Web Marketing Strategy Update

1. Publish A Free Ezine For Selling Products

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter to promote your own or affiliate products, MLMs, etc. This is the most common format, and to work well requires quality — preferably original — content related to your business and products so that it stands out from the crowd.

2. Publish Free Ezine For Selling Advertising Space

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter to sell advertising spots and exclusive mailings to other businesses. Similar in format to the previous example, except that instead of using the ezine as a vehicle for promoting your own products, you use it to generate ad revenue. This approach is often favored by those new online and / or without their own product, using mainly contributed articles for content and combining the promotion of affiliate programs with ad sales.

3. Publish A Paid Subscription Ezine

You could charge a monthly or yearly subscription to your ezine or newsletter. Unless your annual subscription is fee is relatively little, you will probably make more money with a low monthly fee automatically charged to the subscriber’s credit card. Note that you need quality, highly targeted original to be successful selling ezine subscriptions like this.

This could prove important to many affiliate marketers:

From MarketWatch

Expanding into the U.S. market, Rakuten Inc., a Japanese Internet portal operator, said Monday it is buying LinkShare Corp., a privately held U.S. Internet marketing firm, for $425 million.

Tokyo-based Rakuten said it expects the cash deal to close in four to six weeks and allow it to expand into the U.S. market.

Rakuten, founded in 1997, operates a diversified Web portal business in Japan and also owns the Rakuten Eagles, a professional baseball franchise.

New York-based LinkShare, which specializes in performance-based marketing, claims more than 10 million e-commerce relationships and a list of more than 500 clients that includes J.C. Penney Co. Inc., Avon Products Inc. and Dell Inc.

“LinkShare’s performance-based marketing expertise across affiliate, search and e-mail capabilities provides Rakuten with an excellent first step to launch our U.S. operations and continue our international expansion,” Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “We can leverage LinkShare’s client relationships and technology advantages worldwide, so that LinkShare will be able to achieve significant growth in the future.”