Ezine Advertising

Solo ads advertising is a great marketing tool for promoting a business or a product online or for building your own mailing list. The same like for any other marketing tool, one of the keys to a successful advertising campaign is to find out how the prospects think and what they are looking for, and then to meet their expectations.

The purpose of this article is to give you an idea on how a solo ads reader thinks and what he doesn’t like to see. Of course that what follows is only my own view and you don’t have to limit your research only at what one person likes or doesn’t like.

Fact # 1 – The more solo adverts I receive daily, the less I read.

Tip # 1 – If you plan to use safelists, forget about it. If you plan to advertise in an ezine, subscribe to that ezine and see how many solo advertisements are sent daily to subscribers. If they are flooded, they are bored. You may not want to promote your business to such a market. Look for ezines that distribute maximum one solo ad per day.

Fact # 2 – My first name in the subject line doesn’t make me open that email. The spammers did their marketing homework and I receive many spam emails that contain my first name in the subject line.

Tip # 2 – Forget about first names in email subject lines and use wisely that space. The subject line is very important and if it doesn’t grab the reader’s attention, your solo ads advertising campaign will be a failure. Recent email marketing reports issued by professional email marketing companies revealed that first names in subject lines are no longer an incentive for opening an email.

Fact # 3 – I don’t trust what an advertiser recommends or what she/he guarantees if that advertisement is not signed. [Don't get me wrong: it doesn't mean that I trust any piece of text that is signed.]

Tip # 3 – At the bottom of your solo advertisements always insert your signature that includes a name (your name, a pen name, a business name).

Fact # 4 – Even if I like what you want to sell, if for whatever reason I don’t have funds in my account then I won’t buy your stuff. Or if I have funds but I’m not convinced that I really need what you sell, I still don’t buy your stuff. And then I will forget about it.

Tip # 4 – Instead of trying to sell something, offer an incentive so that the reader to signup for your mailing list. Then you’ll have the chance to send me more emails, on different days, and finally you may get me having money in my account and being in a buying mood.

To Your Success!
Adrian Jock

I can hear everybody laughing, “Wow! A joke about ezine advertising!” Actually it is not a joke and if you focus for a few minutes you’ll understand the whole point. Despite the fact that usually the solo ads are getting much better results than the top sponsor ads, in some cases the practice contradicts the theory.

First of all, let’s recap what actually are those two types of ezine ads. A solo ad is an advertisement that is sent alone to a mailing list, without any other piece of information that may grab the reader’s attention. A top sponsor ad is an advert published at the top of a newsletter, together with many other pieces of information: articles, free resources, news, other ezine ads, and so on.

Looking at the definitions above, anyone can clearly see that the sponsor ads have a big disadvantage: the newsletter contains a lot of information that may distract the reader’s attention. Then what’s the secret behind the title of this article?

There is one fact that many advertisers overlook: the reader doesn’t care who wrote your ad and how great success you already had with it. Your ad may be written by the best copywriter in the world, but if the reader decides for no matter what reason to delete it without reading it, that’s it! It’s not easy to understand the human mind, even if some copywriters believe they know the secret and talk about different magic principles like for example AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).

Are you starting to understand where I’m coming from? The biggest problem with the solo ads is that you have to make the readers open the email. What if someone helps you and makes the readers open the email? Yes, there is someone who can help you: the publisher of that ezine. When the publisher is sending her or his ezine, most of the people will read it. The people didn’t subscribe to read your solo ad, but to read what the publisher has to say.

You can use this in your advantage and buy the best ad space that is inside the newsletter: the advert that is placed at the top. The price of this type of advertisement is much lower and the publisher is your “vehicle” who makes the readers open the email.

A very good solo advert is usually much better than a very good top sponsor ad. But a “not so good top sponsor ad” may get you better results than a “not so good written solo advertisement”. Are you sure that always your ads are great? Take care: it doesn’t matter your opinion. The reader is the king, no matter whether the reader is expert or newbie, smart or dumb, educated or not.

To Your Success!
Adrian Jock

If you missed the previous parts of our “Quality Ezines Checking Map”, please go to How to identify top quality ezines for your ezine advertising needs? (Part 1).

Question # 10 – Is it easy for a subscriber to contact the publisher?

Some ezine publishers simply don’t want to be contacted by their subscribers. You should run away of such people because this way of doing business simply means this: “I don’t care what you want to ask and I don’t care about your opinion. I only want you to click on my links and buy the products I recommend.”

How can you identify such publishers? Easy: check where their emails are coming from. If their emails are coming from an email address that contains “no reply”, don’t bother to write to that publisher, your email will never be seen by anyone.

How to identify what is the email address where an email is coming from? If you use a web-based email like Gmail, open the email message and click on the link “show details” that can be found at the very top of the message. If you use Outlook Express, select the email message, right click, and then click on “Properties”.

Question # 11 – Does the publisher respond to subscribers’ questions?

Ask the publisher a question related to the content she/he just published.

Tip: Don’t ask something the publisher may be interested in (like “How much do you charge for solo ads?”).

If the publisher replies within maximum 24 hours, it’s good. If the publisher doesn’t bother to reply to subscribers’ “not interesting questions” that will not get her/him any immediate profit, then think twice when you decide who to advertise with.

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Finally, here it’s a trick for a last test …

Setup the autoresponder function (sometimes called “Vacation responder”) so that to send back a message like “Sorry, I’m out of office for 9 months.” If the publisher doesn’t remove your email address from the mailing list and you continue to receive publisher’s emails, then there is something wrong at publisher’s end. Always remember that you are charged based on the number of subscribers. You don’t want to pay also for “dead” email addresses, do you?

This mini-course on how to identify top quality ezines for your ezine advertising needs ends here. Of course that there can be made even more tests but … you don’t want to spend all your life making tests, do you? Now go to work! Find some ezines, test them and advertise. Never forget what P.T. Barnum said, “Without promotion something terrible happens … nothing!”