Advertising

You will need to consider whether you will take advertising in connection with your e-zine. If you do, this can take various forms:

• The first is advertisements included within the body of the e-zine itself – these can be designed along with the rest of the text, or artwork provided by advertisers can be slotted in.
• The second is ‘banner’ advertisements, which are small advertisements that can appear on your website close to the e-zine, but not inside it.
• The third is web links that, again, can appear on the website associated with the magazine but not inside it.
• The fourth is ‘pop-up’ advertisements, which are moving features that generally appear on screen in front of the e-zine and which have either to be read or deleted by people before they can get to the content of the e-zine itself. Pop-ups can irritate many people and, while they are undoubtedly attention grabbing, they can be counter-productive – so use them with discretion. You will also need to decide what to charge for advertising and this will depend, as it does with printed publications, on your total readership, the size of the advertisement and other similar factors.

Monitoring Your Readership

There are various ways of checking on who reads your magazine – but this only applies if it is available on your website rather than as an email attachment. One way of checking is to monitor the number of ‘clicks’ you receive – and this can be to a site, to a page or to an item. Another way is by using what is called a ‘cookie’, which is an electronic data file that can remember how often a person visits a site (people can, however, turn cookies off in their browsers, so this may not always be an entirely accurate process).

3. Electronic Newsletters

Electronic newsletters are newsletters specifically designed for on-line receipt and reading. These are now becoming very common and are a useful business tool and also a good commercial prospect. In this section I will cover some of the main aspects of producing electronic newsletters.

Title

It is important to have a name that invites people to read the newsletter. Thinking about your overall purpose and approach will help you select a name and it is important, where possible, to make the name reflect the benefits that readers will get from subscribing to your publication.

Frequency

Because of the ease with which ENs can be produced, it is tempting to bring them out very frequently. However, monthly, fortnightly or, at most, weekly is about the maximum that most people can cope with receiving an EN. Less often than monthly means they are less likely to contain topical news, and more often than weekly means recipients are likely to go into overload and not bother to read them. However frequently you do produce your EN, if you find you cannot keep to your schedule from time to time, it is worth letting subscribers know that there will be a longer gap and when to expect you back; this will keep them involved, and save them having to contact you to find out what is happening.

Timing

Some people consider that there are optimum days of the week on which to send out ENs. This may be so in general terms, but for individuals the ‘best’ day can vary. Mondays are probably not good days for most business people as they will probably be returning after a weekend to lots of other messages and unfinished work; similar points could be made about Fridays, when people are likely to be trying hard to complete all their urgent work before leaving for the weekend – unless they are very efficient, in which case Friday afternoons may be good times for them when they are beginning to ‘unwind’. This means that mid-week is probably best for the majority of people.