Ezines are fantastic marketing tools but good content can be hard to come up with. Here are six excellent ideas for content you can use to get those creative juices flowing.
1. Provide a 'digest' of what's good or useful on the web.
Guess what? The internet is HUGE, and growing every second of every day, with new content and resources in every conceivable field.
A minority of this material is good, much mediocre, some downright bad. You can, therefore, provide a valuable service to your audience simply by 'separating the wheat from the chaff', and providing links to resources on the net that you've found that will have a value for your audience, with a short commentary of your own explaining how subscribers can benefit from looking into them.
Sign up to other ezines in your industry or related industries and do a weekly sweep for valuable content.
Note however that the value of your digest will be a direct function of the time and care you put into ensuring that what you recommend is actually valuable and relevant, and not just in your ezine to fill space.
2. Topical opinion pieces.
Giving a punchy, reasoned opinion on a hot topic in your industry or the news can make for very readable content, not least because you can capitalise on existing news value.
But as much as provocative content can be good, be aware that strongly stated opinions are likely to upset someone, somewhere. Whatever you do, keep your opinion pieces on topic for your ezine.
Politics is a good example of a very dangerous topic on which to vent your spleen (assuming your ezine is not a political one).
3. Competitions.
People love competitions. How about these ideas?
• Humorous caption competitions - insert a photo of some famous people in the news and ask for a caption - can provide reams of amusing content over several ezines and allow you to interact with subscribers in a light-hearted, fun way.
You may even be able to leverage the results - could you blow up the photo and caption, and put it in your shop window, or on your website, or submit it to the press, to gain publicity with a wider audience?
• Testimonial competition - as above, get your customers to provide 50 or 100 words on what they like about you. Great material to have, obviously!
• Cross-promotion - run a joint competition and bundle prizes up with three or four non-competing businesses, and use a co-registration system or advertisement swap to cross-fertilize the audiences.
• 'Everyone wins' - set up a competition with the twist (known to you) that every entrant wins a prize of some sort.
You're likely to get a better response out of this than merely giving stuff away; maybe a store visit is required to collect the prize?
Bear in mind that competitions and sweepstakes can potentially have legal implications so take legal advice if you're in any doubt.
4. Multiple choice quiz questions.
Rather than a full-blown competition, you can include a section of your ezine for a multiple choice question, based around your area of business or expertise. Pose a question with three or four possible answers. By clicking on their choice of answer, subscribers go to the answer page on your website (a great way to drive traffic to your site!).
5. Get inspiration from the calendar/events.
There's always something going on that you can tie content to. The end of the year can be especially handy for content concepts: predictions for next year, new year's resolutions, best articles of the year.
6. Run occasional 'best of' ezines/sections.
The reality is that no ezine's content is read by everybody, all the time. You can afford to repeat great content occasionally - and you may find this particularly useful if you're taking a holiday, for example!
Websites That Have the Most Interesting, Relevant, and Engaging Articles Six Great Ezine Content Ideas
