August 2002

Email Technique
Getting Content

There are many ways to get content for your email publication. In most cases if you are doing an ezine to enhance your regular business you will do one based on the topic of your business. You can also do ezines on other topics unrelated to your regular business.

Your field of expertise

If your zine is about your business like mine are, it's fairly easy to get content because I'm working with the topics every day. My two major ezines are "Great Speaking" my text based ezine that is sent to people and the one you are reading right now "Great Internet Marketing, which is a "web based" ezine.

In both cases, the topics covered, speaking and Internet marketing, are things that I think about and work with every day. If you look closely at many back issues of both of the zines you will see that some of the things I'm talking about are things that happened to me or one of my clients that month. This makes it very easy for me to come up with content and it will for you too. Simply jot down different things that happened to you or you did and bang out a few paragraphs on that topic.

Here's a tip. Don't wait until the moment you have to write the ezine and get it out on deadline to think back over the past couple weeks or a month to remember what you have been doing. Chances are you'll come up with a big goose egg and get writer's block just when you don't need it. Jot down things all through the month that you think belong in the zine and keep them all in one place either on your computer or a box. Then when it comes time to do the writing you'll have plenty of reminders of what to write about.

Other writers

Once you get a decent number of subscribers you will have other people contacting you to give you articles for your zine. This happens to me all the time for "Great Speaking." Many of them, however, are lazy and won't take the time to slant the article to my audience. I get all kinds of articles that I would publish if the writer simply slanted the article to public speakers. I reject hundreds of these articles because I want to keep highly targeted information in my zine, so it doesn't become one of the many run-of-the-mill Internet publications.

If you are willing to take the time to coach these people, you may get some of them to customize the articles they send which will probably give you lots of new articles to choose from.

Article trade sites

Websites have been set up to be content trade areas on the Internet where publishers can get content and writers can contribute content on hundreds of different topics. You can go to one of these sites and use the articles found there free of charge as long as you don't edit them and you include the writers bio blurb/website link at the bottom. These articles are necessarily general in nature, so you'll have to decide if they will work in your zine. You can also place your articles there in hopes that other publishers will use them in their ezines.

Here are some of the sites:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com/

http://windstormcomputing.com/pubs/free-ezine-content/

http://www.tucats-design.com/free-content/

http://www.websuccesscentral.com/articles/index.html

There are lots more. Just type in "free content" or "free ezine content" in any search engine and you'll find tons of places to get articles and place articles.

Pay for content

I don't do this for my ezines, but you certainly could hire ghost writers, college students, and other free lancers to write your content for you. This will cost a little, but if you're back end products and ad revenue can support it, then it's a viable way to put out your publication with a lot less work.

If you don't have a college nearby, http://www.elance.com is a place you can find thousands of qualified writers  to do your work.

Off topic zines

Let's say you have a hobby that you'd like to turn into some money. Let's take fly fishing for instance. If you are a fishing fanatic (and there are lots of them) you probably read and buy all kinds of things about fishing. Why not start a zine about fishing and build up a list of other fishing enthusiasts? You could then write ebooks, and sell all kinds of fishing products and advertising right from your zine. You would be turning your hobby into cash with virtually no risk and since you already love the topic and read about it all the time you would have an endless supply of content.

Upcoming topics for this section:

• Email strategy

• HTML email

• Plain Text Email 

• Link tricks

• Getting subscribers fast

• How to make money with your zine

• How to gain clout with your zine

• How to maximize the signups on your website

Back to August 2002 Index page