How to publish your own e-zine10 February 2005
There are several advantages to publishing your own e-zine or electronic newsletter. Having your own branded e-zine allows you to:
- Promote new products and services
- Create a loyal community of customers
- Drive traffic to your website
- Capture the contact details of visitors to your website
But setting up an e-zine isn't just a matter to building a page and launching it. It requires careful consideration. Here are our top points to consider when setting up an e-zine for your business.
Content
- Make your content relevant, interesting and reflective of the personality of your business. Ask for opinions and feedback, and reward respondents with exclusive news, special offers or competitions. Publicise your website or online products by including plenty of links back to these in your e-zine.
- Keep your e-zine jargon-free and easy to read, by breaking up the copy with bullet-pointed lists. You can get good advice on writing for the web from Useit.com.
- If you're thinking of publishing your e-zine as part of your website (rather than, or as well as, being e-mailed to subscribers), use relevant keywords to help the search engines find it.
- Once you've decided what your e-zine will cover and how often it will be published, set up a schedule of forthcoming topics and deadliness and stick to them.
Legal considerations
- Make sure people have signed up or subscribed to your e-zine before sending anything out. This way you won't be breaching anti-spam regulations.
- You're legally obliged to include your contact information at the bottom of the e-zine, along with details of how people can unsubscribe. Use the copyright symbol to protect your content from plagiarism.
Distribution and promotion
- If you're emailing out your e-zine, you may want to use your existing email program, a desktop-based package or a paid-for email management service like Constant Contact or Vertical response.
- Decide on a format (text, html or both - some email programs may have difficulty reading html newsletters), and find a suitable editing package. Draw up a template that you can use for each issue, to speed up assembling your e-zine.
- Publicise your e-zine by putting an opt-in form on your website, or when they buy a product or service. You could also publish back issues of your e-zine on your website.
- E-zines can also be promoted through ad-swapping with other e-zine publishers. Freezineweb.com will help you find publishers in related fields.
- The Write Market provides a practical tutorial covering how to publish an e-zine, with good tips on content and formatting. While Email Universe has useful general tips for e-zine creators.
