As you know e-zine advertising has been touted by many of the Internet guru's as being the advertising method of choice.

And certainly advertising in the right e-zine will get you desirable results.

However.......

Today we're going to blow the whistle on it and take a look at some things about e-zine advertising you were never told.

A year or so ago, I placed a top sponsor ad in a fairly well known e-zine. The subscriber base was claimed at being over 45,000.

The ad I placed was a proven one, and I fully expected at least a 2% response rate.

The ad ran on a Thursday. I waited. Then I waited, and waited some more.

Not one single response.

Hmmm.....

A week later I wrote the editor and he ran it a second time.

Again, not one single response.

The plot thickens.......

A month or so after that, I happened to have some time on my hands and was actually reading through some of the messages in my test accounts at Yahoo and Hotmail. I use these accounts to mail tests of various newsletters/etc. to check for how they are going to come out.

Lo and behold, I noticed something very interesting. Not only was I getting the usual spam from address gleaners, but also there were many e-zines being sent to me at these test account addresses.

There is absolutely no way I ever subscribed to any of these e-zines via the test accounts. The only way they could have gotten my address is to have harvested it or purchased it as being harvested.

(NOTE: there is software that runs over the Web harvesting email addresses. These addresses are then sold, and in may cases advertised as being opt-in addresses)

(Now you know why and how you have been getting so much spam...more about this in a future issue)

Back to the story.....just so happened that the e-zine I had placed that ad in had me subscribed to not only 1, but 2 of my test accounts.

So I really wonder, just how many other bogus addresses were in that guys list of 45,000? You know it's pretty easy to build a newsletter list of numbers using unscrupulous methods. The numbers look impressive and the editors can charge bigger and bigger dollars for adverts with the high numbers.......

But numbers don't necessarily mean readers or good addresses.

Another thing you need to watch for is: do editors remove their undeliverable addresses?

People change addresses, addresses get shut down, mailboxes get full, etc. and all these are undeliverable. But many editors never take those undeliverable numbers off their total subscriber count.

A 50,000 base e-zine may have 10,000 of those which are undeliverable.

Here's another way some e-zines gain big subscriber numbers, quickly and un-professionally. The editor will get some FFA or Links Pages accounts. Then when a person posts to their page, they will be automatically subscribed to the e-zine.

Some editors will say this in their confirmation messages to the post, others will simply add your address to their mailing list.

But since folks almost always use submission software and never read these confirmation notices, they don't realize what happened. And again, these subscriptions are all going to trash accounts so no one ever reads them anyway.

All that really happens is the e-zines numbers go up and the editor's credibility goes down.

So be careful when placing e-zine advertising.

Before you buy advertising, write and ask the editor a couple of things.

1. Are ALL their subscribers opt-in addresses..... meaning do the editors have an actual subscription request on file.

2. What is the e-zines un-deliverable rate?

3. What is their un-subscribe rate?

I mean folks, why buy advertising if all your ad is going to be sent to is trash accounts or undeliverable addresses or to newsletters that no one wants to read?

Fortunately there are a lot of quality e-zines out there with editors who take excellent care of who is on their list and who isn't.

For instance, Prosperity has over 30,000 readers. Every single one of them has opted in to our list and we have a subscription notice for every single address.

Also, if an address has 3 undeliverables in a row, it is dropped off our list permanently. We allow three grace mailings cause some folks go on vacation or forget to check their mail, or things come up in their lives.

But 3 in a row, and you're gone. That gives us an undeliverable rate of less than 1%. And it's usually between 0.03 and 0.04%...less than one half of one percent.

And folks, I will tell you this, there are very few e-zines out there that can claim that low of an undeliverable rate.

We also have an exceptionally low un-subscribe rate of only about 5 out of a thousand.

We are quite proud of the fact that all our readers are such high quality readers.

We want to thank all our readers for being such quality folks. Without you, none of this would be possible.