Ezine Advertising

Today I will talk about a common mistake made by many advertisers who promote their products or businesses by buying ezine classified ads.

There is a copywriting principle that basically says that a “call to action” wording will help you improve the results that your salesletter or ad will get.

That’s right when we talk about a salesletter or about a solo ad.

When we talk about ezine classified ads, the use of a call to action wording is … wrong. Completely wrong!

Let me explain you why …

A classified ad is very short and you have at your disposal only a very limited space for grabbing the reader’s attention.

If the short advertising space is wasted by using different call to action wordings … you fail.

The call to action works when there is something before it that grabs the reader’s attention first. If there is nothing that makes the reader interested, your call to action is worthless anyway.

Let’s look at 2 examples.

Example 1:

Free internet marketing ebooks for any visitor:
link A

Example 2:

Click here NOW, don’t miss this:
link B

On what link would you click?

The first ad tells you that you will get some ebooks for free if you visit that website. The second ad tells you … nothing but to click there.

The old days when the people clicked on any link … are gone! The people will click on a link if the text responds to the question “What’s there for me?”

Got it?

Instead of wasting the limited space by using call to action wordings, use wisely that space by trying to respond to the above question that any reader will ask. If the actual advert is interesting, the people are not dumb. They know what they have to do: to click on the link.

You lose visitors and money if instead to respond to “What’s there for me? Why should I click?” your ad is explaining to the reader what to do. “Click here now” or “Click the link below” is like saying, “I don’t know what else to say about the product/program I promote. By the way, if you’re really dumb and you don’t know what you have to do, click on that darn link.”

Well? Got the point? Then stop using “click here now“, “click on the below link“, “act now” and so on. By the way, there are spam filters that penalize such call to action expressions or other expressions that contain an urgency matter. So what you really get by using these expressions in your ezine classified ads? Hmmm … you’re just wasting the money on advertising that will NOT work … Not so good, right?

I was reading yesterday a newsletter and the publisher was complaining about the amount of spam he recently received. And then he said,

“I never could understand the spammers. I would never open a spam email, much less buy anything.”

Well, I think that there are many people not understanding why the spammers keep sending their spam and that’s why I wrote this article.

If you want to find out the sad reason that makes the spammers exist, then keep reading …

First of all, let me clarify one thing: when you subscribe to an ezine or newsletter, or mailing list, and then you get it … this is not spam. Only the people like John from my below story yell spam every time when they receive a solo ad from an ezine they subscribed to.

Let’s come back to our topic and respond to this question:

“I never buy anything from spammers. My friends are doing the same like me. Why those spammers keep spamming us?”

Let me answer to this question by telling you a real story …

One month ago, a guy from Arizona – let’s call it John – visited one of my websites, started to place an order, skipped the first step where he was supposed to submit the ad he wanted me to publish, paid for the advertising space and then did … nothing.

Seeing that he doesn’t send me his ad, I sent him an email:

“Thank you for paying me to publish an advert for you but … you didn’t let me know the text of the ad you want me to publish. Can you do it now, please?”

Can you believe what was the answer?

John said, “What is an advert?”

John purchased from me … something that he didn’t know what it is …

Can you believe it? He didn’t understand what I was selling, he didn’t know if he needs what I was selling, but he still purchased it without asking anything …

You know why? Because someone promised him that he will become rich (yeah, sure!) if he follows a certain plan that was including buying advertising space from ezines, one of the recommended ezines being mine.

Isn’t this sad? Yes, there are people who believe anything they are told, and there are people who … don’t know their own language.

John from Arizona didn’t know the meaning of the word “advert”.

Sad indeed.

Well, like John there are tons of people online.

You know it very well in fact. The people are smart, normal, or … stupid. This is our world.

Well, the spammers exist because stupid people exist. Those people are spammers’ main target. However, when the spammers harvest email addresses they don’t know whether an email address belongs to a stupid person or not. So everybody is spammed.

I’m sure that not allowing stupid people to have internet access will drastically diminish the spam and will protect those people from throwing away their money.

However, this will never happen … A government cannot say to someone, “Hey, you’re stupid and that’s why you don’t have the right to get an Internet connection“. We would get back in the past … and this cannot be a solution.

I think that you should be very happy that you’re not a John from my real story. Pay that small price called spam that you are forced to delete daily, and be happy if you’re not stupid. This is a priceless gift!

Or alternatively, get a powerful spam filter, install it and block anything sent to you, spam emails or … legitimate emails. Or better cut off your internet connection and hope that your online business will survive [OK, I was joking. This last paragraph is addressed to people who think that spam filters and blocklists are a solution for spam]

Ezine publishers are talking about solo ads, safelists owners are also talking about solo ads.

Take care! There is a big difference between a solo ad published by an ezine publisher and a solo ad distributed to safelists members.

Basically the solo ad itself is the same but … the audience is very different.

The people subscribe to the ezines to get more information. They won’t read each and every email they receive. [You don't read each and every line of the newspaper you receive daily in your mail, right?] However, they subscribed to the ezine in order to read it and they do it from time to time.

The people join the safelists because they want to be able to send commercial emails to other people. The result: everyone is sending emails to each other but no one is reading them! Many safelists members join them with throw away email addresses they never log in again …

Conclusion: take care to whom is distributed your solo ad. The solo ads distributed to safelists are cheaper but …