Research before you advertise!

Before you run out and purchase advertising in your favorite ezine, or the first ezine that strikes your fancy, research the market.

First, review ListCity's free directory of ezine advertising rates at http://www.list-city.com. Then, determine which ezines match your target market and are within your advertising budget.

And remember, ezines that don't immediately seem like appropriate targets may be a great advertising opportunity. For example, perhaps you have a travel website or travel product. Certainly, you will want to target travel ezines, but you may also want to target other leisure publications, such as humor and recipe ezines. In particular, you might want to advertise in one of the many humor ezines that have huge subscriber bases and moderate advertising rates.

Get a sample copy of the ezines in which you are interested. Perhaps a particular ezine might have cheap rates, but that may be for a good reason. Check to see how many ads each ezine runs, and what type of ads are run. Stay away from publications with a plethora of ads, even if they offer a large subscriber base and a low CPM (cost per thousand subscribers). It shouldn't surprise you that you'll often get only a few responses from these types of ezines, even if they have 35,000 subscribers! People skim right by these ads, because there are so many of them -- and because most of the ads are of such low quality. Also, beware of ezines that claim to have thousands and thousands of subscribers and are of suspect quality, or just started publishing. Their subscriber numbers may be highly exaggerated.

There are some ezines that are published frequently -- perhaps daily -- and have a huge subscriber base. Yet they publish three to four ads per issue. That may not seem like a lot of ads -- but stop and think a moment. The subscribers of these types of ezines have become accustomed to daily seeing a few ads per issue, and have learned to skip the ads entirely. Each ad gets little attention, because the readers have become numb to the frequent advertising messages that they see every day. These messages are just viewed as more junk to skip to get to the good stuff -- the editorial content. If you are interested in a large ezine with daily publication, try to find one that publishes only one quality ad. Its readers are then much more likely to read that one ad before getting on to reading the remainder of the publication.

Remember, you get what you pay for. Don't be afraid to pay a little more for a quality ezine and exclusive exposure. It's not how much you pay for your advertisement -- but rather, the response to your advertisement. A good ad in a quality ezine should pull a response rate of upwards of 1%. A good ad in a shoddy ezine might pull much, much less.

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Article by Katherine Winters, courtesy of MediaPeak http://mediapeak.com