Ezine marketing made easier: Succeed together, struggle alone.
Like many of you, I offer a service and I get paid to do it. I don’t have employees or co-workers or anyone except my cats to keep me company throughout the day. Mostly I love this. Sometimes, though, I feel lonely, especially when I have a deadline that is causing me to be single-minded while I work 15-hour days in order to get everything done on time.
It’s much easier to grow your small business or private practice when you have support, but knowing how to get that support can seem tricky, especially if you don’t want the hassle of renting an office, hiring employees or commuting through traffic.
So here’s a scenario I conjured up for you:
Imagine you want to grow your business (and if you’re self-employed, you’re in business). One of your goals is to increase your client base. How can you collaborate to eliminate some of the stress of working alone?
You can have a community “ezine”, or “electronic magazine.” It’s similar to a newsletter, but there are some notable differences.
In my weekly ezine I use a consistent format with an intro section, an essay and a sidebar column that contains contact info and a few things that I’m offering.
The essay (hopefully) gives you relevant, useful information you can use to more easily grow your own work. The sidebar area helps me let you know what I’m offering. The intro let’s me connect with you on a more personal level. And when you email me to let me know how you’re doing I get to know you better (hint, hint.) An ezine makes the entire exchange more personal.
A newsletter, on the other hand, is more about sharing news and events. It’s generally not as personal.
Regardless, an ezine and newsletter can help you:
1) Add value to your clients’ lives by providing them with useful information
2) Attract new clients (because people will sign up to receive valuable information)
3) Advertise without being salesy
4) Be seen as an expert or “go to person” in your particular field
The most effective ezines are mailed on a regular basis, like daily or weekly, and on predictable days, like every Monday. But that’s a lot of writing for some people.
Unfortunately, monthly ezines aren’t as effective as weekly ezines. My website traffic has tripled since I went from monthly to weekly ezines, and more people are calling to enlist my services.
But what if you’d rather not write weekly essays? Is there still a way that you can benefit from a weekly ezine?
Believe it or not, the following idea came to me as a result of a dream I had.
You can have a weekly ezine by creating a small group of colleagues who agree to help cross market each other’s services. You don’t have to share an office. You can do this virtually (over the internet.)
Let’s say you are a massage therapist and you know an herbalist, a dream worker and a spiritual counselor.
Each of you wants to grow your clientele, likes to write, and is thinking of having an ezine, but you’d rather focus your time and attention on your services, not on writing weekly articles. What do you do?
Instead of each person writing a weekly essay for a weekly ezine, you could send an ezine that is a collaborative effort. Each of you could contribute one essay a month. With your combined essays you have enough to send a weekly ezine, and you don’t have to do as much work.
Here’s how it might work:
Imagine each of you has a mailing list of 100 people. Together you produce 4 essays a month, emailing one essay a week to your combined mailing lists.
Suddenly your message is reaching 400 people instead of 100.
1) 300 new people are reading about your work and since much of your shared audience likes holistic care, chances are good they’re going to like what you have to offer, too.
2) If you include links from your ezine to each member’s website then you increase traffic to your websites.
There is a problem, however. In this scenario it’s best to have one email database, but if one person decides to leave the group what happens to their email addresses? They might lose everything and that would be bad. So here’s a possible solution:
3) Have one database and send one ezine to the entire database. Then, each of you has a free, downloadable ebook on your website. The ebook can be downloaded in exchange for an email address. When you send your weekly ezine you promote these ebooks and help one another collect email addresses. Your email lists will actually grow.
When you work in community the possibilities are nearly endless. I encourage you to think about how you might work with your colleagues to help eliminate some of the stress that is involved in growing a business.
In the TV show Lost one of the characters often says, “Live together, die alone.” For our purposes it might be, “Work together, stress out alone.”
Work with others and eliminate stress. Start by asking yourself who you know and how you might help one another grow.
Have any ideas about other ways to collaborate? Share your ideas in the comment section of this blog post:
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