Unless you’re completely new to the Internet, you’ve most likely heard of ezines. Chances are, you are subscribed to several of them.

What’s an ezine?
An ezine (sometimes also spelled e-zine) is simply an informative, electronic newsletter delivered via email. They arrive in your Inbox on a regular basis — daily, weekly, monthly, or anything in between, including sporadically — and, ideally, provide you with useful information.

Ezine publishers cover pretty much any subject you can imagine. Internet marketing is popular, but you could easily find one or more about things like bird-watching, beekeeping, soap-making, hang-gliding, investments, real estate, and much, much more!

Unfortunately, far too many publishers — especially in the Internet marketing or business arenas — seem to forget about the “informative” part. They bombard you with daily emails that are little more than thinly disguised sales letters for whatever product s/he is promoting that day. If after three or four emails you haven’t received anything useful, unsubscribe. CAN-SPAM compliant newsletters will have a link included in the email, usually at the bottom. Some email service providers will give you the opportunity to explain why you unsubscribed — don’t be shy! Tell them you were looking for the information that was promised on the signup page, not continuous spiels about the latest, greatest products!

Generally, if they provide you with useful info and include links to related products, or every third or fourth issue is a sales letter, that’s considered acceptable.

How do I produce an ezine?
If you’re thinking of becoming an ezine publisher, keep the above in mind: don’t bombard your readers with sales pitches! Similarly, stay with the subject at hand. If your newsletter is about dog care, don’t write an article about bicycling or exotic vacations (unless the dog is included!).

Publishing an e-zine doesn’t have to be particularly complex. By making use of Private Label Rights (PLR) articles, you can have your e-zine up and running in no time. Be sure to rewrite those articles to make them unique. Alternately, you could take advantage of sites like elance.com to hire ghost writers for very little money.

You’ll need to sign up for an email service for delivery — doing it manually every day from your home or office computer becomes old fast and doesn’t give you the automatic list keeping capabilities to make your publishing venture reliable and “professional.” There are also autoresponse programs you can install on your web server.

After your ezine becomes popular, you may be approached by advertisers. Most publishers are fairly particular about the types of ads they accept, and for good reason. Too many ads could alienate your readers. Resist the temptation and publish no more than one ad per article. If the articles are long, then top, middle and bottom ads — usually three to six lines long and well-delineated from the article text — are acceptable.

So how do you pronounce that, anyway?
The word ezine is derived from “electronic (or email) magazine.” The word magazine is generally considered to be of French origin but may actually go back to the Arabic word for “to store” or “storehouse.” The last syllable is always pronounced “zeen” — it does not rhyme with “mine.” So, it stands to reason that “ezine” is pronounced “ee-zeen” NOT “ee-zine” (rhyming with “mine”) as some misinformed marketers insist upon.

There you have it: e-zines in a nutshell!