Let Your Affiliates Build Your Opt-In Lists!

Starting your own e-zine is a great way to build credibility and increase revenue. Visitors, prospects and contacts will admire your ability to reach audiences with your message on a regular basis. Advertisers will also admire your ability to reach an audience - and may be willing to pay you to reach your audience with their promotional messages.

Many online businesses are trying to capitalize on the credibility and revenue that an e-zine adds. It seems that every site you visit asks you to "Sign up for our Newsletter", or "Join our E-zine List for Weekly Updates".

Though they are all jumping into the e-zine game headfirst - all don't succeed. So, what's the trick? What makes some e-zines succeed and some e-zines fail?

There are two main factors in the success - or failure - of an e-zine: Content and Subscribers.

Content
Content is the base of your e-zine. Your content needs to be well-written, expansive and worth writing about. If you write well - write. If you write "good" - hire someone to write for you! Even the best topics, issues and angles can get lost in a mess of misspelled words, incomplete thoughts and run-on sentences. Be sure that your content is clear, concise, grammatically correct and accurately spelled.

Pick a topic that is expansive enough to continually write about. Pick an industry - not a product; an issue - not a current event; a hobby - not a project. Plan a schedule for regular mailings - daily, weekly, monthly - and review your topic to be sure that you'll have no problem coming up with new content to meet the schedule.

Remember, though a topic may be interesting to you - it may not be worthy of an entire e-zine. Choose a topic that is worth writing about for you and worth reading to your potential subscribers. For example: If your company manufactures construction paper, an e-zine about the paper may not be interesting enough to read. However, a well-written article on the many uses for construction paper in an e-zine about crafts is more interesting and worth reading.

Subscribers
Subscribers are very important as well - if not more important. If you have the most well-written articles, eye-catching ads and appealing layout but nobody to read it, you're e-zine is a flop!

The more subscribers you have, the better. You've probably seen sites that boast subscriber levels in the thousands - but you probably haven't run across any sites that boast "14 subscribers!". People are impressed with big numbers. Hearing that thousands of people read your messages makes you and your message sound important, interesting and useful. Thousands of subscribers will also help you get top dollar from advertisers who want to reach your readers.

So, where do you find these valuable subscribers?

You can place a guestbook on your site to sign up visitors - but that means signing up only a fraction of your unique daily visitors. You can place ads in other e-zines, list your e-zine in a directory of electronic newsletters, post classified ads about your e-zine and so on.

Or