After publishing an ezine for over four years, I have discovered that there are three main steps to publishing an ezine that will boost your bottom line and build your relationships with your prospects and clients. They are:

1. Having A Clear Vision

This step is by far the most complex one because it lays the foundation of your ezine. Going through this one step alone will save you time, money and heartache because it will keep you on track! To stay in alignment with the main goals of your business, you must have a vision for your ezine since it is an integral part of building relationships with others. Your vision includes determining your table of contents, creating an attention-grabbing name and subheading, determining your publication schedule, crafting a powerful subject line and ultimately defining your ezine mission statement.

2. Developing Your Hook

So what is a “hook” anyway? Are we going fishing? Well… sort of! We’re fishing for clients! Creating a high-value free hook is great way for your ideal clients to take notice of you and eventually turn into real clients.

A hook can be a variety of things, including a white paper, an e-course, an audio course, a video course or free teleclass or whatever you can dream up! The point is to provide your prospects with something of tremendous value for free so that in return, they will give you their email address and start receiving your ezine. There are many other reasons to use a hook and here are a few of them:
•    To give people added incentive to subscribe to your ezine
•    To give people a sample of your products and services
•    To get them to enter into your marketing funnel so you can market to them again and again
•    To gain credibility and expert status, which leads to future income.
95% of your web traffic will not buy from you the first time they visit your site nor bookmark your site to revisit, so it’s important to capture their email address on their first visit!

3. Determining Your Email Marketing System

I rarely say, “You cannot do this,” or “You cannot do that,” but I do in this circumstance:
You simply cannot use Outlook or another similar system for
your database.

Why? Because it will quickly become an absolute administrative nightmare when you find yourself having to manually type in addresses in and take them out and send individual emails to thank people for subscribing, and so forth. You can easily and inexpensively automate this process! To publish a highly effective and relationship-building ezine, it is imperative to use a system that manages your campaigns for you.

I highly recommend Constant Contact and used it successfully for years. Their program is affordable for even the start-up solopreneur. If your list is under 500 people, your monthly fee is $15. By using their templates or customizing your own template, your ezines are easy to create and you get to track all of the important data that you need in order to make good decisions.

I also recommend 1ShoppingCart. This system is more involved than Constant Contact, but it has an autoresponder system and a shopping cart feature that you will need if you sell products. I use this system now because it has all the features I need to grow my business and I can keep my list in one place.

Aweber is another resource that many people use. I am not as familiar with it as I am the other two, but it is a highly reputable provider.

There is much more that goes into creating a money-generating and relationship-building ezine, but these three steps will get you started in the right direction. Happy publishing!