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    Ezine Advertising Mistakes?

    These days writing articles has become a fashion.

    People knowing what they are talking about and people NOT knowing what they are talking about write articles …

    This is a good marketing vehicle and there are a lot of people looking for information and reading articles. That’s why writing articles determines also a responsibility. The writers should be more responsible and not write every little stupid thing that comes in
    their mind …

    A few days ago I’ve read in a reputable ezine an article written by a “profitability consultant” about the most common mistakes made in ezine advertising.

    I was puzzled to find out the wrong opinion of this “consultant”. These days everybody is a guru who knows everything …

    Too bad that some of these gurus are like a car dealer that never had a driving licence. He knows everything about the cars … from other people’s experience or from … his imagination.

    Let’s come back to our consultant and see one of the most common mistakes:

    “Running Classifieds. Since they don’t cost much, business owners tend to use classifieds to save costs. Classifieds are cheap, $5-$20 per ad, and in most cases run faster than solo or top sponsor ads because the ezine publisher runs 10-20 per issue.What’s not so commonly known is the fact classified sections are often times scanned by the reader (I scan past them every time) and get very little eye time.

    Solution: Run Solo or Top sponsor ads. These ads get more exposure. They are exclusive (solo mailings) or only have 2-3 (sponsor ads) per issue spaced out between the content.”

    So … two disadvantages of running classified ads are that they are cheap and run faster than the solo ads. What?

    Then … the ezine publisher runs 10-20 ads per issue. My dear consultant, if you are driving a very old car and you were not satisfied, this doesn’t mean that ALL cars are old … Do you know how many ads are published in Ezine Advertising Info Newsletter issue where has been published this post? TWO!

    Let’s go on …

    Do you mind if we use a little bit our brains? If you’re a consultant, my dear friend, how comes that you don’t know the purpose of buying the classified ads? Did you think that spending $5 will get you in return some thousands and now you’re disappointed? Come on … Did you ever hear about testing or about branding? That’s the main purpose of using classified ads!

    Let’s go on to the next “mistake”:

    “Going for large subscriber bases.Large subscriber stats are impressive. 30,000 subscribers is a ton of eye balls and the potential to return a profit is greatly
    increased. Well, this is completely untrue.

    A recent test we ran took our breath away. We spent $180 on a solo ad to a subscriber base in a general marketing publication
    of 30,000 subscribers. We ran that same solo ad for $65 in an ezine about pop-up marketing strategies with a subscriber base
    of 1200.

    Ad #1 to 30,000+ brought back $0!

    Ad#2 to 1200 specifically targeted subscribers brought back $900 in pure profit!”

    First of all, let me tell you one thing: the ezines I publish are small ezines, so … I don’t have any interest in defending the large ezines. But I cannot stop myself laughing when I see a stupid thinking like the above one.

    Let’s think again (it hurts, my dear consultant?) … A question first: what car do you think that runs faster? A very old Mercedes having only 3 wheels or a new no-name car? Oops! If something is garbage, then it’s garbage and that’s all. Did you check the subscribers’ database? Did you check how many email addresses bounced back? Did you check how clean is that database? Did you ever think that the 30,000 subscribers may not be 30,000? If you want to see how a subscribers base of 2,000 can be “transformed” into 20,000 for stealing money from the advertisers, read this article. [Coincidence or not, after publishing that article, the ezine I was referring to has disappeared from that co-op. However, the Internet Archive is in place and anybody still can verify the reality of my article.]

    How can somebody think that under the similar conditions 1,200 is bigger than 30,000? Go to the school, my friend …

    God, what a world!

    And you my dear reader, don’t believe everything you read in such guru’s articles …

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 12:18 am and is filed under Ezine Advertising Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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