In the Blog Squad’s article, Recipe for an Ezine, the core elements that make a blog or website into a successful ezine, an online magazine, are:
We have found ezines that work well for attracting new clients usually have these eight key ingredients:
1. A great name that defines the topic
2. A defined audience and clear purpose
3. A compelling headline or subject line
4. Valuable information readers can use
5. A call to action
6. A customized template or plain text formatting
7. A bonus incentive for subscribing
8. CAN-SPAM Compliance and a privacy statementYou will notice that the first five ingredients refer to the actual content of the ezine; the last three elements refer to how it is delivered. Each element contributes to the overall effectiveness of a newsletter for growing your business.
Do you agree?
Turning a blog into a magazine, or a magazine into a blog, isn’t as easy as it may appear. It took me a long time to get past the “print” thinking when developing my first website. They are related but very different.
But what about an online magazine, ezine, and blog? This is a description of the key elements for an “ezine”. Does it really apply to an online magazine or blog?
The elements of a clear purpose, target demographics, good writing, and a call to action are important to all, but I want to know what you think the difference between an online magazine, ezine, and blog are. Is there a difference? What is the difference? And what do you think are the characteristics that make up each one?
I will be covering more about how to turn your WordPress blog into an online magazine or ezine in the near future. Stay tuned for that!
Site Search Tags: ezine, online magazine, blog, blogging tips, blog writing, what is the difference, ezine versus blog, ezine versus online magazine, define, definition, define blog, define magazine, define ezine
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network 
Subscribe
3 Comments
I’m on the editorial team of a two-year-old literary blogzine called qarrtsiluni, http://www.qarrtsiluni.com (unfortunately still using Typepad, but hopefully on WordPress by August). Most of these rules have little relevance for our experience, but your question is a good one. To me, “online magazine” and “e-zine” are the same thing. I call ours a blogzine because it’s a hybrid: we use a blog format and publishing pattern, but are a juried publication with a standard (albeit much briefer) submissions process. Most standard literary e-zines still ape their paper counterparts in releasing material in periodic dumps they call issues, and in placing content behind static front pages, which usually must be accessed through a separate index page. Given the short attention spans of online readers, we don’t think that’s reasonable - we want to try and suck people in right away. And we don’t understand why most e-zines don’t have RSS feeds.
We started out as more of a group blog, and gradually professionalized over the course of our first year. But a true group blog is a very different thing from a blogzine: a number of people posting their own own works, versus one or two editors soliciting for material from others.
I’m not sure I completely agree with them being that different.
I mean, sure, they can be deisgned to be completely different but some people purposefully intend for their blog to look just like a newspaper because that is how they want it.
Really, the difference between the two is how personal it is. The more personal/bias it is, it is probably going to be a blog.
I think you’ve hit something here. There appears to be no standard definitions just many artificial distinctions and a few points that are inidicative of what it may be.
I agree that an online magazine and ezine are fundamentally the same, and i’m not going to try and distinguish.
Between a blog and a ezine there does appear to be a difference, though as Matt said don’t dwell on appearance of the actual blog because people like to write in different styles, some may have the appearance of a newspaper.
To me an ezine and blogzine are also different as Dave Bonta pointed out, but maybe for slightly different reasons.
A blog to me is one persons views, opinions, feelings, thoughts, stories, anecdotes, humour, etc. It need not be personal, i.e. it could be more informative, but it is written by one person.
A blogzine is several peoples views, etc. But to me it differs from an ezine in it’s community sense. Friends publishing their thoughts and experiences together to me is a blogzine. I also think it is important that the blog standards are not lost, ‘i’ instead of ‘I’ and human spelling. ezines hide behind perfectly spelt paragraphs, expert opinions and a general lack of life, caused by the periodic dumping of content.
In short I think my view is best expressed by saying Blogs are a feature of Web 2.0. While ezines remain expertly created blogs and blogzines benefit from the underlying principle of Web 2.0 that content does not have to be good, merely good enough.
2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] Lorelle on WordPress ställer en fråga som jag och Jonas har diskuterat litet. Jag tycker inte det är alldeles enkelt att göra distinktioner för att klargöra vad som är vad och var gränserna går. Frågan är om det egentligen är intressant överhuvudtaget. Alla tre varianterna är ju publikationer på Internet. [...]
[...] points towards the recipe for an ezine and asks about the difference between an online magazine, an ezine and a blog. It is quite true that all these are finally forms of publishing and might end up using similar [...]
Post a Comment