The great thing about Ezines is that there are no hard and fast rules. The whole purpose of your Ezine is to be informative. People love information and don't really care how they get it as long as it's easily attainable and easy to read. So don't be afraid to be different with your Ezine. You don't want to be outrageous to the point where people think of your Ezine as a joke, unless of course it's an Ezine about humor, but there is nothing wrong with being a little out there. So, how do you come up with all these great new ideas? What if you're not exactly the most creative person in the world? What if your artistic talent consists of drawing stick figures on napkins? What if you don't know a GIF from a JPEG? What if you think HTML means How To Make Lasagna? No problem. Want to get ideas for an Ezine look? Go right to the source. Subscribe to some of the more popular ones. Take a look at what's included in them. Look at the design. Look at the layout. Is a simple one page email Ezine or is it something more complex like a PDF file or an HTML page with several sections? Read as many of these as you can. Get a feel for what's out there. The more popular Ezines probably got that way because of how they are put together. I'm not suggesting you copy a look exactly but there is nothing wrong with getting inspiration from these other Ezines. It is probably best to view competing Ezines. These are the ones that focus on the same subject matter that you're going to focus on. The reason for this should be obvious. If you do a search for say, "Automotive Ezines" the ones that appear at the top of the search are probably going to be the most popular and they are for a reason. Examine them carefully. You'll probably find they are either PDF files or HTML based web pages. You'll probably also find that they contain lots of photos of autos. Take these Ezines apart and see what makes them tick. And then, go one step further. How? Look to see what ISN'T there. This is where you become unique. This is where you give people something that other Ezines don't. If you're very familiar with a topic then you should know everything there is to know about it. Certainly there is something that you are personally familiar with that you're not finding in other Ezines. If it's an entire sub topic you may want to devote a whole section to it. This could end up meaning a huge subscriber base if it's something that a number of people want to know about. Yes, coming up with those great new ideas is work. It's not going to just come to you. You're going to have to exert some brain power and it won't be easy. But after you've done it, you'll have an Ezine that you'll be able to have pride in and one that many people are going to want to read. |
