ANATOMY OF AN EZINE START-UP

As a beginner, I've read many marketing articles from all the popular writers. I've done this because I wanted to start my own ezine for my area of interest. Well--after months of reading and researching, I finally decided I was ready to try it. Since there wasn't much money in the budget for this, I needed to keep my expenses very low. I created copy-after-copy of my new ezine until I was finally satisfied with a finished product.

At this point, I was ready to find a list-hosting service. Some of the marketing ezines I subscribed to had suggested this was a necessary step to keep things manageable. How right they were! In hind-sight, if I had to keep up with all those names on a daily or weekly basis, I probably would have given up. After researching several free listing services, I decided on Listbot.com. Now that I had one, I was ready to promote my new ezine....

I had read about announcing your new ezine at New-List, so I started there. From there, I looked up other ezines and newsletters that pertained to my subject and sent out announcements to those editors. After hearing back from several, I pushed on. I went to the "Poor Richard's" web site and found his list of sites for ezine announcements. After trying a few of those, I pushed on again.

From time to time, I checked my Listbot.com site and saw that my subscribers were slowly trickling in......I felt like things were taking shape at a pace that worked for me.

I continued to promote my ezine whenever and wherever I could. In the meantime, I'd read about autoresponders and decided to try the ones at Sendfree.com. I set up one for detailed info about my ezine, as well as one for details about the additional products that I promoted in the classified ad section of my ezine.

I remembered to send a copy of my ezine to the forums that related to it. I joined several WebRings.

I was contacted by Listquest.com, a site that archives your ezine for you. I decided that it would be good to have my ezine archived both on my site and off my site. Besides, this was additional promotion.

After doing all of these things, I see the steady growth of my ezine. There are many more things to do, and I will continue to read, research, and take the advice of ezine publishers and editors who have successful publications.

But the important thing was to just get started...... what seemed overwhelming at first turned out to be not so bad after all. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.......

If I can do this, anyone willing to work hard and consistently can do it, too.

About the Author

A.S. Johnson

"K-6 Art Lesson Plans Monthly"
http://ArtLessons.Listbot.com
To subscribe, send email to:
ArtLessons-subscribe@Listbot.com
For sample, send email to:
feb2000artlesson@sendfree.com

This article provided by the InfoZone Archives at: http://www.MakingProfit.com


AL_ART@ivillage.com
http://ArtLessons.Listbot.com