Charlie Page began his online career as a copywriter, specializing in sales letters, selling emails, and autoresponder messages that cause readers to take action in record numbers. One of Charlie's sales letters garnered an amazing 34% conversion rate during the introduction of a very well-known ebook about Internet marketing. In 2000, Charlie joined the Directory of Ezines as a member and began using ezine marketing to grow his business. Within 18 months, he bought the company and today is considered the leading expert on ezine marketing.
Charlie has been interviewed by the best and brightest minds online, and he is also an accomplished author, with over 10 ebooks on Internet marketing.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's talk about ezine advertising because that was one of the first things you got involved with when you were starting to market your own stuff, right?
CHARLIE PAGE: Yes. I began my online adventure as an affiliate marketer, selling other people's products, because I couldn't create a product or a website. I didn't know what HTML stood for. I did know that I could write pretty well, and I could write persuasive copy. What I began doing was writing ads for other people's products and earning a commission when those products were sold, which is what we now call affiliate marketing. I needed a place to put the ads. I'd looked around at many different things.
I tried many different things and discovered a thing called the Directory of Ezines. I became a member of the Directory of Ezines, which back then was a lot of money for me. My wife looked at me and said, "Are you crazy? We need that money." I said, "I promise, honey. I'll make this work." I started doing some advertising, article marketing, and developing relationships with publishers so they would work with me in a joint venture sort of way. A little less than 18 months later, I bought the company.
RIC THOMPSON: Wow. Gang, before I go any further, I want to make a note that Charlie is going to have a gift for everybody. I'll talk about that in a few minutes. We're probably going to talk about Directory of Ezines and maybe some others sites he has, but Charlie isn't going to sell anything today on this call, so keep your wallets in your pockets. He'll be giving you a gift later on.
Charlie, about the Directory of Ezines and ezine advertising, there are a million different ways you can market your products and services. You mentioned you started off as an affiliate, as a lot of people do on the web. In fact, a lot of folks listening right now are probably affiliates. Why do ezine advertising? Of all the different methods, why did you go that direction?
CHARLIE PAGE: It's so highly targeted. As a person who had been in sales all my life, I knew that if you want to sell products more easily, you try to speak only to an audience that has already expressed an interest in what you have to sell. With ezines, it was really easy to find people who were already interested in what I was trying to sell, because the nature of the ezine they were subscribing to told me they were interested in that topic.
For example, I was selling AWeber back then. I still love and recommend AWeber. I have known Tom forever, and I think they're a great company. I didn't place ads for AWeber in golfing ezines, recipe ezines, or parenting ezines. I placed ads for AWeber in ezines about business opportunities, Internet marketing, advertising, affiliate marketing, and things like that. I knew in advance these people would be interested.
You have to have a good autoresponder in order to successfully market things online. That was what drew me to ezines. It was the logic of it. If Joe is subscribed to an ezine about bass fishing and I'm selling bass fishing lures, I'm going to do a lot better if I advertise in the ezine Joe reads than if I advertise in one about recipes. That was the logic that appealed to me.
RIC THOMPSON: We probably need to back up. I may be making some assumptions here. Give us a quick rundown of what ezine advertising is in case anybody is not following us at this point, and then we'll get into some details about it.
CHARLIE PAGE: Let me back up one step farther than that and talk about what an ezine is. The word 'ezine' can be pronounced 'e-zeen' or 'e-zine'. It comes from smashing together two words: 'electronic' and 'magazine'. You take the 'E' off electronic and the 'zine' off of magazine, and that's what you have. You have an electronic magazine. They're also called newsletters. The ezines are delivered by email to people who subscribe to them.
The way they subscribe to them is that they visit a website about a particular topic. Let's say it's parenting. You go and visit a website about parenting, and they have a little form that says, "Would you like to learn more? Get my simple guide to helping your child sleep well at night," or whatever. You fill in the form, and you subscribe to their newsletter or ezine.
An ezine is an electronic magazine delivered by email to people who have requested it. It has nothing to do with bulk mail, blasting, or any of this kind of stuff. These are all 100% opt-in subscribers. That's what an ezine is: an electronic magazine. It contains articles. Just like magazines you read when you buy them at the newspaper stand, it contains advertising.
If you go to your market to buy some groceries for supper, you'll go to the checkout stand and see People magazine and all these other magazines. They all have articles and advertising. Electronic magazines, ezines, have the same thing. They have advertising, and they have articles. That's basically what an ezine is, how it's delivered, and the type of content it contains.
RIC THOMPSON: Of course, the next logical step is how a marketer like you were when you started off-you're an affiliate marketer, and maybe you have your own products-do you tap into that as a form of advertising?
CHARLIE PAGE: There are a couple of things you have to do. This is actually the reason the Directory of Ezines exists: to help people find the right ezines for their offer quickly. There are several things you have to do if you want to use Google to do it. There's nothing wrong with using the search engine of your choice, whether that's Google, Yahoo!, or whoever comes along. In order to find ezines, first of all, you have to find the ezines that are being published by topic.
Let's say you want to reach golfers and sell golf balls. You have to find all the golfing ezines. Then you have to determine if they sell advertising. If they do, how much does it cost? What are the requirements? When is the next ad available? How do you pay them? There are a ton of details you have to find, and it takes a lot of time. The Directory of Ezines exists to help people find ezines faster. We gather about 45 different pieces of information about each ezine, and we put it in a very searchable database.
It's really easy to search. You can quickly find what you're looking for. To answer your question specifically, you have to find an ezine about a topic you're interested in. Then you have to determine if they sell advertising. If they do, can you afford it? If yes, how do you buy it? Then you contact them. The process is a lot like selling a car. If you had a car that you needed to sell, you'd call your local newspaper. If you're in an area where they have Greensheet or something like that, you'd call a local publication.
You'd say, "I want to sell my car." They'd say, "Here's the fee for doing that." Then you'd give them the ad copy. You'd say, "2006 Volvo; white with brown interior; only ever drove it to church; 2,000 miles," and that type of thing. You'd give them the ad copy. For a fee, they would run your ad on a particular day, and people would respond to your ad using whatever you told them to use. They'd email you or call you on the phone, and you'd sell your car. Selling products using ezines is very similar to that.
RIC THOMPSON: That makes it very simple. Going back to your story, you were in a financially tight situation, shall we say, barely able to squeeze out a membership to the Directory of Ezines, and in less than 18 months you purchased the entire company. I guess that sort of makes the assumption that ezine advertising can work pretty darn well and pretty darn quickly.
CHARLIE PAGE: It does make that assumption. You know me well enough to know that I'm going to say that God is good and we were really blessed. That's a happy thing. I would add this to that: I worked that Directory of Ezines until it smoked. I got in there and took advantage of everything I could do. I submitted articles to publishers. I called publishers on the phone. I placed advertising as I could afford to.
I see so many people today who buy tools for their business but don't fully use them, and I really do believe that I've fully used the Directory of Ezines, and I was in a very happy place at a very happy time and able to buy the company. It absolutely works. I placed an ad this morning to 1,200,000 people. That ad goes out on Tuesday of next week. I know the kind of clicks I'll get from it.
I know the kind of traffic I'll get from it. My landing page is optimized. I'm happy to report that in this year, ezine advertising works just as well as it did when I started doing it quite a while ago. I buy advertising every single week in ezines and probably always will.
RIC THOMPSON: Let me really dig into this, Charlie. You mentioned a couple of quick things that had me asking some questions mentally. I'm sure folks who are listening are asking the same things. How do you know that by advertising in that one specific newsletter, you're going to get the clicks and your ad is going to be worth it? How do you know those things? If I put an ad, I'm going to get this much traffic from that particular ezine.
CHARLIE PAGE: In fairness, there is no Coke machine of traffic on the Internet. There's no machine where you put in $1.00 and receive your Coke. That just doesn't exist, to the best of my knowledge. Also in fairness, I have a lot of experience at doing this. How do I know how many clicks I'll get? I've been advertising with this guy for a couple of years. I found him, researched, and did my due diligence. I subscribed to his ezine, and I liked what I saw.
I communicated with him via email. We've never spoken on the phone. I've spent many thousands of dollars with him. I've never met him or talked to him. I found his ezine, saw that he sold advertising, subscribed to it, read some issues, and liked what I saw. I was happy as a subscriber. I contacted him about advertising, which he did sell, and he said, "Sure. I'll be happy to sell you an ad." I had a good ad prepared. It was what I call control copy.
I knew how this ad performed in other ezines. I ran it in his, and when I compared how it performed in others, I knew I'd found a long-term source. One thing that people make a mistake about with ezine advertising is they think they need to find 50 ezines in which to place ads. The truth is that you need three to five. If you can find three to five ezines that really suit your product and resonate with you in which you can place an ad and get good response, that's all you're going to need to find.
You can go beyond that if you want to and reinvest your profits, but I did this in the early days when I was doing ezine advertising and every penny counted. I'd write a sales letter for somebody, and I'd take that money and immediately buy advertising with it. Back then, when every penny counted, I had five ezines I was using. That was all. They were a great fit for me because I'd done my homework.
RIC THOMPSON: How often can you run an ad? If you built your business up with five ezines, it seems like you'd be running an ad every couple of weeks in the same ezine.
CHARLIE PAGE: In some cases, I was running an ad every week. There were a couple of ezines where I became their only advertiser for a while because I could afford to buy them out because it was working so well.
RIC THOMPSON: Wow. You went through a process of weeding out the weak newsletters versus the strong newsletters. When you found a good one, you just kept spending money until it stopped performing. In some cases, it never stopped performing.
CHARLIE PAGE: That's exactly right. In copywriting for the web or anything now, I owned a direct mail company before I went online, so I was used to writing direct response copy. I was used to writing the kind of words that cause people to take action now. When you write direct response copy, one of the little things you always hear bandied about is, "If I could show you a way to take $1.00 and turn it into $2.00, how many times would you do that?"
That's the same philosophy with ezines. I think one thing that helped me is my personal philosophy with all advertising. I do every conceivable form of advertising. I do banners, pay-per-click, social, and everything. When I find a pay-per-click campaign that works and I'm paying 50 cents or 75 cents a click, I'm going to do as much of that as I can if I'm making a profit. Wouldn't you?
RIC THOMPSON: Absolutely.
CHARLIE PAGE: It's the same with ezines. When I found an ezine that worked for me, I didn't quit. I kept going, and I kept good records. Then when I would reach the law of diminishing returns, which affects everything in life, I'd back off for a while. Then I'd come back with a different product and different copy. I want to clarify. I'm not saying that I only ever advertised in three to five ezines.
Obviously, I've advertised in a lot of ezines. I don't know if it's thousands, but it's at minimum hundreds of ezines. My base of ezines today is much broader than three to five. What I'm saying is to get a good return on your investment and build a solid, reliable source of traffic, you can begin with three or five ezines that work well for you and then go from there.
RIC THOMPSON: Fantastic. If you don't mind, can we spend a few minutes talking about what makes a good ad for an ezine?
CHARLIE PAGE: Sure.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's say that I've done my research, and I have a target list of ezines I want to advertise in. They look pretty good, they match the market, and they seem to be pretty solid and reputable. Now the rubber meets the road. I have to draft an ad when I go buy the ad spot. Where do I start?
CHARLIE PAGE: You start with understanding the different types of ads that are available in ezines. The most commonly known ad is called a solo ad. A solo ad is an email that is sent alone. It goes by itself, hence the word 'solo'. It's sent to the entire subscriber base of the particular ezine. You contact an ezine with 75,000 subscribers, and you say, "I want to buy a solo ad." They say, "Okay, it's $110." You pay them the $110.
They're going to send that email for you, and it's going to go out by itself to the entire subscriber base. That's a very powerful form of advertising. The next are ads that appear within the ezine itself. There are two types of ads, basically: one that goes by itself and then ads that appear within the ezine. Those types are sponsored ads. They're usually at the top in little classified ads like we're all used to seeing and banner ads for HTML for more graphical ezines.
You have to choose the kind of ad that you want in order to talk about how to write the copy. There are a few things that are universally true, no matter what size ad you're running in an ezine. Actually, these things are universally true no matter what form of advertising you're using. Let me give those to you. The first is the purpose of the ad is to sell the click, not the product. That's probably the biggest mistake I see made in advertising across the board.
People get into describing their product and how wonderful it is when, in fact, that's the job of the website. The job of the ad is to sell the click to the website, which then sells the product. That's the first thing. The job of the ad is to sell the click. The second thing is that you have to build curiosity in the ad and not satisfy it. In other words, curiosity is what's going to drive the person from seeing the ad to going to the website, because they just have to know more about this wonderful thing you've just described.
The third thing is always talk about the reader and never talk about yourself. I very rarely will talk about myself in advertising, even though I'm kind of in a position where I could because I've written 12 books. I wrote a book with Bob Allen, Multiple Streams of Internet Income. I've worked with some big-name folks like Yanik Silver and people like that. I could say, "This is from Charlie Page." I hate the sound of that just saying it right now. I don't do that because people care about what's in it for them.
They don't care about who you are even if they know who you are. They care about what's in it for them. You sell the click, create curiosity, and talk about them. That's called using benefit statements. Talk about what's in it for them. If you do those three things, it doesn't matter what size ad you run or where you're running it. It could be pay-per-click, email, ezine, or banner ads. It doesn't matter. Those three principles, I think, underlie everything.
RIC THOMPSON: Awesome. One of the big things I think people are probably concerned about, Charlie, is how much are they going to have to put out of their pocket to place this ad? They've spent some time, done some work, and written a couple of good ads to test out. How much are we really talking about to get this rolling?
CHARLIE PAGE: That's a good question. I can give you some rough guidelines. There are different types of ezine publishers. The rates seem to follow the type of publisher. The first type of publisher is the enormous corporation, such as The New York Times, People magazine, and places like that. These enormous corporations want to collect a fair amount of money for their advertising. You can expect to pay a bit more to them.
Then the next level is what I call a professional publisher, but it's not the enormous corporation. This is a person or company who publishes 10, 15 or 75 ezines. They're sending out millions of emails a day, but their only job and revenue source is selling advertising in these ezines. Those can be very cost-effective. Then there are what I call the mom-and-pop publishers. That's a person like me. I've published my own ezine for eight years now.
I don't sell advertising in my ezine because I'm kind of in a unique position as the owner of the Directory of Ezines. I don't want to compete with publishers, so I don't sell advertising. I'm a mom-and-pop publisher. I work from home. I have a small business as small business is defined. I publish it myself as opposed to staffing it out. You'll have different levels of pricing. I'll give you a couple of examples.
There's one mom-and-pop publisher that has 200,000 subscribers. This is a special price, but they sell a solo ad for $50. That's pretty cheap. That's a pretty reasonable price point. I don't know what the ad sells for on their website. I think it's a little more than $50. We have about 300 publishers who offer Directory of Ezines members a special price. Their DOE price, which I'm very familiar with, is $50 for a solo ad to 200,000 people.
With a mid-level publisher, the professional publisher I talked about that's not the enormous corporation, that same ad would likely cost $800 to 200,000 people because they're going to be more active advertisers. A lot of small and large businesses are going to be buying advertising from them. Then with the enormous corporation, sometimes an ad to 200,000 people could cost $2,000.
You want to begin with mom-and-pops, move into the mid-level, and then eventually maybe or maybe not do business with the enormous ones. There are some mid-level publishers who have very attractive rates. I placed an ad this morning. I'll give you an exact number, if you'd like.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's do it.
CHARLIE PAGE: Okay. I placed an ad this morning at a cost of 15 cents per thousand. My ad is running now. This is a banner ad, but it's a 160-by-600 banner ad, so that's a pretty good sized ad. It's running to 1,119,000 people for $167.
RIC THOMPSON: : Holy moly.
CHARLIE PAGE: That's not bad.
RIC THOMPSON: That rocks. You don't have to sell a whole lot to make that money back.
CHARLIE PAGE: This is the thing. These ads create real traffic. They really do. Sometimes an ad will miss, and it doesn't create a huge flood of traffic, but generally speaking, it will do well if you choose the right ezine, place a well-crafted ad, and run it at a good time. Tomorrow is tax day. It's probably not the greatest time in the world to advertise. We teach this inside the DOE. If you do it well, the results can be very substantial.
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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