How to Juice Sales with Online Advetising: eZine

Updated July 11, 2008

There's a common misconception out there that drawing massive volumes of web traffic to your site is ecommerce goal number one. However, having ten thousand unique visitors a day means nothing if no one is buying. Though marketing pundits talk a lot about "spinning hit counters" and "converting browsers to buyers", conversion ratios remain pathetically low for most e-businesses - independent of whatever website marketing gyrations are being applied.

The point? Serious conversion takes place only when you've directed qualified visitors to your site. If you want to juice sales, you need tactics that attract pre-qualified leads - tactics that generate the folks who are ready to lay down plastic in real time. To target your audience requires that you understand your audience, and once you have a bead on the demographic variables, try running an ad for your products in an e-zine. Approached properly, e-zine advertising can be an effective way to drive qualified traffic to your site.

For beginners, an e-zine is really nothing more than a fancy name for an e-mail-based newsletter that provides regular doses of news and information on a particular subject to subscribers who have signed up to receive it. In the last few years, thousands of e-zines have sprouted up on nearly every subject you can imagine - from cooking and UFOs to good parenting and postmodern philosophy.

Mainstream to fringe, academic to pop culture, there's at least a handful of e-zines that will cater to the informational needs of your target customers. If you sell art, find an art zine to advertise in, and make sure they traffic in the kind of art styles that stimulate the traffic you want at your site. If you sell computer components, find a computer zine - but always target within your category to maximize advertising response rates. You won't get much of a positive reaction selling Bill Gates' inventory to the Linux community. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and so it goes with advertising - at least if you want to capitalize on every penny of your investment.

So what are the mechanics of e-zine advertising? As you may notice, most e-zines are free to sign up for; and that's because, for many publishers, the primary goal is to build a large subscriber list of people with common interests that they can dangle in front of prospective ad buyers like yourself. The first step in sampling the effectiveness of e-zine advertising is to identify one that caters to your unique target market. The next step is to evaluate their reach and scope. If you're not already aware of an appropriate e-zine for your market, try one of the following approaches:

Contact a company, like OptInNews, MyFree, or MeMail, that offers dozens of e-zines on a broad variety of topics; or

Invest $30 - $40 in an e-zine directory - a comprehensive listing of links to e-zines that accept advertising. One such directory is The Directory of E-Zines: or

Scour the net with relevant search terms to locate e-zines, information portals, and online trade journals that cater to your target demographic.

When you've identified an e-zine that looks like it may be appropriate for your advertising purposes, be sure to do your due diligence before handing over your credit card information. Find out how many subscribers they have - and how they have collected their subscriber database. It is a publisher's duty to compile a core e-zine audience and know its demographic features. They should also be candid about how products like yours have performed when advertised before in the past.

Also, ask the publishers if they have many repeat buyers of ad space (a good indicator of effectiveness) and who they are. Evaluate their website and other services for professionalism. And request to receive past issues to make sure they feature quality content with a bit of advertising tastefully interspersed throughout - and not the other way around. E-zines that go light on content tend to go unread and they often have a generally seedy aura. It almost always proves true that the better the content, the better the quality of the subscriber list, and the better the advertising response rate.

Also, be sure to find out where your ad will be placed within the e-zine - featured prominently at the top, tucked snugly in the middle, or hidden away at the bottom.

Logically, ad content should be extremely well crafted, with an attention-grabbing headline. Take a look at a large sampling of ads that are working, that make you point and click, and then derive a formula for click-through success. Write ads that stimulate and curiosity and interest of your target audience. Promotions are, naturally, an effective way to advertise. When your customers click through to your site, make sure they are provided with seamless follow-up information and a direct link to the buy or contact button.

When purchasing e-mail marketing space, the number of subscribers on a list will determine the cost. In e-zine advertising sales, you'll find that pricing is usually quoted on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis - a system that sounds complicated but is actually quite simple. Here's how it works: If an e-zine has a subscriber base of 20,000 and quotes you a $25 CPM rate, you would pay $500 (or 20 X $25) to run your advertisement.

Finally, monitor your results (or click through rate) using traffic analysis software and then evaluate the impact on sales, your conversion ratio, and your advertising return on investment. The e-zine publisher should be able to supply you with traffic stats as well. Analyze your data, perfect your strategy, and optimize ad content and targeting tactics. If you've selected the right e-zine and written a powerful ad, you should see a significant improvement in your conversion ratios.