By David Callan

As a webmaster, running your own free Ezine (also known as a newsletter) can bring huge benefits to your website and help increase your profits. You have seen them all over the Internet, nearly all sites related to marketing offer them to their visitors.

The popularity of these Ezines is based on the need for information. The number one reason people are online is because they want and need information and that's exactly what Ezines provide. Ezines are mostly delivered via email, some however are delivered as HTML pages. Ezines which are delivered as HTML pages still utilize email though as the webmaster will email subscribers notifying them that a new issue is ready.

There are many advantages of starting your own Ezine, however Ezines do require a bit of work to get started and maintain so they may not be for everyone.

Let's go through a few of them advantages now. There a two main advantages. These include being able to maintain regular contact with your website visitors and being able to build a relationship with them also.

Ezines allow you to maintain regular contact with your website visitors. This is vital to your success because rarely do people buy on their first visit, in fact most people usually have to be exposed to an offer up to seven times before they'll buy from you. Your Ezine allows you to keep the connection with your sites visitors and also allows you to remind them you're there so that the can revisit and maybe after the 6th or 7th time at your website they will buy.

They don't have to visit your site for your sales messages as Ezines give you the excuse to send potential customers another and another and another email packed with articles, tutorials and information. Each edition of your Ezine will of course include your sales message.

Ezines are great for building trust and relationships online. If your Ezine provides regular quality content which your subscribers can really use they'll begin to trust your opinion and will also begin to feel that they know you. This is important as you must develop relationships to make real money from your website.

The other often overlooked advantage of having an Ezine is the income it can generate, not from selling your products and services which we've already discussed above but from selling advertising space in it. You do however need a medium to large subscriber base before other businesses will be interested in advertising within your publication but this is not that hard to achieve, especially if your Ezine is regularly full of quality content. You can earn a few hundred dollars every month just from ads if you play your cards rights.

Disadvantages of running your own Ezine include the amount of work involved. While publishing an Ezine you've to regularly write a lot of quality content before your next edition comes out (usually every week) and this isn't always easy. In fact it's never easy, the next thing that adds to your work load when it comes to Ezines is maintaining your email addresses, many people change their emails addresses and even more enter in the wrong email address on your sign up form, it's your job to get rid of the bad addresses and keep the good ones.

You can of course get software to automate the maintaince of your email list, there are also lots of online services which you can use to maintain your list too. Certain software can automatically unsubscribe and subscribe different email address as well as do other things, this will significantly cut down on your workload. The content part can't however be automated, it takes time to create quality content and there is no way around this.

Now for a little summary, you need an Ezine if you sell products or services on your website, without one you'll be losing touch with hundreds if not thousands of potential customers which could in turn make or break your business.

Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com/webmaster-forums/ . Visit his webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines, website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics.

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