But let's think about WHY you began your e-zine in first place. It was likely to use it as a vehicle to promote you and your services/products, right?

You have every right to toot your own horn in your e-zine, as long as you don't drown out useful content your readers are looking for.

You work hard on your e-zine, so let's make your e-zine work FOR you!

** Here are 7 simple ideas on how to accomplish this: **

1) Make sure your MAIN ARTICLE always provides information that your readers will find valuable.

By having a main article as foundation of your issue, readers will feel they got what they came for - helpful information. Try a list of top 10 tips, a "how-to" article, a list of resources, a review of a trend in industry - that sort of thing. (For a free copy of my article, "11 Quick and Good E-Zine Content Ideas," send a blank e-mail to mailto:ali- 14285@autocontactor.com)

So remember, if your e-zine is tonight's meal, your main article should be entree. Any promotional info should be your side dishes!

2) Begin each issue with an "EDITOR'S NOTE" or "PUBLISHER'S NOTE."

New List Announcements are great, but you can only use them once!

When you start out with a new list and begin promoting on announce lists, you are thrilled by each new subsciption. But after some time passes, you begin to notice that your new subscriptions are waning. Most list owners will reach this point and start playing with their ads a bit. This is a good excercise, it will help you learn to craft a better ad. Let me give you some of what I learned when I started trying to create a better ad.

You can learn alot by watching your own methods for looking at announcement posts. If there are certain things in an ad that trigger certain reactions in you, then you can be fairly certain that other people will react same way.

Take for example white space. White space is wonderful. It is much easier on eyes than an ad that runs along for miles without a break. It provides a clean appearance and seems more professional.

Subconciously, we may be equating white space or lack thereof, to different subconcious reactions we have towards a clean person versus our reactions towards a bum in an alley way. By paying attention to my own reactions to various ad styles, I have learned that you do need that white space to break things up, or people will skip your ad altogether. My ad efficiency increased by 25% by learning just this one lesson.

You need to try to cycle your ads and try different things. Each week, try a different approach for your ads. By doing this, you will begin to see what works best for your particular ezine. Different ezines will need a different style of ad, to represent differentiation of subject materials and people who read them. Despite differences of various genre, some tactics will be effective for all of them. The remainder of this article will continue to address some of those constants.

Some of my early growth explosions came as a result of using testimonials in my ad copy. I know you have heard people talk about that before. I know, because I have read more articles on subject of using testimonials than for any other subject material.