Ezines are fantastic marketing tools but good content can be hard to come up with. Here are six great ideas for content you can use to get those creative juices flowing.
1. Solve typical (or topical) customer problems in an article.
Take a moment and think about the questions your clients are always asking you, or the problems they're always complaining about.
Look through your own personal 'sent items' emails - what have you been saying to clients? Your audience is likely to share similar interests and concerns, so can you adapt, expand upon, or reproduce some of what you've already said or done?
As a rule of thumb, about 400 words is a suitable length; if you've written more, and the quality is consistently good, think about splitting it into parts you can run over two or more ezines.
2. Five to 10 tips on a particular topic, or area of your professional expertise.
A list of how-to tips is very reliable, and easy to produce content. 'Top 10 customer service tips for small businesses', 'The 7 biggest management mistakes', '5 ways to get better fuel efficiency out of your car'.
These don't need to be long; 5-10 tips of 50-75 words each is perfectly adequate. Put your best tips first, and consider only giving a partial list in the ezine so you can drive traffic through to the full list on your website.
Later on, you can expand a single tip into a longer article to generate new content.
3. Interviews.
Just look at any bookstore, magazine rack or TV chat show to see the popularity of interviews and autobiographies of interesting people.
Whether you provide them as text, audio or video, and whether you conduct them over email, telephone, or in person, interviews with clients, celebrities or relative industry figures can be a very compelling type of content.
And, if you know you have an interview coming up, what about trailing that fact in your ezine and asking subscribers to submit potential questions for your interviewee?
4. Humour can make your ezine unique.
If you can do it in such a way that it doesn't send out the wrong impression, is there a way you can incorporate humour in your ezine?
You can have great success by making a point of always including something humorous at the top of every ezine, or maybe better still at the bottom, so people have another incentive to read down.
Go online and find relevant or topical jokes, funny images or videos. Just be careful to get your tone right - remember that one person's idea of a joke can be another's idea of offensive, and whatever humour you use must be congruent with the image you're trying to get across.
5. Teasers.
Adding a 'teaser' about forthcoming content in your next ezine can help build anticipation and improve open rates.
6. 'Evergreen' content.
Obviously you have your niche. But don't forget that there are areas of interest common to nearly all business people or consumers.
Time management, saving money or avoiding tax are just three that spring to mind. These can be useful standbys, especially if you can put your own brand's spin on them somehow.
Happy writing!
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