Content is King

by: Bob Osgoodby

EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s tip has been provided by Bob Osgoodby who publishes the free weekly “Your Business” Newsletter Visit his Web Site at http://adv-marketing.com/business to subscribe.

Most industry pundits maintain that one way to build your online business, is to become known on the Internet and this is true. They go on to say that publishing a Newsletter or Ezine is the way to go, but neglect to say how to attract subscribers.

One might think an ideal way to build readership, is to give away free ads. This may build the subscriber base, but seldom builds readership. Those who place the ads are primarily interested in getting their message to the subscribers of the newsletter. People who subscribe to a newsletter are looking for content, not to read ads, so a basic conflict immediately exists.

If ads are reasonably placed, most people will accept them as the price they pay for receiving the content. But when the majority of the publication is ads, and the publication has little or no content, the subscriber base quickly goes away.

The unsuspecting might think they are building their subscriber base, but it is a false premise. Many who place the free ads use a free email account, which they don’t keep if they don’t get a response to their ads, or lose it for spamming. Some may use a trial membership to AOL which they may not keep after the free month is over.

For approximately every hundred ads posted, about 20% are returned as undeliverable within the first month. This process continues each month until there are very few of the original group left. Add this to your normal attrition rate, and you will soon only have subscribers who are placing ads, and don’t read it other than to check if their ad is there.

Free ads can also be overwhelming to the publisher of a Newsletter. The time spent managing the ads takes away from building quality content. And, as you can see, if you don’t have content, it’s not a good way to build a subscriber base anyway.

The free ads on a web site can also be overwhelming. Our web site accepts free ads, and we got burned pretty badly a few months ago. The people who sell automatic submission software identified the top hundred or so web sites, and developed software to automatically submit ads to them.

They actually went to our web site and stole our submission form. They then wrote software that imitated our form, so someone could submit an ad to us, without having to fill out the form. They then sold this software, along with the submission routines to the other top drawing sites, to those poor unsuspecting souls who thought they could submit their ads to the free web sites with little or no work on their part.

I realized we were being spammed by this kind of submission software, when we started to get several thousand free ad submissions a day. We immediately changed our online form, and filtered all the spam into our trash basket - we never even see them. Many of the top drawing sites have done likewise, and that automatic submission software quickly became a poor investment.

Once 150 or 200 people a week start posting to your site, you are a prime candidate for them to spam you with the automatic submission software.

We also filter the legitimate ad submissions and acknowledge the receipt of their ad automatically by return email. We then send a confirmation when the ad is posted to the web. This is a simple matter and can be done automatically by several email clients.

Currently we are getting about 250 - 300 ads a week and that became overwhelming (we update the free ads once a week). Since we run ads in five categories and allow a limited amount of HTML coding in the ads, it was taking us two full days to sort through the ads, and place them on the web.

To ease this situation, we developed a computer program that would do all this work automatically. It now takes less than an hour or so to post all the ads. Now all we do is scan the ads to ensure there are no ads submitted which are against our community standards, and fix an occasional HTML error.

Using free ads is a good marketing technique. You must however be sure it does not encroach on your time to the point where it is overwhelming, and everything else suffers. Newsletters or web sites are great marketing tools, and can generate a decent income. But remember - Content is King.

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