Ezine Advertising

Selling other people’s products is maybe the easiest way to earn a living online … if you know how to do it!

Many people start their online business venture like this: sign up for a certain affiliate program, log into their account, copy and paste an ad provided by the owner of that affiliate program, and submit that ad to ezines.

After their 10-minute job, they just sit and wait for the money to come …

Wrong approach! Online world is part of the real world, not of fairy tales … You have to work a little bit before getting some good results …

If the affiliate program is not brand new on the market, then copying and pasting an advert you found in your affiliate account is the biggest mistake an advertiser can make.

Hundreds or even thousands of other affiliates did the same thing and other tens or hundreds are about to do it.

If you didn’t got it yet, let me explain you what the problem is.

Forget what you’re doing (affiliate marketing) and try to be in my shoes: I’m a simple reader of some ezines. The POTENTIAL reader of your ad and the POTENTIAL buyer of the product you advertise.

Without reading all the lines of that ezine ad … I recognize it at once. Within the last years I’ve seen the ad you intend to show me hundreds of times.

Why do you believe I will click NOW on your affiliate link?

Why do you believe that any big company – McDonald’s, Coca Cola to name only two – changes its commercials periodically? Just because they can afford it? No. Because the viewers get bored and the message is LOST!

No advertiser wants to irritate the readers with his message …

Do you?

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This article has been published for the first time by Ezine Advertising Info Newsletter – a newsletter published by AdsMarket Ezine Advertising Network.

Today I’ve conducted a test to see how serious are some of the ezine ad co-ops that sell you advertising space in ezines.

For the purpose of this test I’ve selected the newsletter HomeBiz_Bites published by Donna Sweat.

Donna published her ezine since 2000 under the name Dee’s Helpful Info and then on July 2007 she renamed it HomeBiz_Bites.

Now let’s search on Google for “HomeBiz_Bites”.

First 2 results show the ezine’s website, the 3rd result is one full page dedicated to this ezine by AdsHome Ezine Ad Co-op, the 4th result is 2Bucks an Ad, the 6th result is MyWizardAds … That’s it. Only 3 ad co-ops contain references to HomeBiz_Bites.

Now let’s search on Google for “Dee’s Helpful Info” to see if there is any ad co-op whose last update of the database is made before July 2007.

1st result: 10Dollars20Ads. They also show as homepage of the ezine a website that no longer exists.

On the next page we found another ad co-op: EzinesUnited. The same old and not working website is shown. [To read more about this advertising co-op read our post "Ezines United - an ad co-op to be avoided"]

On page 3 another one: Home Business Advertising (HBAds)

On page 9: SubscribeMe.net – at least this ad co-op does not charge you any money … so you get exactly what you pay!

Next weeks I will continue the tests …

Some ezine ad co-ops didn’t update their database since months or even years (!), other ad co-ops promise you to publish your ad in ezines no longer published since many years (!!!) …

Until next week … take care!

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UPDATE made on January 13, 2008: The owner of Home Business Advertising (HBAds) has removed “Dee’s Helpful Info” from his classified ad co-op’s listing. Google’s cache of the page as retrieved on 10 Jan 2008 10:21:18 GMT still shows the ezine at the position 63, but next time when Googlebot will spider the page, it will not see it anymore

HBAds owner is subscribed to the ezine where this post initially was published (Ad Co-ops News Ezine). I don’t know whether he has read the ezine published on 6th of January or not, but anyway he made the update. That’s why in the first stage of the test I am running under the name “How serious are the ezine ad co-ops?” I will penalize this ad co-op with only half a point instead of 1 point.