by Ruth Townsend - Lifestyles Publishing

Being an online advertiser like most of you reading this, I started my advertising campaign with the free classified ad sites. I had a great business opportunity that I could advertise and not spend a dime to get my message out and I would be making money hand over fist and could retire in a year! How often have you heard that one!

Needless to say, all that time I spent placing free ads only brought me responses for other business offers...no one gave a hoot about what I had. The wind sure went out of my sails in a hurry.

I think the only people reading the free ad sites are people who are looking to send you their offer, which of course you didn't ask for. When was the last time you browsed the ads at the free ad sites because you had nothing better to do?

Then I heard this word ezines. What in the world does ezines mean? I contacted Gary Christensen, the "keeper" of the ezine subscribe list at: http://www.site-city.com/members/e-zine-master/ and got enlightened to the meaning of that word.

He simply explained that an ezine is an electronic magazine; hence the word ezine. Ezines are sent only to those people who have voluntarily requested to have it sent to them.

Finally I found a targeted market unlike the free ad sites which are hit and miss!

Anyone can publish an ezine...it can be about advertising, marketing, food/wines, MLM, parenting, sports, business opportunities, web development, anything that a person wants to write about. Plus some of these ezines accept classified advertising.

I started subscribing to some of these ezines and started learning about ezine advertising and marketing methods. Ads that are displayed in these ezines are seen by thousands of businesses and opportunity minded people who have voluntarily subscribed to newsletters!

To say the least, I decided that the subscribers of ezines was the market that I wanted to pursue. My first attempt at ezine advertising brought me 18 responses from 4 ezines that had free advertising and a total circulation of a little over 3,600.

I was in heaven...I finally got some responses from people wanting to know more about my business opportunity and not the other way around! I had a 100% response increase over the free classified ad sites. This convinced me that ezine advertising was the way to go!

BUT, I quickly found out I was faced with a new challenge and again, the wind went out of my sails and my little boat was drifting.

With thousands of newsletters out there, and I've seen the number as high as 75,000, how was I going to find just those that accepted classified ads?

Well, I started the routine of subscribing and unsubscribing to find just those that accepted advertising. Once I started gathering and compiling data on the ezines, it was easy to see that each had their own "rules and regs" on the "how-to's" of advertising with them.

Working on a shoe-string budget, I wanted to test my advertising with those ezines that offered free advertising or those that were relatively inexpensive.

$20.00 for a 3 line ad or $20.00 for up to l0 lines was within my means but it really didn't mean that much without the circulation numbers. If the circulation is 2,000 and it cost me $20.00 that's a $.01 each for each subscriber to see my ad...on the other hand if the circulation is 500 and it cost $20.00, that's $.04 each. Circulation is definitely worth knowing.

Next, I wanted to know what the subject content of the ezine was...no sense advertising a fishing lure in a food/wine newsletter!

Publication and ad deadlines are important if you want to balance the amount of advertising that you have out each week...I didn't want one week feast and then the following week famine with my responses.

Where do I place my ad...send by email or place it on-line? Now you need the email address or the URL.

What are the payment options...pay online, check by mail, fax, or email? Maybe I don't want to give my credit card online or maybe I don't have a fax machine. Maybe the publisher only accepts checks by mail.

Any method that payment can be made, you need the mailing address, email address, fax number, or URL. Don't forget if you are trying to balance out the number of ads you have out each week, its important to know which ezines will only accept payment by snail mail...you need to plan ahead.

It's also nice to know if my ad is going to be posted on-line for added exposure...if so, maybe the cost of the ad isn't so bad!

Well, you get the picture...lots of time is spent researching for all of this information. By the time you go back through the newsletter, and this is if you kept it in your mailbox, you start reading through it to find out how to place your ad.

Maybe you find what you need, but if not, you need to send an email to get more information. Now you wait for a reply...maybe it will be a day or two before you get a response. Remember, you are not the only one asking for this information.

I was getting confused and most frustrated to say the least! We have all been through this...just think how much time we wasted each week trying to place our ads. Just think too, how FEW ads we did place! We spent our time looking for the missing pieces of the puzzle when it came to spending our hard earned dollars on advertising!

Remember, I was on a shoe-string budget and every penny counted and I was looking for the biggest bang for my buck...I had to spend time researching for the best deals. I couldn't place my ads in just any ezine that happened to come along without knowing all the facts and being able to do comparison shopping!

After spending considerable time with the search engines trying to find a resource that had ALL of the advertising information in ONE place on the ezines that accepted classified ads, I soon realized the results I was getting, is not what I expected.

Well now what?

Then Gary suggested something...why not create that resource yourself? I gave it some thought, "tested the waters", and I found that there were other people, just like myself, that wanted to have all of the advertising information at their fingertips and in ONE place too.

Publishers also saw the benefit for themselves...their newsletter would no longer be lost in that "sea of ezines", subscriptions would increase and advertisers would be pulling out their credit cards to place an ad!

Well that was back in January 1998. I met the ezine challenge and did something about it. I published the first resource tool that contains all of the pertinent advertising info needed to place ads in ezines.

You too can benefit from my hours of research and get a jump on your competition. You owe it to yourself and your business so you can spend more time managing and bringing in the profits. You just may be able to find some extra time to do the "fun" things that you could never find the time to do because you had to get your advertising out.

The competition is fierce on the Net and you'd better hit them with your best shot! And do it first before the next company jumps in front of you. You need to bring more traffic to your website and be able to generate sales, month after month after month.

The last thing you should be doing is spending your time researching the ezine issues. The time element alone is liable to cost you more than you care to image and wished you hadn't seen!

Ruth Townsend is the Publisher of the Directory of E-Zines, a listing of ezines that accept advertising and the author of several advertising and marketing reports to assist the online advertiser.

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