What is Ezine Blaze?

Ezine Blaze purports to be an ezine directory, but in fact, it is no more than a downline builder, in which you can send your message (ezine) to all new members. You can join for free, but you can only really use the program once you become a paid member. You can submit your message every day but when I started this test (in January 2004) there was around 40 - 50 members joining every day, you could hold off and send to around 300 new members once a week.

Not withstanding that, if the system works, then it doesn't really matter how it achieves it's results.

In theory, ezine subscribers should be very targeted, let's see if this is the case in practice?

The Test

In order to be able to carry out as accurate a comparison as possible, I use the same ad for the same program for all tests. The ad that I use does produce results for me, but more importantly, gives a level playing field to all the programs that I test. At the time of this test, I switched ads because of the results I was getting, to try and see if improvements could be made.

Unfortunately, I have not (until very recently) had my own site to test. The advantage of having control of your own site is that you can add code to it to get more meaningful data from the Ad Tracking software that is used to generate your stats. We can get an idea from affiliate programs however (such as was used on this test) as to the number of Click Thru's (users clicking on your ad links) that have been generated.

The program is relatively easy to set up, and straight forward enough to get your message out. Because of the nature of the program, I did not send messages out every day, but at the rate of say 40 new members a day, you have around 1200 prospects to mail to a month. This does not compare favorably with some FFA systems which give you between 200 and 1000 leads a day, but you must take into account the quality of the leads, not the quantity.

When I started these tests, I was using a different Ad Tracking program, which did not give the detail of stats that I achieve now.

Here is a summary of unique clicks attained for the period 7th January 2004 to 31st March 2004.

I think that this is fairly self explanatory. Just as a point of reference, unique clicks indicate single clicks for any one IP address or individual. So if someone clicks on the ad link twice, the click would only be recorded once. Raw clicks indicate the total number of clicks that an ad link has received for a given period, including duplications.

So, this tells us that the ad I have used does perform, and that there was a 100 % approximate improvement when I changed the ad.

The results tell us that in a 3 month period, where approximately 3600 leads were mailed, we had 17 responses, or a response rate of less the .5 of 1%. This is very disappointing bearing in mind that we were expecting highly targeted leads.

Summary

The results from Ezine Blaze were disappointing.

The cost is $27 as a one off set up fee, then $18 a month. I would suggest that this makes this tool very expensive.

I have noticed also that the number of leads being generated has halved to between 10 and 20 a day, which makes the system very unattractive.

This is definitely not being added to the Magical Marketing Engine, although I shall continue to monitor the leads coming in and test again if there is a major improvement.