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Ezine Profit Alternatives
by Brian Alt
[December 3, 2001]
Printer Version | Email This Article
Revenue generated from advertising has been the most popular
source of profit in most publishing ventures, and email
publishing is no exception. But unfortunately for the online
publisher, there is not an endless supply of advertising
dollars to support his or her publication.
Many publishers have turned to alternative sources of revenue
to maintain the profitability of their ezines. In some cases,
these sources provide a supplement to advertising revenue,
which remains the primary profit source. In other cases,
publishers have found that alternative sources of revenue can
actually be more profitable than advertising. This article
looks at several of these profit alternatives and examines how
you might incorporate them into your own publishing venture.
- Your Own Product Or Service - Developing your own product
or service that is an ideal match for your audience -- or
in the other direction, building an ezine around the product
or service you already have for sale -- is one of the best
means of maximizing the profit potential of an email
publication. Theoretically at least, your ideal product or
service should do better than any advertiser's offer in
your ezine from an overall profit standpoint. If an
advertiser doesn't recover its investment, that company
won't continue to advertise with you. As the publisher,
however, you don't have to risk a cash loss if a certain
offer doesn't do well in your ezine. You can simply try a
different approach in the next issue. A business owner
with both the product and the audience is in a great
position to turn a profit.
Beyond specialized products for specific ezine audiences,
most ezine publishers can produce and offer books, e-books,
or other products of the "information" variety to their
subscribers. Previously published ezine content can be a
great source of the intellectual property to create these
products. We will examine the creation of these
informational products in a future issue.
- Affiliate Programs - If you don't have a product or service
of your own, you may be able to find an appropriate
affiliate program that sells relevant products or services
for your ezine's audience. While this source of revenue
will be dependent on "performance" -- the number of clicks
or sales generated by your ezine -- affiliate programs will
usually perform better than CPA (Cost Per Action) offers
from advertisers, which may not be the best match for your
audience. For a list of sites that will help you identify
the right affiliate programs for your ezine, see this page.
- Subscription Fees - A growing trend among online publishers
is to charge a subscription fee to access some or all of
their content. If you do take this approach, it is
recommended that you maintain a free version in addition to
the paid version. This free version should still offer
significant value to your subscribers, and should be used
to encourage free subscribers to "upgrade" to the paid
version, which offers much greater value. In upcoming
issues, we will look closely at the paid-subscription
model. Much of our research in future issues will be aimed
at some of the best methods of running a fee-based online
publication.
- Profit From Your Expertise - One of the largest benefits
of publishing an ezine is that it will help to establish
you as an Internet "expert" in your given field. This
expertise can be leveraged to create sources of profit
such as consulting, public speaking, and book deals. The
most significant source of profit that EPDigest.com has
created for its publisher is the consulting business that
it has helped to generate. Similar opportunities surely
exist in other fields.
- Non-Monetary Profit - Ezine publishers profit in ways that
can't be measured in dollars. The most obvious example here
is the "education" that you receive from subscribers. The
feedback that your readers will send to you will provide
article ideas and an overall sense of the scope of your
topic. For more on the benefits of reader feedback, see this
article.
Other non-monetary sources of value include the benefits
of being a member of the "press"; namely, the ability to
get your foot in the door to interview executives of
major companies, free "review copies" of books and other
materials, and so on.
What's your opinion on the alternatives to advertising as
sources of ezine profit? To send feedback on this week's
EPDigest, email [email protected].
Until next time,
Brian Alt, Publisher
Email Publishing Digest
Brian Alt is the founder and CEO of Email
Possibilities, a provider of comprehensive email publishing solutions. He
also publishes the weekly Email Publishing Digest
and is the author of several
ebooks on email publishing-related topics.
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