As you know e-zine advertising has been touted by many of
Internet guru's as being advertising method of choice. And certainly advertising in right e-zine will get you desirable results.
However.......
Today we're going to blow 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 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 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 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 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 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 story.....just so happened that 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 editors can charge bigger and bigger dollars for adverts with 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.
