Discover how to meet the challenges of 21st century online publishing with real-world, hands-on skills using free or low-cost software tools and reports.
We’re all familiar with the aphorism, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.”
Bring Don Nicholas and Kim Mateus to your offices for intensive, hands-on training and you’ll (1) be given a fish, (2) be coached through a lesson in how to fish, and (3) receive your own fishing gear.
All metaphors aside, Mequoda Method Advanced Training can equip you and your staff to execute the specifics of any Mequoda best-practice skill. Here’s how:
First, Don will give you an exemplary, best-practice case study for the advanced skill. You’ll discover how an expert publishing company has mastered this skill set.
Next, Don and Kim will demonstrate explicitly how to apply the same skill to your market niche, on your website, for your information products. With practice and precision, you can expect to achieve similar, high-level results.
Additionally, you’ll receive a valuable software tool or report, and thorough instruction in how to use it, so you can continue to update and enhance your new skill.
Because each of these one-day advanced training programs includes a tangible deliverable, you should be able to boost the performance of your online publishing system and measure its effectiveness immediately.
Finally, all Mequoda Method Advanced Training programs include a two-hour follow-up phone conference call with Don to clarify any remaining issues and discuss future steps.
Mequoda Online Market Analysis Workshop
Description: The Mequoda Online Market Analysis Workshop is designed to answer seven important questions about the online market in which you operate and compete.
• How big is your market?
• How fast is your market growing?
• What is the seasonality in your market?
• What keywords does your market use?
• Who are your top competitors?
• Who are your potential content partners?
• Who are your potential marketing partners?
Do you know the 10 keyword phrases that best define your overall content?
How can you identify the 10 best primary keywords phrases that describe and define what your website delivers? How many competitors do you have for these keywords?
If you don’t know the answers to these and other important questions, you could be leaving money on the table, or worse, leaving your company vulnerable to competitive annihilation.
Mequoda Online Market Analysis Workshop is designed to make your publishing company more competitive.
First, Don and Kim will demonstrate how to do market analysis research, repeating a detailed process for each of your 10 primary keyword phrases. Next, they will show you how to import the results into an Excel spreadsheet until you have at least 200 popularity-ranked URLs that feature your keyword phrases.
Additionally, they will cross-reference this data with advanced web analytics tools to determine both current and historic unique visitor counts.
Benefits: You will identify each of the 200 competitors in your market niche by website archetype (retail, online store, periodical hub, etc.) and by revenue model (user-driven, sponsor-driven or hybrid).
With ingenious free or low-cost software, you will learn how to analyze the resulting database to determine your market size, annual year-to-year growth, seasonality, traffic patterns, etc. You also will discover which content models are dominating (or perhaps missing) in your market.
Finally, you’ll be able to analyze the revenue models of each of these competitive websites to better understand how the best operators in this market niche make money.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll know how to choose or change your website business model, plus which competitors represent potential marketing or content-sharing partnerships.
During the following two weeks, Mequoda analysts will complete and fine tune this research and deliver to you, in an Excel spreadsheet, a detailed online market audit of your publishing business.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda SEO Keyword Research Workshop
Description: Do you know, with certainty, the keywords by which web surfers find your website? Have you identified the best primary keywords phrases that describe and define what your website delivers?
The Mequoda SEO Research Workshop demonstrates how you can use the Google Keyword Tool to research and identify the top 20+ primary keyword phrases for your website.
Benefits: Search engine optimization begins with solid, methodical research. The Mequoda SEO Research Workshop will enable you to be a keyword research expert.
You’ll learn how to use the Google Keyword Tool to do your own additional keyword research, and how to use the Google search engine to quantify competition.
The Mequoda SEO Keyword Research Workshop will demystify and explain the mathematics behind the Google Visibility Report, which will become your primary search engine optimization dashboard for modeling and monitoring your achievements.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you will have, for one brand, on one website, a working draft of your keyword universe, formatted in a Google Visibility Report.
In the following two weeks, a Mequoda analyst will further edit the GVR and perform a position analysis of your keyword universe with Advanced Web Ranking. You’ll receive a comprehensive Google Visibility Report, complete with a keyword universe benchmark study that quantifies your market share.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Online System Design Workshop
Description: How many different websites do you need for your Mequoda System? Which of the nine website archetypes are required to design your online publishing business? Will you have an online store? A website directory? What else?
The answers to these and many more questions will determine the design and architecture of your Mequoda Method website. In this interactive workshop, you’ll explore a myriad and options and narrow your focus on the business model that is right for your publishing enterprise.
Your system development team must complete this exercise to determine the basic functionality required, before it can requisition a website content management system. The Mequoda Online System Design Workshop will facilitate and expedite this vital process.
Benefits: In this intensive, interactive exercise, Don and Kim will lead you through a discussion of the Mequoda website archetypes and help you identify the architectural parameters required for your online system.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll have a clear understanding of the system specifications required to build your Mequoda Method website. During the following two weeks, Mequoda Systems designers will complete your 36-page, customized Mequoda Method Project Plan, including a template inventory and task flow map.
Additionally, you’ll receive a complete list of software architecture integration requirements — every application from WordPress to Google Analytics to OpenX — that we recommend for building your system.
With this document, you’ll have three options. You can use these customized blueprints to guide your internal site development team. Alternatively, you can use it as project description to request competitive price proposals from outside vendors.
Or you can contract with Mequoda Systems to build out your complete Mequoda Method website, just as we have done for more than a dozen other publishers.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Landing Page Workshop
Description: During the Mequoda Landing Page Workshop, we will critique and restructure one of your website landing pages. If you do not have a sales letter landing page, we will draft one with you.
Benefits: Together we will rewrite your sales letter landing page, then break it down into a multivariate test. That will enable us to define zones and test dozens of different versions of one web page, and to determine which elements of a page convert best.
You’ll discover how to use the Google Website Optimizer, the free A/B testing and multivariate testing application that helps online marketers and webmasters increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of website content.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you will have a draft of a new sales letter landing page, plus the ability to execute a multivariate test plan with the free Google Website Optimizer tool.
During the following two weeks, Mequoda will deliver the complete, refined sales letter landing page, and in the two-hour telephone follow-up that is included in this workshop, Don will coach you through fully implementing your test plan.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Content Management Workshop
Description: How much archived content does your publication have, how old is it, and how can you put it to work to make more money online?
Every Mequoda Method website unleashes its archived content to facilitate search engine optimization and help build a database of potential paying customers.
The Mequoda Content Management Plan Workshop is designed to help you quantify all the content your organization produces — print newsletters, books, magazines, live events, transcripts, CD-ROMs, etc. You’ll discover when and how it should be redeployed on your periodical hub for additional marketing, sales and profits.
Benefits: First, you’ll complete a thorough inventory of all your archived content and create a forward release schedule. Next, for each type of content — newsletters, books, magazines, etc. — you’ll establish a policy governing when to redeploy the content on your periodical hub.
Should it be redeployed when it is two weeks old, a month old, a year old, five years old? What release schedule is most effective — and profitable?
Finally, you’ll determine the best practice for transforming that content from whatever form it is in and redeploying it into your Mequoda periodical hub. Can this process be automated? Are basic procedural changes required? How much technology can we employ to facilitate this process? Whose job is this? Do you need casual employees to help you with these tasks?
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll have an archive release policy, and a content release plan for redeploying all your archived content on your periodical hub. During the following two weeks, Mequoda will refine your content release plan in an Excel spreadsheet.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda SEO Copywriting Workshop
Description: In order for your website to dominate its market niche, it must be comprised of two different categories of web pages that either attract search engine traffic or provide visitors with useful content. We call these hub and authority pages, based on the pioneering work of computer scientist Jon Kleinberg that became the basis for the Google search algorithm.
In this very practical one-day workshop, Don explains the 12 types of landing pages and how to write them to be both rich in user content and highly attractive to Google’s search engine crawlers.
Did you know that your Mequoda Method website can be a living, growing, online organism? With the right software applications and website architecture, the eight hub pages can generate themselves and repopulate automatically based on the content added to the four authority pages.
Benefits: In the Mequoda SEO Copywriting Workshop, you’ll discover precisely how to create highly effective rapid conversion landing pages, sales letter landing pages, article pages and glossary pages that Google loves to index and point visitors to.
Takeaway: Don and Kim will create for your website three original article pages, three glossary pages, a rapid conversion landing page and a sales letter landing page. At the end of this one-day workshop, you will have eight draft pages written and ready to be uploaded to your Mequoda Method website.
Over the following two weeks, Mequoda experts will fine tune these pages for optimal effectiveness.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Email Marketing Workshop
Description: When you fully understand your audience, and how your primary topics best align with their editorial needs, you can create email newsletters that are delivered to eager recipients who are predisposed to buy your products.
How many subscribers do you have? How many editorial topics do you have? What should the contact frequency be on each of those topics? Do you have any list segmentation issues?
Your paid products are the best sponsors of your email newsletters. Are they print newsletters, book, or events? What is the intersection between the paid products you are promoting and the topics you are writing about?
In the Mequoda Email Marketing Workshop, Don and Kim will lead you through a thorough exploration of all your email marketing issues, including the editorial, merchandising, advertising and navigation elements of a best-practice email template.
Benefits: The Mequoda Email Marketing Workshop will enable you to reorganize your email newsletter into your most powerful and profitable marketing tool.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll have a customized email publishing plan and an editorial policy checklist, including an email newsletter template and an email marketing/editorial calendar that effectively promotes your paid products.
In the following two weeks, a Mequoda website architect will take this overview of the components and features of your email newsletter and add the graphic design elements to transform it into a professional four-color HTML document.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Product Development Workshop
Description: There are two key metrics that drive online or database marketing: the size of your list and your revenue per subscriber. Only with more and better product offerings can you maximize revenue per subscriber.
The more webinars, downloadable PDF files, magazines, newsletters, and live events you offer, the better.
In the Mequoda Product Development Workshop, you’ll discover how to inventory all your products and array them by price in a product pyramid. We’ll discuss pricing relationships and help you determine the ideal frequency of promotion and how you can create an email editorial calendar across several platforms.
Benefits: You’ll discover how most editorial content is generated at the top of the pyramid and is driven down over time. Taking into account product production values and costs, you’ll create a policy for redeploying the content of your live events by creating additional written and recorded products.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll have a master product plan in the form of a product pyramid that identifies the categories, sets the pricing ranges, establishes the production values, and identifies the flow and timing of original research on each platform.
Within two weeks following the workshop, Mequoda will create a refined graphic of the pyramid that represents the details of your new master product plan.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Partnership Development Workshop
Description: How can you get other publishers to send more links and traffic to your website? Mequoda has identified 12 different online relationships you can initiate and maintain with other sites.
Content partners are websites that agree to syndicate your editorial content, or whose editorial content you may want to syndicate.
Affiliate partners are websites that can sell your products for an affiliate commission, or whose products you may want to sell.
Review partners are websites designed to invite comments, on which you can submit editorial commentary, with links to your site, and vice versa.
Advertising partners are other website operators to whom you can sell or trade reciprocal editorial promotions, clicks, listings, sponsorships, display ads or impressions.
In this intensive one-day workshop, Don and Kim introduce you to all the possibilities for creating profitable partnerships with other online publishers.
Benefits: The Mequoda Partnership Development Workshop will help you identify all your potential website partners for content syndication, editorial promotion, pure affiliate marketing, reciprocal affiliate marketing and advertising.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll have a complete partnership development plan on an Excel spreadsheet that identifies potential marketing alliances across 12 categories.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Team Building Workshop
Description: Online publishers face some challenges that can be resolved with a better understanding of how people work together. How do you get your staff members to work as a team? The answer may lie in a comprehensive audit of your organization to determine its strengths and weaknesses, efficiencies and redundancies.
In the Mequoda Team Building Workshop, Don and Kim conduct a multi-platform organization review that leads you through an in-depth analysis of the markets you operate in, and the number of unique job descriptions that exist within your organization.
Benefits: The Mequoda Team Building Workshop will help you create comprehensive job descriptions that include strategic goals, daily activities, and key performance metrics.
Takeaway: At the end of the day, you’ll have a master job analysis report and team-building plan, with organizational job descriptions and key metrics for measuring the performance for your company’s online business unit staff. Additionally, we’ll provide you with recommendations for how to job share across publishing platforms for greater efficiency.
Who Should Attend: CEOs, COOs, and VPs of Human Resources.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Key Metric Workshop
Description: Effective website publishers isolate and track a handful of operating statistics using the Mequoda Key Metric Dashboard that alerts them to problems and opportunities in their online business.
The Mequoda Key Metric Dashboard will enable you to cut through the clutter of data and regularly review a standard set of daily, weekly, or monthly metric reports, looking to see if something is above average, way above average, or way below average.
We call this “management by exception.” The idea is to manage for the things that are coming out differently than they have in the past or than you thought they would.
With the Mequoda Key Metric Dashboard you track these 11 main management key metrics:
• Google Visibility Index
• Google Search Impressions
• Inbound Links
• Percent Conversions to Email Subscriber
• Average Email Subscribers
• Revenue per M Email Sent
• Website Pages
• Revenue per M Page Views
• Leads Generated
• Revenue per Lead
• Online Media Index
Benefits: The Mequoda Key Metric Workshop is designed to reveal precisely how to use your customized Mequoda Key Metric Dashboard to measure and manage your online publishing business to optimize revenue and profit.
Takeaway: Before Don and Kim deliver the Mequoda Key Metric Workshop, they will have created a Mequoda Key Metric Dashboard specifically for your online publishing enterprise. During the workshop, you’ll take ownership of this comprehensive Excel spreadsheet, an invaluable tool measuring and managing the 11 key metrics of your website.
Investment: $9,000
Mequoda Business Plan Workshop
Description: Every viable publishing business, whether contemplated or existing, needs a business plan, including a five-year financial forecast suitable for senior managers, equity partners and venture capitalists.
Don Nicholas understands this process intimately. During the Dot Com Bubble, he raised $34 million in venture capital with his business plan for Blue Dolphin Magazines. Don has helped dozens of online publishing start-ups use his planning process to get funded and launched.
The Mequoda Business Plan Workshop provides details of all the factors you need to consider, whether you are launching or retooling an existing publication.
Benefits: The Mequoda Business Plan Workshop reveals how to create a publishing model, using the formal Mequoda publishing business plan creation technique, including key statistics and a five-year financial forecast for your market.
Takeaway: For a period of six months following the presentation of this workshop, you may deliver your model and business plan, using the Mequoda business plan Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint format, for Don’s written critique. Included is a 90-minute Webex meeting to review Don’s findings and recommendations.
Investment: $9,000