And I'm looking first for that link that says
"advertising." If I find it, then I'm going to get in there, and I'm going to
determine what type of advertising they have.
If they have a media kit, I'm going to download that media kit and
save it for later and then move on to the next, because I'm gathering
information that I'll eventually put into either a spreadsheet or I'll analyze it
a little bit later.
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If they do sell advertising and you click that link, you can determine
what size ad, what cost, and other parameters.
If that's not clearly listed, here's what I suggest. I suggest writing
up a standard email – as a matter of fact, I'm going to provide you with
the standard email that I use for advertising request, and basically it's just a
short email that says, "Here's who I am. Here's what I'm looking for, and do
you provide it?"
Now in this case, I have found that most of those emails I do get a
response. I will get a response from most publishers when I'm making and
advertising request if they have an advertising link. Again, if they don't
have an advertising link, I've moved on, but you have to dig into these, and
you have to get the important criteria. What are the categories? Obviously
you're on their site, so you should know what it's about. What types of ads
do they run? What are the costs? And what are the availabilities. Those
are the big three: types of ads, cost, and availability. So if you can
determine that from the site, make a note of that or purchase an ad and
then move on. If not, send a standard email to the publisher, bookmark the
site, and move on to the next.
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Search engines are really very easy to use for ezines, but you're going
to want to use a few keywords in there. Obviously, if you're in the financial
business, financial might be, bond, stock trading. You're going to want to
use the keywords that you use normally to describe your site or to describe
your product, and that's going to be a very important consideration. You're
going to want to add to that the word "ezine," and you're going to want to
add to that the word "advertising."
Now using advanced techniques, you can drill down and find more
specifics than you can otherwise. Your search statement is, of course, the
word or phrase you type in to begin the search. The words don't have to
make sense. This is something, too, that I think people don't understand
about using search engines, and this is not a seminar about how to use
search engines, but it is something about how to use search engines to find
ezines. So understand that your search statement doesn't have to
make sense to a person.
They have to make sense to the search engine.
In other words, "find a financial ezine" is not any better than "financial
ezine."
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Now the hits that you see are going to be search results. Sometimes
they're a homepage, and sometimes they're a page that might just be
optimized for the words that you searched on. Unfortunately, that's not a
guarantee anymore that the pages will have that content.
Here's another thing that you should know, just a couple of search
engine tips, and that is that search engines and directories are
different. Google is a search engine. Yahoo! is a directory. If you do an
identical search on each, you'll see quite a bit of difference. Search engines,
of course, create their listings with what's called a spider, a little program
that scans the Internet continuously looking for new or updated pages, and
search engines used keywords in order to determine which search results
they're going to return to you.
Directories often depend upon humans to submit sites for listings and
to review sites, although Google does review more sites now with human
editors than they used to. Directories use their own systems to
categorized sites into groups and determine the results you see.
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I think a lot of people go to Google and forget about Yahoo!, and that's
fine. You know, you can do what you want, but I'll tell you, I use Yahoo! a
lot, because as a directory it's very good. And sometimes I find results more
quickly doing that. I find that directories return fewer results, but
sometimes that's a good thing.
How many times have you gone too Google, typed in what you're
looking for, and four-and-a-half million hits? That's not unusually helpful.
They're not grouped in any particular order. Sometimes they're a little hard
to wade through. I find that occasionally a directory will return fewer but
sometimes more relevant results, so you have to try these different search
engines and see which one fits you. There's Google and Yahoo! and Ask and
these others. Search engines and directories work the same way, but they
provide different results.
Here are a few tips to use when you're using search engines. Avoid
repeating keywords in your search statement. You don't want to put the
keywords in too many times. Keywords are good, but you don't want to
repeat them. Using jargon actually helps you search better if you're in
an industry that uses jargon, particular phrases. Those phrases will
generally be unique to your industry, and because of that, using the phrases
instead of their synonyms will help you find sites more quickly.
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I have a friend who sells a bond-trading product, and the phrase "bond
trading" just doesn't really appear on a lot of ezines about collecting sports
cars or playing golf of cooking. So using jargon can actually help your
search statement, and it brings back some very interesting results.
You probably know, but in case you don't, if you use quotation
marks, it will combine words into one phrase, and so those words
have to be together as that phrase.
Search engines tend to automatically place an "and" invisibly in
between words. So if you have "health ezine," it's going to be "health and
ezine." Again, the book that I'm going to provide you, I think will be very
helpful for that, and I think you'll enjoy it.
So using search engines to find engines to fine ezines can be tedious,
because once you're found the ezine, you have to determine do they sell
advertising. The way to do that is to look for that advertising link. I find it
90 percent of the time, literally, at the very bottom of the page. Why
publishers do this, I don't know, but they tend to neglect putting their
advertising link in their regular navigation. So you'll come to an ezine site
that'll have left-hand navigation with all of those nice little scroll things that
change when you roll over them. Not a word about advertising, but down at
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the very bottom you'll find the advertising link. If you find it, follow it. If
you don't find it, I'd move on to the next.
That's the first pass; do they sell advertising? If they do, you want to
determine types, costs, and availability as quickly as you can. Using search
engines to find ezines can be very time consuming. I don't recommend it as
your first best choice, but it can be effective if you have lots of time.
Let's move on to method five, which is word of mouth. Now this
might surprise you a little bit, but asking your friends and asking other
people who do ezine advertising, it can be very effective. But it's something
that people often forget. One thing I would mention is this. If you're in any
kind of a network marketing or MLM type of business, you should definitely
ask your upline which specific ezines they're using to advertise that
program. These people have a vested interest in your success, and there
should be no hesitation to help you succeed. So I think it's a valid idea to
ask them which ezines they use if they use ezine advertising. Some do and
some don't.
Now, there are a couple of ways to gather ezine information using
word of mouth. One way is to ask your upline if you're in that type of
business. Another thing is to visit the forums.
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If you have your success guide, you'll find on Page 11, which is the
last page of the success guide, Page 12 is just for your notes, you'll find a
list of forums that I have used over the years to talk about ezine
advertising. Sometimes I've done research by asking questions on these
forums.
Mostly, to be candid, I've answered questions about ezine advertising
and how it's done and that type of thing. But it's happy that there are
people on forums who will answer questions. I always say this when I talk
about forums. You need to know going in that forums can be a little
contentious sometimes. Sometimes the people on forums are there, and
they're a little fussy. And they're fuss at you, but I have found often if you
stick with it and you're patient, you can get some really good information on
forums.
So what I've done is I'm compiled a list of forum resources for you,
and I've put that on Page 11 of your success guide. I visit the Warrior forum
a lot. Probably you're familiar with the Warriors of Internet Marketing
created by Allen Says. If you're not, it's a forum that I suggest that you
visit. Anthony Blake runs a forum, as well as Michael Green, his
HowToCorp.com forum is very good, and I've listed five or six others that
can be very helpful, too. I like Harvey Seagal's forum on ClickBank products
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if you're an affiliate marketer who sells ClickBank products. Often if you go
in and just post a question about ezine advertising, was it effective, have
you used it, can you share specific ezines, then you'll get some interesting
feedback.
Now sixth and finally, there are professional researchers. This is
an area that people overlook, and it can be done pretty cost effectively
depending on how serious you are about finding a large list of ezines. I
don't suggest this as your first method, of course. That's why I listed it last.
It's not a method many of you will use, I think, but it can be done.
There are sites like Elance and Rent a Coder and places like that were
people who do research for a living, these people live to be in front of their
computer and ferret out pieces of information, can find some information for
you about ezine advertising.
The reason that I don't suggest this is a good method or a first best
practice method for this is because it's generally a little bit costly, and
not all of the researchers get it when it comes to ezine advertising.
They'll find ezines, you betcha, all day long, because that's an easy
thing to do. But to determine if that ezine sells advertising, publishes
currently, how to contact them, and all of the other data that is in the
Directory of Ezines is a very difficult thing to do.
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Let me recap these methods for you.
1. The first is Directory of Ezines.
2. The second is free ezine directories, or I should say other ezine
directories.
3. Number three, ezine advertising co-ops, something worth
looking into but enter with caution.
4. Fourth is search engines. Again, you'll get a video on this as
soon as I can possibly make it, and I'll show you exactly what to
look for on the page. That's the key. The key is when you
arrive at the page to quickly filter them in or out. Make a
decision quickly. Don't get caught up in the content. Don't get
caught up searching around for a link. If you can find it, it's
there, and if not, move on.
5. Fifth is word of mouth
6. Sixth is using professional researchers.
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Now let me say this in closing – The goal is not to find a huge list
of ezines you can use.
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!
The goal is to find a core set of ezines you can profit from time
and time and time again. Finding 100 ezines might be fun. It might be
interesting. It might make you feel like, "Oh, look at how many I have to
choose from," but I'm telling you that what you're looking for is three to
five powerful ezines that can work for you. Go beyond the obvious,
and find three or five ezines that will work well and that you can afford to
test with and you'll have success with ezine advertising.
I looked back today at the campaigns that I ran over the years, both
for myself and for clients, and almost all of them began by finding five
great ezines and then moving on, once success was happening, once the
money was flowing in, now the campaign funds itself. You place those first
few ads. You use 25 percent of your budget, no more than, in one location,
and you don't spend all your money in one place. You have a powerful ad,
as powerful as you can make it, and you start with a core set of ezines that
are right for you, because they're well matched to your offer.
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The readers see that ad, and they're going to say, "Oh, yeah, that's
something that interests me." You don't have to gin up their interest. You
don't have to generate their interest. You don't have to create their
interest. You don't have to interrupt them and get their attention. You'll
have their attention, because you know they're interested in what you're
offering. Once you do that, you'll begin to have real success with ezine
advertising.
Thank you as always and I hope you enjoyed call 2 of our Ezine
Advertising Live series! Good night.