Ezines are fantastic marketing tools but good content can be hard to come up with. Here are six easy ideas for content you can use in your ezine.
1. Share the content burden by partnering with other, non-competitive organizations and individuals.
Whether they're peers, clients, prospects, professional media organisations, industry authorities or whatever, lots of people can be persuaded to give you content if you remind them what's in it for them: exposure with a relevant audience.
This works both on the level of the business, and the individual (smart professionals recognise that their profile within an industry is a major factor in their employment prospects).
And it works even better if an interviewee, for example, has their own following, because it can provide an opportunity for you to cross-fertilize your lists.
But be careful not to come to rely on third party content - remember it is YOU and YOUR expertise that the ezine is there to showcase!
Three tips on successfully sharing the content burden:
• Brief contributors properly. Ensure contributors have sufficient information to do a good job for you: be clear on what you want and expect: format, number of words, and so on.
• Produce a one-page profile of your ezine to guide contributors. This is the easiest way to keep outside contributors and in-house staff alike 'on message'. Include information on your ezine's readership, purpose, history, usual subject matter and business objectives.
• Get your deals with contractors straight from day one. If you're planning a more obviously commercial or ongoing relationship with a contractor to produce content for you, make sure you agree, preferably in a contract and certainly in writing, expectations, rights and obligations, from the very beginning. When should they submit material? How long should it be? Who owns the material, and where and when can it be used? Consider all these issues now, before they become problems later, and take legal advice if necessary.
2. Include a dedicated client or subscriber area.
Sales authority Jeffrey Gitomer's weekly 'Sales Caffeine' ezine for salespeople always includes an area for subscribers' 'sightings': snapshots of Jeffrey's sales books and CDs, the weirder the better.
This has three obvious benefits - it showcases the products, generates light-hearted subscriber interaction, and has a viral marketing effect (how many other people do you think those featured subscribers tell about, show, and forward that email on to?).
Other sources of content from your clients might include a) news and success stories b) client-submitted profiles (individuals or business), c) people moves, especially if you operate in a close-knit industry with regular inter-company movement, d) job opportunities with your clients.
You may also be able to work out a clever way in which featuring in this kind of section is restricted to clients who give you business, or a certain amount of business, thereby acting as a cue or incentive for the non-clients or low value clients who subscribe to your ezine to get more involved with you.
3. Use subscriber feedback as a source of, or inspiration for, content.
With a reasonably sized audience, you should start to get feedback from subscribers anyway, so comment on their feedback, or ask if you can reproduce their comments verbatim.
This can be a way of garnering feedback, generating content AND getting more customer contact, particularly if you offer incentives for feedback.
For example, you might offer a 20% discount voucher for your store each month for the subscriber who provides the most useful feedback on what they like about your service.
Not only can you learn about what you're doing well, but you can package it into ezine content in the form of a 'good news story', AND get to build the relationship with your happy customer when they come in to use the discount.
4. Repeat popular content.
With even the very best-read ezines averaging open rates of 40% maximum, the fact is that any given ezine you send out will not be read by most of the people on your list.
And, of course, we hope that lots of brand new people will be joining your list every day.
It stands to reason therefore that your hard-produced content is going to waste at least some of the time unless you repeat it, at least in the form of summaries with links.
Of course, if you are repeating content, put it only after new content, and mention that it's been repeated due to popular demand, great interest or exceptional quality.
5. Ongoing glossary.
If you work in an industry with a lot of technical language, this can be a very useful service. Feature one or two words a week and explain what they mean.
6. 'Recent articles.'
Add a 'Recent articles' section to your ezine linking through to articles from recent ezines. Typical ezine open rates are 40%. That means an awful lot of people, for whatever reason, will miss a given article - it doesn't however mean they're not interested, so give them a second chance to see your best content.
Happy ezine publishing!
Six Great Ezine Content Ideas
0 comments:
Post a Comment