Ezine As A Viral Marketing Tool

by Douglas Peirseille

Published on this site: May 27th , 2005 - See more articles from this month...

A very popular method of marketing ezines and newsletters is by making them viral. If your newsletter contains information of value, such as tips, hints, news or tutorials, you'll find that subscribers will forward it on to others.

Ezine Advertising is one of the most powerful ways to market and promote your other products and or services. There are literally thousands of electronic newsletters on the Internet with millions of people who subscribe to them. Placing ads in online newsletters is an inexpensive way to reach your target market quickly especially when you compare it with other forms of advertising.

In 2002, ezine publishing took a quantum leap, as its status evolved from "amateur's hobby" into becoming the most powerful marketing tool for business online. Email newsletters have come of age, and increasingly, more ezines will take this route, as subscribers prefer them to drab, lack-luster text-only ezines. In the coming year we'll see more ezines published.

There are tens of thousands of Ezines being published every month, with a collective audience of millions. And the editors of most of those Ezines are all looking for quality content for their newsletters.

If you master this technique of making the Ezine viral you can get your name and your website URL in front of 100,000 or even a million readers.

Tips for making the ezine viral

Pick a topic that you know something about and then go to the Search Engines and find as many websites as you can that deal with
that subject.

As well as collecting information for your article, make a note of any URLs that offer free resources dealing with the topic of your article. Include those URLs in your article.

You should choose a topic very carefully. Once the topic is selected, doing enough research on the subject is vital. Organize the material and write in an interesting style. Make sure that you provide links to free resources.

The content in your Ezine should not be pure sales copy. There has to be valuable and genuine information. Promotion of your product or service should be subtle. Viral marketing using Ezine is different than running an E Mail marketing campaign that blasts millions of mail messages to unsuspecting readers.

At the end of your article, attach a 5 or 6-line 'Resource Box' that includes your website URL and/or your email address.

When you have finished your article, do NOT send it off straight away. Let it lie fallow for 2 or 3 days and then come back and read it again. You'll be amazed at the improvements you can make. Those final improvements are what make the difference between an article that gets published and one that doesn't.

Word Of Mouth

"Word of mouth" advertising can be very effective. Besides, it is completely free. The Internet takes this ancient form of "buzz" and promotion and amplifies it with a global network of people connected digitally. "Word of mouth" now has an Internet version called "word of mouse" (computer mouse). With greatly increased speeds, people refer things to their friends and families spreading the word through the Internet and to the far-reaching corners of the world. This can be done for your ezines as well.

Many smart marketers and publicity people have learned to harness the power of viral publicity with Internet "Tell-A-Friend" promotional techniques and tools.

Providing incentives as part of the "Tell-A-Friend" technique ensures higher success rate. For instance, the website www.wz.com conducted a giveaway contest where they gave away 4 Sony PS2's before Christmas as a website promotion. They also gave people who had entered the Giveaway the opportunity to get additional entries and additional chances to win by telling a few of their friends on the "Thank You" page.

On the "Thank You" page, every giveaway entrant received the following message: "Tell your friends about WZ.com, and get an additional entry for each friend you email." In return for the favor, they received an additional chance to win for every friend they refer. This simple addition increased Tell-a-Friend results by 96 times.

So how do you use this technique to leverage and increase your subscription rate, and "word of mouse" publicity? It's simple, just "Tell-A-Friend" or "Tell-A-Friend about everything"! You can add Viral "Tell-A-Friend" forms to all of your web pages just below the subscription offer. This technique is simple and very effective.

Offer your ezines to all your customers, friends, relatives, and colleagues. Let them spread the word. Offer your ezine as a promotional tool to your affiliates if you have an affiliate program. These can drastically improve the subscriptions to your ezine.

Douglas Peirseille [email protected] Ezine Marketing Magic http://www.NewsletterMarketingTips.com