“Do You Have Content For Your E-zine or Newsletter?”

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If you don’t have content for your E-zine or newsletter then what value are you offering to your subscribers?

Content is king. We have heard this term often enough, but the problem with people is that they try to take the easy way out. They don’t take this principle seriously enough that is why the Internet at times is full of unwanted junk and spam sites.

Too many people are obsessed with getting traffic, getting their sites optimized for Search Engine (SEO) and flashing their affiliate links all over the Internet through ‘spam’ comments and worthless self-promotion. This is only a short term solution and you can’t get long term results at all.

Did you know that good content gets ranked on search engines like Google because they now read the WHOLE web page and use it to generate matches? This is very important. As long as you write a lot more ORIGINAL content, you have a higher chance of getting ranked on the search engine.

Basically, you don’t have to worry too much about traffic if your content is good. Your target audiences are humans, people who read and understand your work, not search engine spiders. In the Web 2.0 generation now, HUMANS represent the web and they are the ones who teach the web how to think.

Similarly, if you have good content, other websites may link to your content and this will bring in even more visitors to your site. Links to your pages will also boost your PAGE RANK on Google and we all know how valuable a high page rank means to the webmaster in terms of search listing…

People hate reading an E-book without good content anyway therefore you must realize the importance of gathering content in advance.

The main reason for having good content remains, and it is an unchangeable fact – that it will make your website popular with your visitors and will give it a good chance of surviving and doing well.

When you get content in advance, you have many options. You can estimate the trends of the time and sort through what is considered obsolete information and what is considered flaming HOT in the market.

The next thing you can do is to divide your content into readable chunks. You don’t want to dump all your information into one e-mail. That is very, very bad because you will confuse the reader and they will most likely have little interest in waiting for the next installment.

It is very important for you to put yourself in the shoes of your subscriber because they probably don’t know the subject or the topic as well as you do (that is why they have subscribed to your E-zine in the first place).

Bear in mind, good content doesn’t always need to be in the form of writing, pictures, audio interviews and YouTube videos are all good sources of content and you can be sure that using a combination of these will guarantee good readership.

What Type of Content should you be giving?

When choosing what type of content you want to publish on your E-zine on, you must consider some important success factors that can determine the flow and goal of your E-zine.

First you must consider the format that you want to publish for your E-zine. Publishers today use any one or more of these 3 most commonly used E-zine formats:

•    Text E-zine
•    HTML E-zine
•    PDF E-zine

Each of these formats has its pros and cons and ultimately, it is up to you how you want to use them for your advantage.

If you decide to use text E-zine, make sure your E-zines are short and concise. Don’t try and put too many words in a text E-zine or newsletter because an e-mail should be short and sweet. Don’t try and be long winded and try and sell your subscribers something over the Internet – it is very ineffective.

The good thing about a text E-zine is that you don’t have to spend too much time compiling e-reports or edit HTML to get people to read what you are trying to tell them. Remember, always use text E-zine to pre-sell an idea or a product. Lead them to your webpage or your sales letter to do the job. All you need to do is worry about the text.

The bad thing about text is that you can’t put any pictures and unless your headline is a really powerful headline, it would be very hard to increase your open rate (the ratio between those who open the e-mail you sent to them and those who don’t)

HTML E-zine format requires a certain degree of HTML skills on your part, you can add more refined features to your E-zine issues, making them more appealing to your subscriber eyes.

This will definitely increase your readership value, something that text E-zines do not have because you can’t insert pictures into your e-mails (actually you can but pictures will cause e-mails to wind up in the spam folder if the file size is too large).

Even if you are not good at HTML, you can always use blogs. Blogs allow you to create the content without worrying about the form (in other words all the technical stuff). All you need to do is set your blog template and you can start blogging away.

What you can do is to use a combination of e-mails to lead your subscribers to your blogs or websites. You can decorate your E-zine format, change your fonts, include pictures, and more.

The last format I will discuss about is a format that is rarely used by others – it is the PDF E-zine. Publishing your E-zine in PDF format can consume a lot of time and effort on your part but it increases the perceived value of your E-zine by a lot!

Once you are done with all the formats, then you can decide what type of content you are going to put in regards to the format you have chosen.

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