Article - Maximizing Your Clickthrough in Ezine Ads

Maximizing Your Clickthrough in Ezine Ads
© 2004 bernie schmidt

Developing your Internet presence takes coordinating and maintaining a number of methods. Optimising the content of your website is one way. Placing ezine ads is another.

I’ve read many web sales pages that breathlessly promise incredible sales results using ezine advertising if only I would buy their eBook with their proven method. I bought a couple, researched ezines in my field and placed some ads.

I was taken aback at my low return, or “clickthrough” to my site. The reasons for low ROI were:

False Expectations!

I was assuming that, because my ad was placed within a permission-based ezine with an established subscriber list, my ad was going to get the response of a direct mail piece ie 1-2% of subscribers. That would have been in line with my past experience with physical “snail mail” direct marketing.

In fact, the more realistic comparison is the classified ad section buried in the back of a newspaper where you might get 25-50 calls per 100,000 readership (ie less than half of 1/10 of a percent!), and that’s only when your ad is placed in a specific category and people are browsing ads specifically for something they are looking for.

In the case of ezines, there is usually not a lot of categorization and the subscriber may not even be looking for what you have to offer. So click-through is even tougher to achieve. It would be nice if that fact would be shared with some of these ezine marketing “gurus”.

Ad Copy was too "dry"

I’m sure your eyes glaze over when you see those ads promising countless riches, a superhuman sex drive and enough interest-free mortgages to buy all the real estate in the world. I didn't want my ads to be grouped with that hype and be over-promising, but the net result was ad copy that didn’t jump out at the reader.

So after further research and ad testing, I’ve come up with this list of key thoughts that make ezine advertising effective for me when considering ad development and e-zine placement:

1) Choose e-zines whose content is complementary to what you are promoting – if you’re offering a new fishing lure, focus on ezines that have readership interested in fishing, hunting, the outdoors etc. You’ll get better results than if you place your ad in a general interest or unrelated ezine.

2) Set a goal for ad results - i.e. adding “x’ number of new subscribers to your own ezine subscriber list or selling “x” copies of your eBook. Doing this lets you calculate an ROI on your ad(s)

3) Write and rewrite your ad. Be the reader who is scanning yet another ezine – what can you say in your ad title that will make them stop to read your ad? Then, What can you say in the next two lines to convince them to click on your ad link?

4) Avoid mentioning price in your ad – there’s not enough room in the 25 or 50 words you have available to you to sell the reader on the spot. However, there IS enough room to make the reader some kind of offer to compel them to click through.

5) Offer something FREE - some kind of reward if they visit your web page – it could be a set of articles, an on-line course, an eBook, your eZine.

6) Run your ad through a spam tester – this way you can be sure the language you use will be blocked by spam filters.

Finally, test your ads and track the results. Try different variations on the ad over several weeks and see which one triggers the highest response.

To track down ezines I took the route of buying Charlie Page's Directory of Ezines. It saved me hours of work in finding sites and ezines that were complementary to my MotivAction ezine. To reach Charlie's Intro Page, http://hop.clickbank.net/?fineartofb/lifestyles

All the best,
bernie schmidt
http://www.maketime2makemoney.com

This article in its entirety may be copied and used, just so long as you include my attribution, copyright notice and website link.

(c) Copyright 2004 bernie schmidt