CREATING YOUR OWN E-ZINE

July 2, 2009 Written by Mr X 0 Comment

Now that we have established that creating your own E-zine is actually a good idea, we’re going to begin the process of actually creating the e-zine itself. The first step in doing this is deciding exactly what kind of e-zine you want to create.

Remember what we said in the previous article? There is more than one way to create an e-zine.

One is to offer what we call an e-zine newsletter. This is an e-zine that will be emailed to your subscriber base on a regular basis, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly or whatever frequency you choose.

In creating an e-zine newsletter that will be emailed, you also need to decide on the format of the newsletter itself. Are you going to send out text emails or are you going to send out your e-zine in HTML format? Just a word of caution; HTML emails are many times flagged as spam by Internet service providers, so you may want to stay away from them unless you have a really reliable autoresponder service that has an excellent delivery rate and reputation with the ISPs.

While we’re on the subject of autoresponders for your e-zine, there are a couple of ways you can go with this.

The first, and simplest, is to go with an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse. Both are good services and you can’t go wrong with either one of them. They will both make sure that the bulk of your emails get delivered to where they need to go. The advantage of having an outside service is that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints, as they will handle all of them, including all opt-ins and opt-outs, or as is most commonly referred to as unsubscribes.

The downside to going with an autoresponder service is that you are pretty much at the mercy of their system. If there are things about it you don’t like, well, you either have to live with them or switch to a new service.

The second option is to have an autoresponder script set up on your own server. The advantages of this are that you are in complete control of your list and how your autoresponder works.

However, there is a HUGE downside to going with your own autoresponder script. Should one of your subscribers happen to scream spam (yes, it DOES happen), the complaint goes to your ISP. If you get enough of these complaints, your ISP can pull the plug on you and you’ll end up losing your hosting.

My personal recommendation is to go with a service like Aweber or GetResponse. You will save yourself a ton of grief.

Aside from offering your own newsletter through email, you can choose to offer your e-zine in the form of a web page that you would update every so often.

There are pros and cons to this as well.

The pros to having your e-zine on a web page are that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints. No emails are sent. The person just goes to the site, signs up for membership, gets his login and password and then accesses the site whenever he wants to. This makes for very little work for you as far as notifying members.

A good idea would be to have the last time the site was updated somewhere on the main page with what the update was so that people don’t have to go looking all around for the new information.

The cons of having your own web site e-zine are numerous.

For starters, maintaining a website is a lot more difficult and time consuming than typing up a 2 page letter and sending it out to subscribers. If you’re not an expert at web design, updating your site can be quite a painful process.

Another negative of having a member’s e-zine is that, unless you still have them opt-in, you have no way of contacting these people to let them know that the site has been updated. Many people, if not reminded about the e-zine, will simply forget that it exists and as a result will not come to the site at all after a period of time.

Another negative about having a website e-zine is security. If you want to keep the site only open to members, you’re going to have to have certain scripts written to keep people from hacking into your site. All of this is going to cost a lot more money than just sending out a newsletter, even if you do have to pay monthly fees to some autoresponder service.

Regardless of which format you decide to go with, there are going to be administrative headaches with each. Because of that fact, I strongly recommend staying away from the website and go with the email newsletter, at least when you first start out. As time goes by, you can “graduate” to a web based e-zine.

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E-ZINE CONTENT- WHERE TO GET IT

June 3, 2009 Written by Mr X 0 Comment

Okay, you’ve decided on the format of your e-zine. Regardless of what format you decide on, you’re going to have to get content for it. The question is, where do you get this content from?

Well, you basically have two choices.

You can write it yourself or you can get it from someplace else.

Let’s start with the writing it yourself option since it is the probably the best option overall.

First of all, let me explain why I feel writing the content yourself is the best option.

The Internet is content crazy. Everything on the Internet is based on content. The sites with the highest rankings and the most visitors have the most content. But not just the most content, but the most “original” content. And that is the key.

What exactly is original content? The best way to illustrate that is with an example.

You sit down at your computer and type up a story about how your Aunt Bessie went to the store to pick up a can of peas and ended up being attacked by a 700 pound gorilla. Now that’s quite a monkey story for the middle of New York City.

It’s also original content.

Now, let’s say you submitted that story to an article directory and somebody liked it enough to include it in one of their story e-zines. They pay the article directory for the right to use the article and then they send it to their subscriber base.

That is NOT original content. It is content that somebody got from a third party.

That is why your first choice is to write your e-zine content yourself. If you send out old content that you got from some article directory to your member base and somebody happens to recognize it from someplace else, they may feel cheated. Maybe they WERE expecting original content. Don’t get me wrong, purchasing content from article directories, or even finding free content, which you can do, is perfectly legit. But don’t you feel that your subscribers deserve the best that they can get?

Now, having said that, if you simply can’t write, you can still get original content. All you have to do is hire somebody to write it for you. You can go to a place like Elance.com and get somebody to write articles for you. Please understand that in most cases, you will get what you pay for. Somebody charging you only $3 an article is probably not going to give you top notch quality work.

Now, if you should happen to find somebody who is willing to write for you for free, there is going to be a catch to this. Most likely he is going to want to include a link to his website in the newsletter itself. So just be prepared for this.

Some people really have no choice when it comes to content and have to get content from a third party. If it’s original third party content, meaning they wrote it specifically for you, that’s fine. It’s just as good as your own, if not better, especially if they are a good writer.

But if you get content that has been circulated all over the Internet, your e-zine credibility just won’t be as great. This is something you might want to consider before you even decide if you want to offer an e-zine, because without killer content, that’s the ball game.

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