The Internet is buzzing with e-mail; everywhere, potential customers are communicating with each other and sharing information about their experiences with various products and services. How does your company get its share of the buzz? Here's how to get started.

Any ongoing traffic-building program should include e-zines — targeted niche market publications delivered via e-mail. It's easy to find e-zines that communicate with your target audience (this is covered at the end of this article). Creative use of e-zines can put a company's URL in front of hundreds of thousands of readers at little or no cost.

The term e-zine applies loosely to any content published regularly using e-mail. The two most popular formats are moderated discussion lists, such as the Link Exchange Digest and adaptations of the traditional newsletter format, such as WorkZ.com e-zine.

Short of creating your own e-zine, here are three ways you can utilize e-zines in your marketing plan:

Post to Moderated Discussion Lists

Moderated discussion lists (MDLs) publish comments and questions from subscribers, and sometimes from outside sources. People send these comments and questions (or "posts") to one central e-mail address. The recipient of these posts, the moderator, organizes the posts by theme and periodically distributes them to the entire list of readers.

Participating in MDLs gives you the opportunity to communicate directly with your target market. By posting messages to the discussion you position yourself (and your company) as an industry expert. By reading the comments you can identify the key factors that influence your target market's buying decisions.

Use E-Zines as a Competitive Advantage

You can get a sense of your competition's Web expertise by subscribing to their e-zines. Subscribing to a competitor's newletter can be an early alert to price reductions, new product offerings, or other changes in strategy.

Lack of e-zine activity by your competitors can give you a competitive online advantage: Frequent posting will make it appear as if you "own" your market.

Locate E-Zines in Your Target Market

These resources provide searchable databases of e-zines. They all include descriptions of each e-zine's content to varying degrees:

Publicly Available Mailing Lists began compiling its list of e-zines in 1981. Find e-zines using a search engine or by alphabetical index. Marketing information is limited.

The Directory of E-zines costs $29.95 (U.S.) but provides a marketer's reference to e-zine advertising, including contact names and advertising rates.

E-Zinez offers a Yahoo!-style directory plus search capabilities. Again, marketing data is scant, but links to the e-zine's corresponding Web sites are helpful.

Liszt provides a great search engine of over 90,000 e-zines, but the descriptions are lean.

E-zine List organizes more than 3,000 e-zines by title and keyword.

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Andrew Dellon

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