Until you are able to understand exactly what it is that makes subscribers eager to pay for an email newsletter, success will remain elusive. Like in any other moneymaking venture, to succeed as an email newsletter publisher, you will need to understand all the hot buttons that turn on subscribers and would-be subscribers and then you will need to press these hot buttons quickly and often. Probably the biggest mistake made by would-be ezine publishers is to measure the subscription rate that they are asking for in relation to the quantity of information that they are able to supply. Remember that the World Wide Web is awash with good information. And it is all mostly free. The last thing that anybody would want would be for you to recycle free information and then try to re-package it in such a way that you can get away with charging for it. To better understand exactly what it is that people pay for when they subscribe to a paid email newsletter, it is useful to take a closer look at some of the highest priced ezines online, some of which charge as much as $197. What kind of information do they provide? A quick casual look will reveal that a vast majority of them are financial newsletters. Financial newsletters have a long tradition of success right from the offline days. Their secret is simple. They provide moneymaking and financial tips. Folks do not mind paying the hefty subscription when a single tip in a single issue of the email newsletter can make them thousands of dollars. In plain English, subscribers will have no problem paying for your email newsletter and renewing their subscription again and again, as long as they can genuinely benefit from your ezine. For example, does your email newsletter help your subscribers make or save serious money from your tips and ideas? Or does it help them get healthier? If you can supply information that can help your subscribers achieve tangible benefits that they can see, then it will not be long before you have them falling over themselves to give you money for your email newsletter. Recent events have clearly confirmed what many keen observers and analysts have been saying for some time now. And that is the fact that readers are shifting more and more of their reading online. What this means is that traditional offline media like newspapers and magazines have their future in great doubt. More so because online publishing has a number of things going for it, like the cost and speed at which information can be published. One can almost receive news in real time. But the publishers themselves are enjoying the biggest advantages. They include the fact that there are no obstacles like crippling printing and production costs to contend with. This means that although online information publishing is already generating bags of hard cash for online entrepreneurs (see my article about the 6 year old email publishing company that raked in $100 million in revenues last year), the best is yet to come. That is precisely why understanding potential subscribers to your email newsletter now, is so important. |
