Ezine Publishing – The Pro’s and Con’s of Publishing an Ezine
The Pros
So what is it? “Publish and be damned” someone once said! Someone else also said that any publicity is Good publicity. So publishing your own ezine has advantages and disadvantages, the first advantage being that we don’t need to cut down a forest to get it to the millions of people who might want to read your piece of prime literature.
Firstly I’ll deal with the Pros in ezine publishing, it’s an ideal business to be in if you enjoy writing as it is so easy to get started, just need a computer, an internet connection and an imagination or knowledge. No need for investments in printers, paper, property or people.
So now you have the equipment, get yourself seated in a comfortable chair in a nice well-lit part of the house and set your self up as a publisher.
In order to send to subscribers, you will need some form of broadcast capability and for that you will need an Auto Responder such as available from Aweber.com or GetResponse.com, Aweber costs around $20 a month as a beginner, GetResponse is free to start with. When your list of subscribers grows, you will have to pay more! Both these systems come highly recommended.
When you write your ezine, remember, you want to make money from it, passively or directly. There are several ways to do this. You can sell advertising space in your ezine on a per issue basis, directly sell items you are producing or sell someone else’s products as an affiliate or Joint Venture partnership. This will quickly pay off the monthly fee for the Auto Responder.
The most important thing here is that You are spreading the word around that You have advertising space or products, you are building your own personal Branding online. You will use this Brand to spread your marketing influence through whatever market you are moving into or are already in. The more information you place online in your name on a given topic, the more the big guns of marketing will look to you to place their products on your ezine. So look out for those Joint Venture opportunities, as they will start flowing when your ezine reaches critical mass.
So you have many reasons for creating your own ezine, building Your online Brand and creating Brand awareness across the net, of You, an ezine is a vehicle for your monetization of the internet, once built, it can reap benefits for years with very little effort.
The Cons and how to get round them!
There’s always a down side to any business opportunity, the publishing business has many, not least the disappearing forests! So despite the benefits listed above, here are a few of the Cons, just so we keep our feet on the ground here.
The hardest part of creating an ezine is getting started, “what do I write about?” The answer is quite simple; pick a topic you LIKE! Don’t try and barge your way into a subject you know little about or are not prepared to read up on in great detail, if you do this than you will fail quickly. If you like gardening and know a bit about it or do a lot of it even not knowing much, then you can write about it. If you don’t garden, know nothing of plants or grass, then it’s difficult to write about.
You can’t spell? Well, trust spell checker, as 95% of the rest of the world can’t spell any better than you. Just bare in mind that you still need to proof read after running spell-checker as it often doesn’t recognize a well spelt word that is completely out of context. (“she was pulling her out”, instead of “she was pulling hair out”.)
You will need to have some sort of publishing schedule to give your readers some commitment. This will inevitably tie you down, however your auto responder will be able to be set up to deliver broadcasts if you are away for short periods. This just means you need to write more content before you go away!
Back to the content bit, not all of us can continually come up with new and original thoughts on a subject and we need either prompting or a little help here and there along the way. Read magazines, papers, or other ezines about the topics you are covering, every subject on earth (just about) has some form of blog or articles written about it, find them, and re-write them collate information from several papers so that you now have the definitive article where people can read the whole story, not just snippets from before and snippets from after.
If you really can’t write, pay someone to do it for you. Have someone write up a batch of articles, say 20 or 30 and then place them into your auto responder and set the delivery times accordingly, daily, every 3 days or weekly as the case may be.
You can find freelance writers at places such as and after paying for the articles to be written, you can still put your name at the bottom of the page!
Still lost for words? Maybe ezines are not for you! However, have you ever read an article, online or offline, doesn’t matter, but have you read one where you have felt it wasn’t well written, the words didn’t flow right? The grammar was poor? The spelling was really bad? It just didn’t make sense until you got to the end and asked someone what they were talking about? Yep, lots of times! Write your own article so it makes sense!
Here’s your biggest bonus chance. You can re-issue articles! If an article has been submitted with republishing rights and there are lots of them, provided you acknowledge the original author by including his resource information in the re-submitted article, than you will be OK.
The longer version is to completely re-write the article from scratch so that it is now your work!
You will find articles with republishing rights at article directories such as this one, EzineArticles
Don’t be put off by days or longer periods where you can’t inspire your fingers to do the talking. Sit down and read a little on what others are saying or doing and new content will course through to your fingertips very quickly.
You can quite simply get round the content creation problems by not writing yourself, use other peoples work and acknowledge them, or pay for it up front and get the works customized to you.
Submit all your works, not just to your own subscribers, but a short while later, publish them to the article directories with links back to your website or Blog. Put sign up boxes on your website or blog so that you get more subscribers. This will generate many more followers to your ezine.
Happy writing, Happy submitting and hope you enjoy the results.
