Yeah, you read it well. An ezine publisher can destroy your ad campaign if you don’t take care who you are placing your order with.

Don’t assume the publishers and the ezine ad co-ops are all professional. There are a lot of amateurs in absolutely any field.

I didn’t initially plan to write this article because I thought that this mistake is not made by publishers anymore, even if they are new in ezine publishing. I was wrong! I’ve just received an email from a publisher that has the following subject line: Solo Ad.

You got the point? Instead of advertiser’s subject line, the subject line of that email contains the type of ad the advertiser purchased (a solo ad).

Advertiser’s subject line was no longer a subject line but a line from the body of that email.

Remember from my previous articles how important is the subject line? If instead of your subject line it is published only “Solo Ad“, “Dynamic solo“, “Publisher’s Exclusive solo“, etc. … who do you think will open your solo ad?

What to do to avoid such unpleasant situation when an amateur seller is forcing you to throw away your money?

There are 2 solutions.

Solution # 1 – Before placing your order, subscribe to the ezine and see how other advertisers’ solo ads look like.

Solution # 2 – Before placing your order, contact the seller and ask her/him how exactly your solo ad will look like. Ask her/him to send you a template or provide her/him your solo ad and ask her/him to send you back an email that it is exactly like the solo ad that will be sent to the subscribers.

Of course you can combine both solutions by subscribing to the ezines and also contacting the publisher.

To Your Ezine Advertising Success!
Adrian Jock

P.S. For more interesting ezine advertising tips, you can subscribe free to Ezine Advertising Info newsletter.

P.P.S. Recommended reading: Ultimate Guide to Solo Ads

Today another customer asked me how many clicks he should expect from his solo ad after I publish it in my ezines. I can’t guarantee clicks and that’s written also in the FAQ section of my site. The question isn’t why that customer didn’t read the FAQ – that is not very uncommon, the question is … why people ask such question?

Do you know the answer? Here it is …

There are tons of scammers out there and they can guarantee you anything you want (yeah, sure!) The problem is that some people are not able to see the stamp located on the seller’s nose. It reads, “I’m a scammer, run away!”. For no matter what reasons, some people won’t buy the guaranteed thing; but … hey, at least they “learned” something, for example: the publishers can guarantee hits for anyone who buys some ad space from them (!) and then when the right time will come, that customer comes to me and asks, “Hey, how many clicks do I have to expect?” This is what they learned, isn’t it? Choose
carefully your teacher!

There are also some marketers who are not really scammers but use all sort of tricks in order to be able to offer you what you want, even if that is useless for you and is not what you were expecting. Such sellers can guarantee you hits without being scammers. Their ezine is actually a “get paid to read emails” program and the readers get credits every time when they click on links. The customer will get what it was promised: the guaranteed clicks. The sole problem is that most of these clicks are useless. Most of the “readers” won’t actually read anything, they were looking only for getting their credits. That’s not what the customer expected, right?

And there is a third case, a special one: all expert marketers who guarantee hits posting their offers on professional places like Warrior Forum and other similar places. They are not scammers, they don’t use tricks, but in the same time, believe me, human beings cannot offer what they offer… So … what are they? Maybe aliens. Or maybe gods. I don’t know exactly. For all of them I have myself a question …

I would like to offer to their readers a free ebook titled “Arimaa for Experts”. How will they be able to fulfil their promise and deliver the hundreds or even thousands of hits, without scamming me and without using tricks?

What I can guarantee myself is that 99% of their readers don’t even know what arimaa is. As a consequence I can also 100% guarantee that those 99% of their readers won’t be interested in my “Arimaa for Experts” (they are not even arimaa beginners, so how they can be interested in a book for experts?). Now do the math!

Got my point? Those guru, experts, gods, aliens or whatever they are won’t be able to fulfil their promise. So … why do the advertisers expect a poor human being like me to be able to guarantee hits? … I’m not a scammer, I don’t use tricks and I’m not a god. Sorry to disappoint them!

To Your Ezine Advertising Success!
Adrian Jock

P.S. For more interesting ezine advertising tips, you can subscribe free to Ezine Advertising Info newsletter.

P.P.S. Recommended reading for every marketer who wants to master the solo ads topic: Ultimate Guide to Solo Ads

This morning I was discussing with another ezine publisher about a solo ad submitted by one of our customers. The P.S. of that solo ad was “The squeeze page may look a bit dull, don’t worry, X [= un unknown marketer] does that very often. Hehe!” and the squeeze page was indeed quite awful.

My fellow publisher thought that adding that P.S. to the solo ad is a big mistake but I completely disagreed. I definitely think that using an awful web page cannot get you too much, but let’s discuss the situation as it is. Let me tell you the reasons for my disagreement and then let’s see what we can learn from this situation …

Fact: Some people will never ever buy anything or signup for a mailing list if the web page is awful. For those people, whether the PS is there or not … it doesn’t matter, they won’t signup anyway because of the awful web page. That’s why in the cases analyzed below we won’t talk about these people. Regardless the PS, they are a lost case for our advertiser.

Case #1 – The ad with the PS – When someone reads that PS, she or he knows what to expect when clicking on the link from that ad. The reader is warned: there will be an awful page. If the reader clicks on the link, there will be NO SURPRISE: the page is exactly as promised – awful. The reader won’t feel like being cheated. She or he may or may not read that text from that web page and she or he may or may not signup.

Case #2 – The ad without the PS – The reader who clicks on the link and lands on that web page will have an UNPLEASANT SURPRISE: an awful page. That would be the worst case for the advertiser. An unpleasant surprise for the visitor almost guarantees a disaster.

What does the above short analysis tell us? The poor design reduces dramatically advertiser’s chances to succeed. But if the advertiser tells the truth upfront like in that PS, then the advertiser has some chances to get a bad result instead of a very bad result. That’s an improvement, even if you don’t see a big difference between a bad result and a very bad result

What is the conclusion? Telling the truth in advertising is not only a legal requirement but sometimes it also helps you improve your results!

To Your Ezine Advertising Success!
Adrian Jock

P.S. For more interesting ezine advertising tips, you can subscribe free to Ezine Advertising Info newsletter.

P.P.S. Recommended reading: Ultimate Guide to Solo Ads

Every ezine advertiser knows that ezine advertising is a numbers game. The formula is simple: more subscribers = higher price for the ad and higher expectations for that ezine advertiser. Nothing uncommon, right?

Now let me tell you about a variable that is not included in the formula mentioned above and is not taken into consideration by almost all ezine advertisers: the type of opt-in process for the ezine. I can hear some of you saying, “What is that? I don’t care about that and I don’t publish a newsletter myself, just tell me the secret you promised!”. Hey, don’t be a gambler like most of the advertisers! Be patient…

There are two types of opt-in processes: single opt-in & double opt-in. When the subscriber is requested only to fill in a simple online form, that is a single opt-in subscription process. When the process is more complicated and he is also required to check his subscription email address for an email from the publisher and take a further action (clicking on a link from that email or replying to that email), then that is a double opt-in process.

Now here is what may happen when the publisher uses the single opt-in process:

1) If the potential subscriber mistyped his email address, then there are 2 cases:

a) when the wrong email address doesn’t belong to anyone, the publisher will detect it quite easy when the next mailing will be sent. It will bounce.

b) when the wrong email address belongs to someone else, the publisher will start spamming that person. It’s not your problem? Well, what if the next mailing is YOUR SOLO AD? If that message is reported, then the publisher has a problem but … you have a problem too.

2) If the potential subscriber indicated for subscription an email address where the email service provider has installed an aggressive spam filter, that “subscriber” may never ever receive in the Inbox that publisher’s messages. A lot of people still use email service providers like the one described above, so this is a real danger.

What this case 2 means for an ezine advertiser? It means that many subscribers will never ever read your ad. Not because it’s not a good ad, but because they will never receive it. How is that? Do you remember the simple formula from the first paragraph? The price depends on the number of subscribers. The more subscribers who don’t get the emails, the more money YOU throw away!

When the publisher uses a double opt-in process, both cases described above disappear! If no one takes any action after the publisher’s first email is sent, then the prospect doesn’t become a subscriber. So you already know the secret, right? Check what type of opt-in process is in place and buy advertising space only in double opt-in ezines.

To Your Ezine Advertising Success!
Adrian Jock

P.S. For more interesting ezine advertising tips, you can subscribe free to Ezine Advertising Info newsletter.

P.P.S. Recommended reading: Ultimate Guide to Solo Ads

No matter if you like it or not, ezine advertising is a complex process. If you try to simplify it, you save some time but you won’t get better results unless you’re lucky.

One of the common mistakes the advertisers make is to simplify the assessment of an ezine advertising offer by checking only the number of subscribers and the price. The more subscribers, the better the results that have to be expected. This is the common way of thinking. Simple math, right? Any newbie can understand that you get better results when you advertise in an ezine that has 1,000 subscribers in comparison with the case when you promote exactly the same thing in a small ezine – from the same niche – that has only 100 subscribers. Well … It’s not very wrong, but it’s not correct …

I remember like it was today the day when an angry advertiser wrote to me, “Hey, Adrian, here are the facts. After you published my ad in your ezine X, I got x clicks. However, after the same ad was published in the ezine Y that has 100 times more subscribers than yours, guess what? I got 2 times less clicks than in your ezine. That publisher is a scammer, isn’t she?”

Believe it or not, I knew that publisher and she wasn’t a scammer! What the advertiser didn’t know is that when it comes to ezine advertising, the simple math doesn’t work!

I guess your question is “Why is that?”

An offline publication – a newspaper for example – has a complete staff: editors, marketers, people who take care of the distribution, and so on. Online publications usually are one man show. Ezine publishing, the same like ezine advertising, is complex. It’s not only about writing or copying an article and sending it to some people. The ezine publisher has to do a lot of things and she or he is alone, without any staff for help. Some publishers do these things, other don’t. Why don’t they do all the stuff required? Hey, ezine publishers are not gods! Some of them don’t even know that there are some actions missing from their daily routine … but hey, they are not scammers.

I publish Ezine Advertising Info Newsletter since 2001 but almost all these years my total subscribers number was in the range of 700-900 subscribers. Why? I don’t get subscribers by giving away different freebies. I don’t participate in giveaway events. I use the double opt-in method of subscription. I remove from time to time subscribers even if they didn’t require it … an so on. There is nothing illegal in doing what I don’t do. The publishers who do all these things (and many other alike actions) will always have a bigger number of subscribers. However, the number of readers may not be so bigger!

Another story … when I was a newbie publisher my mailing list kept growing and growing. I remember that when the list reached about 1,700 subscribers I read somewhere about undeliverable emails and I told to myself how happy I am that I don’t have such problems. Very soon after that moment I discovered that my mailer was setup so that to delete the undeliverable emails without them being forwarded to my email account. I corrected that and once I sent my newsletter I got tons of undeliverable messages. I had to delete more than 50% of my “subscribers”. I learnt my lesson. Beware: some publishers didn’t learn it yet!

I can continue writing stories here, but I don’t want to bore you. Here is the last fact … Some publishers send many solo ads to their subscribers. Some ezines contains many ads in a single issue. Too many ads sometimes. Some publishers post the classified ads only online, on a page dedicated to that purpose, where there are tons of ads. There is nothing illegal in doing that. There is no trick and you’re not scammed if you buy advertising in such ezines. However … if you’re an advertiser who knows your “job”, then you may know already that your ad may be more successful when published in an ezine where there are 2 or 3 ads than when your ad is published in another ezine where there are published 20 other ads. Irrespective of the number of subscribers! 100,000 readers who skip the long sea of ads are useless for you. 20 readers who read the 2-3 ads from the first ezine may get you better results.

Finally, let me say it once again and be sure you learn it … When it comes to ezine advertising, the simple math doesn’t work!

Take care!
Adrian Jock

P.S. For more interesting ezine advertising tips, you can subscribe free to Ezine Advertising Info newsletter.

P.P.S. Recommended reading: Ultimate Guide to Solo Ads