An ezine (email newsletter) is a form of communication where you email your micro-entrepreneurial business subscribers a periodic publication on a particular topic. An ezine can be an important component of the marketing strategy for your micro-entrepreneurial business, and to grow your subscriber list, you must promote your ezine and your brand.
Do public speaking to market your ezine
For micro-entrepreneurs, doing public speaking is a great way to make money directly, but it’s also a fantastic way to meet prospects and customers, gain exposure, build a list of ezine subscribers, and so on. In public speaking, your opportunities are only limited to your time, effort, and creativity.
Check with your local board of education and its adult education programs for public speaking opportunities. In addition, you can find adult education (and other forms of public speaking) in venues as varied as association meetings and conferences, corporate events, trade shows, local club meetings, public libraries, and so on.
Regardless of the size of the crowd at which you speak, you’re in a room sharing your knowledge and information with folks that paid to be there. Just don’t do a hard sell; they’re already interested in your product. Just share your knowledge and what you offer.
Invariably, some of the students will become clients for what you offer, and many of them will sign up for your newsletter. The more public speaking you do, the bigger the list of prospects you can create and the more sales and profits you can generate.
For more information about the world of public speaking, check out these resources:
Swap ads with other ezine publishers to promote your ezine
Ezine publishers commonly swap ads to build their subscriber lists. You offer to let another ezine publisher put a free ad in your ezine if it allows you to do the same.
Swapping ads can be a little tricky because you have to work out a fair arrangement if the two ezines have a significant difference in their subscriber list sizes. For example, if your list is 3,000 subscribers and the other ezine’s list is 6,000 subscribers, you may work out an arrangement where you offer to run its ad twice in place of allowing you to run your ad once.
In addition, consider doing a solo ad, which is an advertisement that you pay the ezine publisher to send to their list and you are the only ad in that email blast.
This will cost you but it is not that expensive and it is a great way to get your message to a targeted audience. If, for example, you sell software that is perfect for webmasters, consider getting a solo ad to an ezine specifically for webmasters.
Join forums and discussion boards to market your ezine
Many forums have thousands of people who are interested in a particular niche or topic. If you spend time and regularly post at a particular forum, you can easily get noticed by many potential subscribers. The trick is to contribute to the forum in order to build your brand, and not sell.
Eventually, people will trust not only your knowledge but your brand as well. Because you are trusted, people will want to subscribe to your email newsletter, and through it, purchase your products and services.
Guest blog to promote your ezine
Guest blogging, which is good for both blogs and ezines, is one of the best ways to market yourself and what you offer. If you have something to offer, but you don’t have an audience, then you can go to a source that has an audience, but doesn’t have your particular offering.
In the case of ezines, you can use guest blogging to build your subscriber list. When you do your guest blog, you can include a link to your ezine subscription (or opt-in) page.
Rely on article directories to promote your ezine
Many places on the Internet serve as massive databases of articles. Writers contribute these articles to the directories’ databases, and publishers are allowed to use the articles as posts in their websites, blogs, and/or ezines. The writers seek to use the articles for marketing purposes. The publishers use the articles as content. It’s a win-win.
If you publish an ezine, consider being on both sides of the equation. As the publisher, consider writing articles that you can contribute to the article database so that others can run them in their venues. You can build your subscriber list with zero-cost marketing.
In addition, you can use some of the articles in the database that others have written when you have an occasional mental block and need a good fill-in article to satisfy your readers.
Here are some of the most active article databases that you can use:
Mingle on LinkedIn and other groups to market your ezine
Publishers of blogs and ezines (and other self-publishers) have an active presence at LinkedIn. You can also look up the groups on blog publishing and ezines. Maybe more importantly, search for those groups tied to your content.
Turn to social media to promote your ezine
Using Facebook, Twitter, and others is a powerful part of any micro-entrepreneur’s marketing plan. They’re free, and they can be very effective for any ezine publisher to get more subscribers.
Market your ezine with your mobile device
With the advent of smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices, a whole new world has opened as more and more people are able to view web pages and emails on their handheld devices. Check with your bulk email service provider about how to take advantage of mobile devices.