Ezine Advertising

Are you using ezine advertising for your affiliate marketing? If you are, what kind of ads are you using?

A lot of affiliate programs pre-write classified and solo ads for their products. This is good when a product is fairly new, but as an ezine publisher I have seen the same tired old ads for more than three years. The products may be good products. BUT you can't sell it if the ad you are using has been seen hundreds or thousands of times. You are just wasting your money.

When you join an affiliate program, do look at those ads but don't use the ads as they are written. Try to find the main benefits that the ads showcase and find a creative way to rewrite an ad to show the benefits in a different way.

To be successful with ezine advertising you must do some research. Look at not only the pre-written ads but also at the sales copy of the product. Maybe the ad writer missed a major benefit. Find that benefit and craft your ad based on that benefit.

And speaking of benefits: don't try to list all the benefits of a product in one short ad. It will make the ad too wordy and confusing.

Write a headline using one of the benefits. Most people who read ezine ads skim the headlines to see if there is anything of interest to them. If they see something, they'll read the rest of the ad.

Write about five headlines and five ads. Now, mix it up: Try each headline with each of the different ads. Does it make sense? If so, keep it as a full ad and go to the next headline and ad. Continue until you've used them all.

Now, test your ads. Use a click-tracking program like clickaudit.com which is free for a limited number of links. Use a separate tracker for each different ad, and for each ezine that you send an ad to.

Try sending your ads to ezines which offer free advertising first to see which ad pulls the best. Then try a different headline with a different ad and see how it does. When you feel you have found a good combination go on to paid ezine ads such as top sponsor and solo ads. Keep tracking!

How do you find newsletters to submit your ads to? Go to the newsletter (ezine) directories. Type "ezine+directories" (without the quotes) into the search engine browser and you'll find hundreds of them. Make sure that the ezine is geared to your target market - the people that would be interested in your affiliate product.

Another place to submit your ads is to the various ezine co-ops like http://subscribeme.net  or http://mywizardads.com.

 You can get your ad seen to a lot more readers than by submitting to single newsletters.

One last item. Don't expect to make any real sales commissions at first. It will take rewriting and submitting your ads to many ezines before you find the right combination. You can only expect about a .05% to a 1.25 percent click-through from your ads. So you can tell...it doesn't happen overnight. Don't be discouraged. Practice makes perfect - well almost :)