Success with Ease Ezine - Vol02Iss03Date030122

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Volume 2, Issue 3

January 22, 2003

Published by Peggy Champlin, Success with Ease is devoted to helping professionals and small businesses build their businesses, particularly in the area of passive income.

Table of Contents

Message from Peggy
Make Money With Advertisements In Your Ezine
Resources - Free Copywriting Tutorials
Final Note
Contact Information

Message from Peggy

Well, I'm getting excited! I've laid out the teleclasses I'm going to start offering in February and started writing copy for my new website. This has all been getting designed in my head for about six weeks now and it's great to see it shaping up as I start dumping it all out on paper.

One of the areas I'm working to get smarter about is copywriting. Of course, I'll be sharing my newfound wisdom in future issues of this ezine! There are a couple of free online tutorials I found that are referenced in the Resources section.

This way of working - thinking a lot for awhile and then just dumping it all out very quickly - can drive people around me crazy. It doesn't look like anything is happening for a long time and then, suddenly it all appears. It may not be in its final format, but it's pretty well thought out by the time the ideas get written down for the first time.

My creativity has worked like this ever since high school. When I took Advanced Placement English in my senior year, we had an essay due every Friday in my second period class. The teacher gave us the topic on Monday. I would put it in the back of my mind, thinking about the conclusion, the three main points and lastly, the introduction. Then, I would write the first - and final! - draft of my essay in my first period study hall Friday morning and hand it in the next period. I always got an A on my essay!

This way of managing creative projects has stuck with me. Hey, if it works, why mess with it, right? When I ask you to check out the teleclasses and my new website in a couple of weeks, you can tell me if it's still working well!

I read the story in the Final Note for the first time quite a few years ago and really liked it. This version has an amusing twist at the end. I hope you appreciate the story and the surprise twist as much as I do.

Enjoy the rest of this issue and make it a great week!

Peggy

Make Money with Advertisements In Your Ezine

This week we continue with elements for your ezine. This week's topic is advertisements, which you absolutely want to include in some form. They are one of the key ways that you make money from your subscription list, either directly or indirectly. As long as you have enough valuable content in your ezine (which we'll start discussing next week), your subscribers will accept a reasonable amount of advertising.

Advertisements can go in various places within your ezine. Some publishers put all advertisements at the end. Some put a sponsored ad, which is more expensive, at the beginning. A very effective technique is to put advertisements within your article(s). You'll want to set them off from the article text, of course, but the ad is much more likely to get read there than at the end of the newsletter.

Your advertising will fall into 3 categories. First, you will have promotional text for your own products and services. Every issue of your ezine should have at least one mention of a product of your own or affiliate program you belong to. After all, the whole reason to build this list is to make money, right! You may want to tie the product or affiliate program you're promoting to the subject of one the articles in the ezine or the issue's overall theme, if it has one. (By the way, I do recommend that you have a theme for each issue of your ezine.)

Another category of advertising is paid. Other businesses may be willing to pay you to put ads in your ezine. This is more likely to happen when your list size gets to at least 1000. If you accept this type of advertising, you will want to indicate that somewhere in your ezine, perhaps with a pointer to your website for your advertising rates and formatting guidelines.

The third category is swapping advertisements. Rather than getting paid for an advertisement in your ezine, you get an advertisement in that business' ezine. This can be very useful between businesses that have a similar target market. It's been shown that even when the business is a direct competitor, sales for both businesses can go up when they advertise each other! Swaps work best when the list size for each ezine is roughly the same. If your list is half the size of the one of you'd like to swap with, you could offer to run two of their ads for every one of yours they run.

You may want to test the placement and content of your ezine advertising to get the best click through rate possible - that is, the most readers clicking the link in the advertisement to find out more about the product or service being advertised.

Next week, we'll finally get to the meat of your ezine - the content.

Resources - Free Copywriting Tutorials

Writing good copy is vital to creating a website that will sell your products and services. While you can hire a copywriter, it's pretty expensive. I think it's well worth it to take some time and learn this skill rather than hire it out. It will prove useful over and over again as you run your business.

While poking around to see what copywriting resources I could find, I ran across a site with a pretty good copywriting tutorial - and it's free! It's at http://www.marketingexpert.com/tutorials/copywriting/index.shtml.

There's another free copywriting tutorial that I found useful at http://www.adcopywriting.com/Tutorials_List.htm.

Final Note

The Donkey in the Well

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway, so it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They each grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well.

At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement, he quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer looked down the well, and was astonished at what he saw.

As every shovel of dirt hit his back, the donkey did something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up. As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up.

Pretty soon, everyone was amazed, as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off.

The Moral: Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up!

The donkey later came back, caught the farmer out in the field and kicked the **** out of him. Then he went over to each of his neighbors farms and kicked the **** out of them too for helping.

The REAL Moral: When you try to cover your ass, it always comes back to get you.

Contact Information

This ezine is published by Peggy Champlin, a small business coach who specializes in helping you convert 'what you know' into passive income.

To send me email, mailto:peggy@peggychamplin.com.

To learn more about my coaching and program offerings, go to http://www.SuccessWithEase.com.

You are free to use the material from my articles in whole or in part on your web site or ezine (email newsletter) as long as you include the attribution below and also let me know where the article will appear.

"This article is by Peggy Champlin of Success with Ease. Peggy's web site is a comprehensive resource devoted to helping professionals and small businesses build their businesses, particularly in the area of passive income. For free marketing resources and valuable marketing tools visit http://www.SuccessWithEase.com."