The Pros and Cons of Publishing an Ezine to Earn Money Online

Publishing an ezine is one of the low cost ways to make money on the Internet. Ezine also known as electronic magazine or electronic newsletter.

The process of making money with an ezine is you first market your ezine subscription offers through your website to get people to subscribe your ezine. Then you write and design for each issue of your ezine and send out to your subscribers on a periodical basis. When you have built a good amount of ezine subscribers (i.e. more than 1,000 subscribers), you may start selling ad space on your ezine to prospective advertisers.

Besides selling ad space, you may think about using your ezine to market your affiliate programs to generate affiliate commission. You can occasionally email your subscribers to recommend an affiliate product or service that is related to your subscribers interest. You can also include your affiliate links or banner ads that are relevant to the articles published on your ezine. When reading your ezine, some of your readers may click on your affiliate link or ad to your affiliated merchant site and possibly make a purchase.

Publishing an own ezine has a number of advantages. If the pros of ezine publishing impress you, then starting a paperless magazine may be an ideal business for you to profit on the Internet.

Pros of ezine publishing

1) Ezine publishing is an easy-to-set up and low cost online business. You don't need to hire employees and purchase any expensive equipment and printing machine to get your online magazine business up and running.

2) Since heavy machines are not necessary for publishing an ezine, you can run your ezine business from the comfort of your home. The most important thing you need is an auto responder such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com that has a broadcast feature equipped with.

3) Low start-up and maintenance costs for ezine publishing mean greater profit margin for your business. You will see profit as long as your ezine is generating advertising revenue.

4) Most importantly, you get to build your own personal media and spread your marketing influence, making you more valuable to those online marketers who sell products and services. And thus you may be contacted by some of these online marketers with a joint venture proposal presented to you that will be beneficial to your business profit.

However, like any other types of businesses, publishing an online magazine does have a few of drawbacks, despite of the several benefits that ezine publishing can offer to you.

Cons of ezine publishing

1) Content creation problem. One of the biggest challenges you'll face when you just started your ezine publishing business is creating unique and quality content for your ezine. If you don't possess good writing skill, write content can be tiresome and when you are out of content idea, often your publishing schedule will be threatening you.

However, there is a solution to content creation problem. If creating content on an on-going basis is too heavy to you, you may outsource your content creation work to one or more freelance writers. Some of the good places you can find writers are guru.com, elance,com and Digital Forum.

2) Growing your ezine subscribers isn't an easy task. It takes a great deal of time and work to build up your ezine subscriber base. One fast and effortless way to get ezine subscribers is by advertising your ezine publishing service on PPC search engines like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. But doing so could drive your cost up substantially.

There are several free Internet marketing methods you can use to increase your subscribers but you have to go through a learning curve before you can master these methods to use them effectively.

Final words
Ezine publishing can be a very lucrative Internet business. But like any other businesses, you need to spend a lot of time to work on your ezine publishing business in order to see good result. Before you really decide to start an ezine, it is advised that you first weight the above advantages against the drawbacks of publishing an ezine to find out whether ezine publishing business is right for you.