I only worked seriously about three months of the year. Another quarter I did enough work to sustain me. For about two quarters a year, I rested and did my physical therapy.
When I didn’t want to work, or couldn’t, ezine advertising not only paid my bills, it kept me comfy. A lot of people will tell you to rely on AdWords. There’s nothing wrong with any type of search engine marketing if you know enough about it to maintain a decent conversion rate, and have enough money to keep your sales steady.
My preference was for testing with small ezine ads, and then, when they test well, solo ads. Six months out of the year, I would hire someone to look at my product and write me two ads, an ezine ad and a solo ad. All told, a really good copywriter that specializes in advertising would cost me $300 or less. I can write a decent ad pulling about 15% for visits, and then 3% of those for sales, but do the math: if a specialist can get me 25% for visits, even if the sales conversion rate remains steady, I’ve made a lot more money. So investing $100 for a solo ad in a high quality publication of about 10, 000 visitors would bring me 1500 visitors, and then about 45 sales.
Still, I wouldn’t suggest ezine advertising for everyone.
Pros? Instead of keyword research, you just do publication research. Is the publication targeted? Did the smaller ad yield good results? Then it’s on. If not, you’ve wasted maybe $10. So add to that cost effective. I’d spend around $100 – $250 just to Test pay per click results. A sampling of less than 100 visitors isn’t really worth the effort. The return is bettery when you hit paydirt on the right publication.
There are more pros, but you get the idea, more money, less effort, more cost effective.
Cons? It’s not as predictable as pay per click and returns aren’t as immediate. You don’t always know when your ad is going to run. Even if you get a special where the ad goes out within three days, you don’t know when the prospect is going to read the ezine or if it will make it through their filters (which I believe accounts for most of the return rate.) Pay per click has it beat there.
You also have to be careful of saturation. In a publication of 10,000, with a visit rate of 15%, I would only run the same ad for the same product ten times, and that’s over the course of several months. I’d also say that this is more of a method for a career affiliate or career infoproduct entrepreneur. Almost anyone else is better off with AdWords, or a combination of other online marketing methods. But here’s a clue – use this method to earn the initial effort for an AdWords campaign.
Of course, no smart marketer uses only one technique. I use AdWords when I want an immediate, controlled response, and have the attention span to test and track the results, and have the time to do the research. Even in the beginning, I always had the money to invest – but I’ve found that I get a better return from a combination of several methods that includes ezine advertising on my own products.
