As professional speakers, marketing is critical to staying in business. Marketing is what controls our income and business level. As someone who speaks as part of another business, marketing is equally critical. It means you'll have an audience and that others in your organization will appreciate your role in building the business as a whole.

The Seldom-Talked-About Benefits of Being an Ezine Publisher

by Tom Antion

Every seminar you attend, book you read, or tape you listen to about online marketing tells you that you need your own eZine. And they're all right. I've been saying that for years.

You'll hear the usual reasons for needing an eZine in your business: name recognition, traffic generation and resulting sales, and a source of advertising revenue. All good, positive benefits.

But I've discovered in my years of eZine publishing three others that I never hear anyone talking about. I thought it was time we shared these together.

Great Barter Vehicle

An eZine is a clever disguise for an opt-in email list. And any time you have a sizable (or well targeted) opt-in email list, you know what happens? People want access to that list. They'll pay for it in cash, but sometimes they have other things you'd prefer to have.

Ad swapping, the most common form of barter in this business, is nothing new. But it can pay off handsomely because it lets you take advantage of other peoples' lists. That can be very cool.

Now, I'm no tax guy so I don't know what all the legal and tax ramifications of barter are but I do know that you can almost always get a lot more value for your goods and services in a barter situation than in a cash deal. Just by way of example, I needed a book cover designed. A top-notch national design firm wanted $2500 to do it but they agreed to barter for ad space in my ezine and I got the job done for no out-of-pocket cash!

I've traded for photography, custom poster work, and tons of other stuff. Barter is a big advantage of being an eZine publisher; don't forget it!

Rejection-Free Publishing

I hate rejection slips, don't you? You bust your tail to come up with a cool idea for an article, you sweat over the right wording, getting the word count right, you pore over lists of eZines to submit to, pick the exact one you need, and...bingo! A rejection slip comes back so fast you're not sure they even had time to read your piece!

Well, one cool thing about being an eZine publisher is I can pretty much say anything I darned well please. If I have an opinion on something (and I usually do, according to people who know me!), I just say it. If you're a subscriber to my eZine and I say something you don't like, you can take a hike (unsubscribe). I don't mean that to sound arrogant. It's just good business. Over time, you'll learn that you will sell more of your ideas, products and services to people who agree with your strong opinions. It's a lot easier to find like-minded people than to win converts.

Exercise Your Editorial Clout

When you get a significant number of subscribers to your eZine, all of a sudden you become popular. People want to joint venture with you. People want to befriend you so they can get access to your list and the power you wield because of it.

I find that interesting. I sometimes throw that weight around a bit. One of my favorite targets for this kind of thing is technical support at computer companies. Don't you agree that it's unconscionable for someone I paid money to for a product to keep me on hold for 45 minutes or an hour just to tell them their product is broken?

I don't wait on hold for hours and hours any more. When I have a technical problem with a product, I don't dial tech support, I call the sales department. I tell them that I'm about to do a very negative article about their product or tech support problems and I am willing to give them a chance to respond. If you word this properly (and have the guts to do it) you usually have them shaking in their shoes.

As a rule, the result of this approach is that I get the most senior tech support guy on the phone about 100 times faster than I could have gotten one of his first-line lackeys if I'd stayed on hold. I get an answer to my problem and, very often, their direct line in case of future problems.

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Tom Antion is an expert on Internet marketing for small business. He is the founder of the rapidly becoming infamous Butt Camp Seminars, which focus on low cost and low risk Internet Marketing methods and explain how you can earn money while sitting at home on your rear end. Tom is also the chief spokesperson for CBS Switchboard.com in their small business outreach program "MainStreetsOnline." To contact Tom mailto:tom@antion.com or visit http://www.buttcamp.com