In old days, two or three years ago, word of mouth and other free methods were enough to build your list. But now there is so much competition that people are already suffering from ezine overload.

One way - and best way if you can write well and quickly - is to submit articles to ezines and websites. But writing well is not something all of us can do.

But one other sure-fire way to get new readers is pay for them. Call it advertising if you like.

We all know that advertising works. The big companies are ones that spend most on advertising and marketing. The bigger promotional budget bigger sales. When I was in England other week I read that Walkers Crisps became countries biggest selling potato chip last year by spending around $500 million dollars on advertising. Do you think they'd have reached that coveted number one spot without spending big on advertising? Of course they wouldn't.

It stands to reason that if you advertise your ezine heavily you're going to get a lot more subscribers than if your ezine remains a little known secret.

( though whether you retain new subscribers you "buy" depends on quality of your publication )

Here's what to do:

1. Decide how much you can afford to spend on promotional activities...on marketing/advertising. Set aside a budget for buying advertising - whether it's a percentage of income you make from your web site, or just money you can afford to set aside by quitting smoking or something. You also need to work out how much a new subscriber is worth. Here's a clip from Ken Evoy's brilliant Sales From The Edge ezine, which you can subscribe to http://salesnow.sitesell.com

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"Before forking out any money, always think of what you can get in return first (sorry, I'm a mercenary guy here). So ask yourself... if you pay GoTo.com $x per click-through, how much profit can you get in return?

Confused? A little math will clear things up in a jiffy...

Suppose you are selling a digital product (i.e., zero incremental per-unit cost of production) at $50, and you have a 1% conversion ratio, i.e., you make one sale for every 100 visitors. So one visitor is worth $0.50 ($50/100), and that is maximum amount you should bid at GoTo.com for each keyword. We will call this your BID CAP."

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Of course, if you're not selling a product, just giving away an ezine, you need to look at it a little differently. A simple way is to add up your monthly advertising income + affiliate program sales income and divide it by number of subscribers. If you make $500 a month from 2000 subscribers then each subscriber is worth 25 cents. ( though if they stay subscribers they will be worth a whole lot more over time ).