How every piece of content you’re already producing can be repurposed and cast into different roles

As Don likes to say, your magazine is not a website. And your website is not your magazine.

In fact, your subscription website isn’t even a website. It’s actually three websites: a portal, a magazine and a store. And the Mequoda Method, which is utilized by successful niche publishers both large and small, calls for deploying a single piece of copy across all three to maximize your unique visitors, subscribers and buyers.

Some of you may be familiar with our fun, fictitious publishing company that we use for instructional purposes, Green Gardens Network. Let’s take a look at how that single piece of content pops up behind the paywall in the May-June issue of Hidden Gardens magazine, appears as a chapter in a handbook in the Green Gardens Shoppe, and is eventually extracted into a blog post at the portal, Gardens Daily, to promote the magazine.

Subscription website marketing: Less work than you think

When we teach our quarterly Digital Publishing & Marketing Intensive, our version of subscription website marketing includes a daily blog and free reports to promote your products, and having more than just a magazine as products. Our participants start to look worried: Where will they find the resources to produce all these things?

Relax. It’s a lot easier than it sounds. The key is understanding how every piece of content you’re already producing can be repurposed and cast into different roles. And no, that’s not cheating. It’s making sure that every member of your audience can access your content in the way that works best for them. And that’s smart marketing.

At Mequoda, we call that single piece of content a minimum information unit, or MIU. The name is self-explanatory: It’s the smallest piece of content that tells a complete story.

For Green Gardens Network, the MIU is a book chapter. For today’s purposes, it’s a chapter on azalea care from The Azalea Handbook, a $47 product that founder and publisher Rose Harper has written.

And truth be told, Rose wrote the book on azaleas by compiling the articles she’d written on them over the years for Hidden Gardens. So you can start to see how this works: Articles are book chapters, or book chapters are excerpted as articles. Either way works for our purposes of publishing profitable subscription websites!

Green Gardens Network, in fact, currently has 2,600 book chapters compiled into 52 handbooks, each with 50 chapters. Those chapters are turned into magazine articles at a rate of eight per issue.

At the same time, Green Gardens Network also takes three or four chapters from every handbook and creates video from them, resulting in 26 DVDs every year. And finally, the online editor excerpts those magazine articles into blog posts to promote the magazine, publishing six of them every week.

Of course, those chapters – or articles, if you want to think of it that way – are constantly being updated and rewritten by Rose’s editorial staff, so it’s genuinely fresh content all around. Green Gardens regularly republishes the books, DVDs, articles and blog posts with that updated content.

Stocking up on content for subscription websites

So let’s look at the different websites I talked about up front.

Subscription websites: Magazine

Green Gardens has a subscription website for Hidden Gardens, where the latest article on azalea care, excerpted from The Azalea Handbook, resides.

Subscription websites: Portal

Being good Mequoda Method followers, Green Gardens has its online editor review this article in their blog at the Green Gardens portal, Gardens Daily, and include links to subscribe to Hidden Gardens (Gain instant access to the complete article!).

(Special note: This blog post also doubles as an email newsletter to subscribers. Providing real content in your free newsletter is Rule #1 for subscription website marketing!)

Subscription websites: Store

But back to the subscription websites: Remember that because this piece of content was originally a book chapter, it’s not only available on the Hidden Gardens website as an article in the March-April issue, it’s also hanging out over at the Green Gardens Shoppe as a chapter in The Azalea Handbook. And eventually it will be packaged with several other chapters into an azalea care DVD, also available at the store. Finally, Green Gardens fans can buy a single issue of Hidden Gardens at the store, if that’s what they prefer.

Finally, Green Gardens fans can buy a single issue of Hidden Gardens at the store, if that’s what they prefer.

What’s not to like? Green Gardens Network is maximizing its resources (Rose isn’t made of money, after all) and its content inventory. At the same time, the company is providing its audience with multiple ways to access its rich content. We like to think that any niche publisher can succeed using the Mequoda Method. If you’re one of them, let us know!

Landing page optimization begins with your headline and ends with the thank-you page of your order flow

When a visitor arrives at your website landing page, you have about five seconds to make a good impression and capture her attention. If you don’t succeed immediately, she’s likely to click away and you’re apt to lose her forever.

Your landing page needs to be a fast, effective messenger.

With a quick glance, visitors to your site should know exactly what your landing page is about and how it benefits them. Determine what image and message you want the customer to “get” in those first few seconds, and design your landing page toward that objective. Anything that distracts from the central message or image you wish to project should be eliminated.

Landing Page Test: Headlines

Write several forceful headlines that capture the interest of your customer and test them all against each other with no other variables.

Far too many landing pages fail almost immediately by offering up lackluster headlines and subheads. A good landing page delivers a compelling headline for a single product or service.

Think benefits and features when writing headlines. The visitor who is reading your landing page wants nothing more than the answer to this one question:

“What’s in this for me?”

Answer that question well and you’ll make a sale.

All the other messages about your corporate image, company background, brand, etc., are of little importance to your prospective customer at this stage. Stay focused on the site visitor’s interests. On your landing page, that process begins with a compelling headline.

A great headline is really an advertisement for an advertisement. It grabs the reader’s attention with such force that she can’t resist reading the next sentence.

Landing Page Test: Your Story

Buying decisions are largely emotional. Consumers buy what they want, not necessarily what they need. Compelling benefits (read reasons or rationalizations) provide the congruency required to justify a subconscious purchase decision. An engaging, believable story enhances this process.

And great products seldom stand on their own or sell themselves without someone creating a story. A great landing page is a sales letter that begins with a story that heightens desire for the product and prompts a purchase decision.

Think of one person and write (speak) directly to him personally.

For instance, suppose you write a landing page for people who work in the food service industry.

Do you think people who work in the food service industry think of themselves as “food service workers?” They do not. So, which lead for a specialty coffee ad is more pleasing to the targeted reader and creates better rapport?

“Food service industry workers like those of you who read this newsletter know good coffee.”

or

“If you’re a restaurant owner, executive chef, or specialty food buyer, you know excellent coffee even before you taste it. Its color, freshness and aroma tell you volumes about its quality.”

The first is impersonal, unfocused and lumps a whole group into one general category. The second identifies its target audience, gets rapport, and compliments them.

Note, also, that plain old “you” is a lot more personal and intimate than “those of you.” This is another place to test although the word “you” is widely tested to make a much better impression than “I” or “us.”

Landing Page Test: Webification

By “webification” we mean the most efficient use of all the multi-media and interactive technology available.

Many personal brands use an audio or video clip that speaks directly to their audience. This is one of the more effective ways of making a sale that is personal and requires trust.

If the product you’re selling could benefit from an interview, a demo, or a backstory, consider testing video or audio on the page.

However, technology should be used to enhance the sales message, not to replace it. Don’t let your readers be so dazzled by the bells and whistles that they forget to buy. If you’re using video, it should be focused on the sale, not on comic relief.

Landing Page Test: Email Capture

Once you’ve captured your prospect’s interest, it’s important to keep your name, product, and/or service in front of them. Offering a free newsletter or a free report is a handy, non-invasive way to accomplish that. These items have a high perceived value and are surprisingly cheap to produce and distribute.

Some different methods of capturing an email that you can test include the following:

• Capturing their email before you allow them to see the price of your product

• Testing pop-unders as a mechanism for capturing a prospect’s email address if they’ve decided to abandon your site before buying

• Test the copy surrounding your email capture: Does it instill trust? After all, this might be the first time they’re meeting you.

Auto-responders can be very effective at getting your potential customers eager to buy more of your product or services.

Some publishers have built an entire business model using auto-responders. On one publisher’s website, once the user submits her email address, an auto-responder starts a series of “lessons” from the editors, delivered once a day for five consecutive days.

Landing Page Test: Testimonials

Buyers love having their purchase decisions validated. It comforts and reassures them to know that other customers—just like them—have bought and been very satisfied with your product or service.

The credibility of your product or service is invaluable. The authenticity of your user testimonials must likewise be completely believable. Good, credible testimonials are a vital element of any sales letter.

The most credible testimonial messages feature individuals who share similar demographics to your target prospects or their heroes. Testimonials should be an accurate transcription of your customer’s own words and ideally should include a full identification of the buyer by name, city, state and occupation.

When testing testimonials, try working with how you reveal the person giving the testimonial.

A statement of support for your financial newsletter from Tom S. in North Carolina is obviously less valuable than one from Tom Smith, Certified Financial Planner, from Boone, North Carolina.

In fact, under-identified testimonials can inspire suspicion and work against your sales message, sending your test results through the floor.

Landing Page Test: Order Flow Links

Links and buttons are the vehicles that allow a prospect to navigate your landing page. Your objective should be to make them as easy as possible to understand and use.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the links to the order flow. In regular text email promotions, some publishers want the whole story told before taking the user to the order page. In many cases, the user doesn’t even know the price of the product or service until taken there.

Guerilla marketers believe that in long copy, if the prospect “gets it” and is ready to order, then she should be taken immediately to the order page.

They argue that when the user is ready to buy, nothing should get in the way.

They believe there should be “Convinced? Want to order right now?” buttons throughout the landing page. Why make the prospect read any more than she needs to before making the decision to buy?

We say it depends. Our testing shows that eight out of 10 times, response rates are neutral or higher when peppering order buttons and links throughout the copy.

What makes the difference? Here’s our best guess: If the product is well-known, easy-to-understand and cheap, the “pepper them everywhere” approach almost always wins.

But we also believe that for each unique combination of product, buyer and the hundreds of different elements on the landing page that may cause them to buy or click away, the only sure way to increase landing page conversion rates is to test the variations and go with the winners.

Landing Page Test: Labeling and Language

Experienced web surfers are familiar with what have become the traditional “road signs” of well-designed web pages. Violating these familiar navigation standards and you go against the norm, taking them out of their “comfort zone” and perhaps detracting from your website’s credibility.

For example:

• Most of us have come to expect hypertext links (not graphic buttons) to move us from one page to another. Links connect to additional information.

• We expect graphic buttons only to initiate processes, such as “Click here to join!” Buttons create action.

• Traditionally, hypertext links are underlined.

These are our expectations after nearly 10 years of online experience with the best designed and most successful websites.

Testing your button copy is one of the most important tests you can run on your website. Some publishers see a drastic increase in conversions just by mixing words around on their buttons.

Landing Page Test: Content Density

Often someone involved with online marketing believes that “long copy doesn’t work on the Internet”—a myth we know to be patently false from extensive testing, but we welcome you to test it!

If a landing page is comfortable and easy to read, your prospects are far more likely to keep reading and respond to your sales message. The more expensive the product, the longer the copy should be. Rarely will someone read the whole page when you’ve packed in 3,000 or more words, but as long as you’ve provided every bit of information they need to make a purchasing decision, you’ve done a good job.

So, if you’re testing long and short copy, just be sure that you’ve given them the answers to everything they could possibly want to know.

Much of this is the responsibility of the copywriter, whose job it is to keep the message flowing in interesting and easily assimilated (bite-sized) chunks.

Test formatting, font size, fonts, and colors. Making your copy easy to read will make it easier for the reader to make a decision. The contrast in font sizes can also direct the attention of your potential customer, while some sizes and fonts get completely glossed over.

Seek out a designer who understands the online medium and won’t impose graphics on your site that overpower the sales message. Remember, it’s not creative unless it sells.

Landing Page Test: Content Freshness

Few things destroy the credibility of a sales letter landing page more quickly and effectively than content that’s out of date. How can you expect the prospect to take your message seriously if you’re not even interested enough in the content to keep it current?

Aim to convey a sense of freshness, excitement, timeliness or discovery.

Some of your potential customers will only visit your site once. If they don’t buy immediately, they may never return.

But if you offer a mouthwatering, gotta-have-it special premium that they will receive immediately upon buying, you can significantly increase your conversion rate.

Something as simple as displaying the current date on the site can help with content freshness. Or create urgency by letting the reader know that the price is a “market test” and may change soon. Alternatively, announce an expiration date for the offer—a deadline by which the user must respond to get the free bonuses.

Landing Page Test: Aesthetics

Beauty is relative, cultural, genetic and ever-changing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and aesthetic judgments are subjective. So how can you decide on the right design for your landing page?

This testing process can be endless. Buttons are a good start.

The answer is to know your target market and create an appearance that conforms to your visitors’ expectations. We call it the “user’s mental model.”

There are innumerable options here. So many, in fact, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose all direction. Before you settle on a design, take a good look around at other site designs.

As you consider designs, keep in mind your main objectives: a professional look, without clutter, that’s easy to navigate.

Landing Page Test: Order Options

Posting a landing page with a confusing or inadequate order mechanism is like opening a new WalMart, but forgetting to install cash registers. What’s the point?

In direct mail advertising, one of the two most important elements of the package is the order form (the other being the outer envelope). If you get everything else right and blow the order mechanism, your sales letter landing page will almost certainly fail.

Some points to test:

Your customers should be able to fill in the fields of an online screen and check boxes to select their preferences. Simplicity and brevity are priceless. Ask only for the information you need to process the order.

It’s unwise to offer more than three options or three price packages. Having three asserts value to each level so that fewer choose the bottom option.

Include alternate order options like  a toll-free number for phone orders and a printable order form for fax orders.

State your guarantee and return policy. In general, longer guarantees—the longer, the better—will increase sales and diminish the number of returns.

Remind your customers that their credit card information is protected by SSL. You can state this on your order form, and include the logo of your SSL provider.

In traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, there is a theory of management called MBWA. It stands for “management by walking around.” Getting out of the office and onto the work floor. Talking to people. Experiencing the business first hand, much like a customer would.

When’s the last time you tested your own order flow like a customer would?

Some tools that make it easy to test your landing pages include Google Content Optimizer (technical), Unbounce (less technical), and Five Second Test (asks users to judge you in five seconds).

Even more, we’re releasing our Landing Page Testing & Optimization webinar video for FREE that was hosted by Matt Humphrey, Chief Marketing Officer at Fortis Business Media, and Rafael Cardoso, the Senior Online Marketing Manager at Business and Legal Resources. You’ll be really impressed with what they tested and which changes made the biggest difference!

Coming up with the right business model for a successful subscription website is usually the biggest stumbling block for those wanting to get into this business.

Choosing your content focus is a business-critical decision, as the focus you choose pretty much dictates your chances of success with a subscription website. However, more serious than the focus of a subscription website is the business model. Not considering the subscription website business model is a major mistake some publishers make.

Our research shows nine discreet models for subscription websites. These include six premium (paid) models and three affinity (free) models. In many cases, two archetypes are needed for success: a portal or blog to drive traffic, and a premium subscription website to use as a primary monetization factor.

Premium (paid) subscription website models

• Membership
• Newsletter
• Reference
• Periodical
• Magazine
• Application

Affinity (free) subscription website models

• Community
• Portal
• Blog

The Nine Subscription Website Models

Membership Subscription Website

A membership subscription website archetype provides paid members with a library of information on a specific topic of interest or a cluster of topics and creates a community of individuals who share a common interest.

A membership subscription website is user-driven and content-based. And unlike a newsletter subscription website, whose minimum information unit is an issue of the publication, a membership subscription website is a destination in and of itself. Its business goal is to generate revenue from user-access fees by acquiring and retaining members; it accepts little or no advertising

Newsletter Subscription Website

A newsletter subscription website archetype is set up to build subscriptions for a related print or digital newsletter and to provide access to issues of the newsletter.

A newsletter subscription website is commerce-based, with an overall objective of increasing product sales and providing customer service to existing subscribers. The Minimum Information Unit (MIU) and the primary product sold through the website is a single issue of the newsletter. The website is organized by the newsletter’s issue date.

A newsletter subscription website generally has a free area, with content that focuses on the benefits of becoming a subscriber to the related publication and conversion architecture where a visitor can purchase a subscription. It also has a password-protected private area, where paid subscribers can view an HTML version of the current issue of the print or digital newsletter or download it in PDF format, as well as access and/or download back issues and other premium content.

Reference Subscription Website

A reference subscription website model allows paid subscribers continued access to a library of content that is updated constantly with new information.

Reference subscription websites are the online replacement for printed reference books, print directories, catalogues, and loose-leaf binders that used to be updated quarterly or annually. For a reference subscription website, however, the flow of new and updated information is constant. The paid subscriber—and, for the BtoB audience, the subscription can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars—can search or browse through the library of data to access the information or listings and find answers to questions.

The MIU of a reference subscription website may be an article or a book, report, document, lesson, or episode. It could be something as small as a baseball card factoid or as comprehensive as a training video. While simple sites may rely solely on HTML and PDF files, more robust sites also incorporate still photos, audio, and video into the MIU.

Periodical Subscription Website

A periodical subscription website model offers regularly updated news content that is intended to be consumed online, primarily in HTML, rather than downloaded.

A periodical subscription website is an on-demand reference source that is experienced randomly and selectively—a filing and retrieval system that allows users to quickly locate the information they seek. Every page of every article is tagged with keywords, topics, authors, and dates in order to facilitate successful content retrieval.

Magazine Subscription Website

A magazine subscription website model is set up to build subscriptions for a related print or digital magazine and to provide access to issues of the magazine.

A magazine website is only a magazine website if the user can view or download an issue of a magazine—one that is linear and periodic, has pages and a regular frequency, and can be viewed in HTML or downloaded as a PDF or stored in a CDF (Closed Document Format) format such as Texterity’s Cover Leaf. The MIU of the magazine subscription website is a single issue of the publication.

Many people refer to any website that carries a legacy magazine brand and magazine content as a magazine subscription website; however, if the content is not organized in a magazine format and issues cannot be viewed or downloaded, it does not meet the basic criteria of being a magazine subscription website. It is, instead, a periodical subscription website.

Consumer magazine subscription websites are as diverse in both content and execution as the magazines they represent. Some offer robust content and interactive functionality; others are mere customer-service portals for the print or digital companion publication.

The magazine subscription website model is poised to explode, as Apple makes it clear to magazine publishers who offer an online digital version of their publications that their subscribers will be able to access it on an iPad. That means potential access to millions of additional subscribers if publishers simply offer an app that delivers a digital version of the publication. At least a dozen other eReaders are also available, have been announced, or are under development. The numbers are staggering. The potential is enormous.

Application Subscription Website

An application subscription website model allows access to specialized online software (an “app”) that allows users to input information, use calculators and/or search a proprietary database, and access results.

Application subscription websites combine user data and publisher data to provide added value for the subscriber. The software application(s) on an application subscription website—similar to standalone applications that a user might purchase and load onto a personal computer—is the MIU. And thanks to Apple, “app” has become a familiar word in and of itself.

Community Subscription Website

A community subscription website is a powerful networking tool that relies primarily on user-generated content.

Social network subscription websites are used to create a setting where people with similar interests can use the virtual world to make real connections—whether purely social relationships or specifically BtoB networks. It’s the online version of meet and greet.

Social netmiumation that person or member decides to share via his or her member profile, forum posts, file uploads, links, and other data. Registration is typically required, and most social networks do not require payment.

Portal Subscription Website

A portal subscription website aggregates content from outside sources. Portals are intended to build and feed an audience; they are specifically designed for SEO, email marketing, list building, and lead generation.

A portal subscription website is the Mequoda System nexus for audience development. It’s designed to attract search engine traffic and links from other websites and, basically, build a paid registration base. The target portal user is passionate about the special- interest topic or topics covered by the portal and may initially encounter the site through paid search-engine results, links from other websites, email passed along by a registered user, paid ads or earned mentions in other media, word of mouth, or any of several other sources of targeted website traffic.

A portal site requires a stable of content providers that want to be associated with the portal. Often those people will want to be paid as contributing editors. Sometimes they’ll write for the portal site for links back to their own blog sites; sometimes it will be syndicated content that has already been published elsewhere.

Then there are levels of portal breadth or sophistication. For example, Yahoo.com is a huge general-interest portal with dozens of subsections with information syndicated by other websites, magazines, newspapers, and other sources. It’s clearly an aggregation play. However, most publishers interested in launching a portal subscription website are not looking to create anything remotely near the size of Yahoo.com. Rather, they tend to post bylined content derived from the publisher’s own publications and other inside sources to supplement bits of relevant content pulled or syndicated from outside sources, including contributors and other subscription websites. The outside sources may receive compensation from the publisher or may simply be looking to generate increased traffic through links back to their own websites.

A portal is also designed to maximize online advertising inventory. To do that, the most successful portals treat registered and unregistered users differently. For the unregistered user, a significant potion of the website page template is allocated to converting visitors into registered users. Once a user has registered, the portal morphs to display content that is personalized for the user. Personalized content enhances user satisfaction and increases page views and time spent—the key advertising conversion rates that drive website revenue for the many information marketers who use their advertising inventory to sell their own products. State-of-the-art portal subscription websites offer users email newsletters, blogs, email alerts and RSS feeds that are all designed to directly and indirectly generate more page views and website revenue.

So portal subscription websites generate value from both the users and the sponsors. Users pay—not with money (all website content is free) but with time and information. They spend time viewing web pages, emails and RSS feeds, thus creating advertising inventory that can be used to sell the publisher’s products (internal advertising) and/or sold to third party sponsors (external advertising) on a CPM (cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) basis.

Blog Subscription Website

A blog subscription website model blends publisher- and user-generated content that is updated frequently (daily, weekly, monthly) and consistently with articles posted by one or more authors and corresponding reader comments.

A blog subscription website is generally (but not always) a personal platform, the product of a single author with a particular interest in or point of view on a specific subject. The articles or essays are brief—ideally no more than a single page—and reflect the author’s personality. Readers who register become part of a community and are welcome to post comments.

The tone of a blog is primarily op-ed style and often a first-person voice; the author of the blog post is generally writing opinion about what he or she feels, believes, or thinks about issues on which the blog focuses—politics, the environment, celebrities, marketing, finance, technology, etc. Many authors also use their personally branded blogs as a device to boost their own visibility and create ancillary opportunities such as book deals, speaking engagements, consulting clients, editorial work in other publications, and so forth.

Blogs have become ubiquitous primarily because, from an execution standpoint, anyone—serious journalists or experts in a particular domain, as well as those who are less serious or less expert—can simply download a copy of WordPress or sign up at BlogSpot.com and easily launch a single-author blog at virtually no cost other than their time. None of the historical requirements for launching a publication, whether print or digital, apply. Consequently, there are millions of blogs.

On the other hand, blogs have evolved into something much larger than personal soapboxes. Publishers and other businesses have increasingly incorporated blogs into their online strategies as a method of getting messages out quickly and publicly, introducing a new product, sharing company news and information, and announcing upcoming events.

A Repeating Pattern

When you charge a fee to access the content within a subscription website, the site needs to provide specific and immediate benefits to your subscribers. The six premium models shown above are examples of exactly that. The three affinity (free) subscription website models serve to build audiences of interested users who may become paying subscribers.

Profitable Subscription Websites Are About More than Design

So you’ve gotten this far and you want to build a subscription website.

You just shovel your content up onto something pretty and wait for the money to roll in, right?

Of course it doesn’t work that way, but it’s astonishing how many ugly and/or dysfunctional subscription websites there are out there.

Part of the problem is that the best website “design” isn’t really about design at all – it’s about functionality. And while there are thousands of artists out there who think they know how to build a website, there are very few indeed who can also build a website that’s specifically meant to enhance profitability.

And the website designer who actually has a process for creating a subscription website is rare indeed. That’s why Mequoda has developed its own system and best practices, and teaches these techniques in our quarterly three-day course, Digital Publishing Intensive.

How to build a website: Step 1

Something that always strikes me when we teach publishers how to build a website is that the creation process is as much about creating a business model as it is about the best website design. Case in point: The very first thing you have to do is decide what kind of subscription business you want to be. That’s what we just walked you through above.

What does your business model have to do with the design of your website? It dictates the entire infrastructure, that’s all. Consumer Reports is a reference model where the audience pays the publisher for the information. Its architecture must provide a sophisticated consumer payment structure and a store.

Yahoo, on the other hand, is a portal with plenty of information, but it’s all free to the consumer, so there’s no store and no visible payment architecture, because Yahoo makes money from advertisers.

And of course, there are subscription websites that generate revenue from both paid content and advertising. Even there, we’ve identified three different models that might or might not apply to you.

Once you’ve chosen which of the nine subscription website models you’ll deploy, you have to choose a brand strategy.

How to build a website: Step 2

What’s that, you say? You only have one brand? Maybe you do – but maybe you really have more than one, or you should have! In the fictitious case study that we use at the Intensive, the publisher has a legacy niche magazine, just like many of our blog readers do. But that publisher, taking Mequoda’s advice, created several new “brands” to launch her Internet enterprise.

These included a new daily blog, free to all readers, which is a second brand. Then there are the books she’s written – a third brand. In order to unite all these “brands” and the related products, this publisher wound up with a multi-brand strategy. That means different logos, different design and different purposes on the website’s pages.

Identifying the best website design for your organization is a lot harder than you realized, huh?

How to build a website: Step 3

To make life even more complicated, you need to keep in mind your people strategy: Who will build your subscription website, and who will actually operate it? Who are the stakeholders who should have input into the process? You might decide to keep management of your site in-house, or you might outsource it to an agency.

In fact, this part of the website design process means you’ll be making critical hiring decisions – chief technology officer, online editor, ecommerce manager, and more. Best website design often has far more to do with HR than with art!

How to build a website: Step 4

Believe it or not … you’re finally ready to start the actual design process. Because Mequoda advises small and independent niche publications, we advocate for choosing mentor sites in whose existing design you can find inspiration. There’s no need for you to re-create the wheel!

And to reduce stress and aggravation, we also strongly recommend that all design be done in an art application, not in HTML, because it’s so much easier to make the thousand and one changes you’ll go through that way. Once the design for every single base page has been finalized – including home page, blog page or portal, store, magazine and more – then you can start creating in actual HTML. Trust us, we’ve learned this one the hard way.

How to build a website: Case study

If all this seems too theoretical, I urge you to check out our 90-minute walk-through below. It features Don Nicholas and Phil Ash, publisher at InvestingDaily.com and BusinessManagementDaily.com, who’s been through the process multiple times.

And, as always, we encourage you to make additional suggestions for best website design and how to build a website in the comments below. We’re always adding to our best practices for publishers, and welcome your comments!

Are you planning on building a subscription website? You can schedule a 30-minute needs analysis call with me to discuss the plans. To schedule your call, contact Ann-Marie via email or by phone at 617-886-5177.

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Editor’s note: Jane Zarem and Chris Sturk contributed content to this article, which has been updated many times from its original publication date in 2006 as new business models emerge.

Today, before I dive into subscription website publishing, I’d like to give a shout-out to the Boston Globe for dropping its paywall throughout the Boston Marathon crisis. I doubt that anyone from the Globe will read this blog, but at least Mequoda’s readers from all around the world can appreciate this act of community service.

In fact, after the experience of the Marathon crisis last Monday, the Globe added a live blog to its site that is available to all readers, including non-subscribers.

The Globe erected its paywall in September 2011. By contrast, the subject of today’s post, MarthaStewart.com, presumably because of its enormous brand recognition among consumers and the advertising that surely flocks to its pages, has no need of a paywall.

Or does it?

All roads lead to Martha

How big is the Martha Stewart brand? The formal name, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, pretty much says it all. And Googling the name for news of the company in the media world delivers stunning results.

Page 1 of Google results delivered nine listings from the website itself, and the usual listing from Wikipedia. One the second page, I found several news articles about its decision to fold two of its four magazines into the flagship product. More on that later … but more interestingly, I couldn’t find a single other search result that wasn’t from the website itself or from subscription retailers like Amazon … and I finally gave up on Page 9.

In short, Martha Stewart Living owns its own name in Google search, which is to say, on the Internet. I’ve never seen that kind of result when Googling any other publication. If there are any other references to the company on the Internet, they can’t compete with the company’s optimization of every single page for organic search and every magazine outlet that sells the magazine!

No matter what your goal in Googling Martha, you’re going to be driven to Martha Stewart content or to a subscription purchase page. This is surely unprecedented subscription website publishing.

But what would the goal be in driving traffic to the MS website if there’s no paywall? Perhaps there are lots of incentives to subscribe, or at least hand over your email address for something free, so that MSL Omnimedia can market its paid products to you – the heart of the Mequoda Method?

If you thought there must be something at the website that allows monetization of the Stewart brand, you’d be wrong.

It’s all about the eyeballs

As one would expect, MarthaStewart.com is a lush, beautifully-designed website, with an abundance of soothing white space and a tasteful color scheme. Everywhere you look you see gorgeous images of food, home décor, and artistic crafts. If you’re part of the Martha Stewart target audience, you can spend hours here.

The tabs lead to content on food, entertaining, holidays, weddings, crafts, home & garden, pets, whole living, television and the store. Every bit of all this content is free – recipes, craft projects, wedding dress gallery, all of it.

There’s a regularly updated blog – but I confess I can’t tell you exactly how often the company updates it because there are actually 21 blogs covering all of Martha’s topics, all of them updated once or twice a day, some of them more often, some less. It’s an astonishing amount of new content.

None of the magazine content appears to be made available for free.  However, you actually have to search to find any kind of call to action for the two magazines remaining in the empire – Martha Stewart Living and Martha Stewart Weddings. The largest, a standard right rail advertisement, appears on the home page … below editorial content and an ad for the March of Dimes

Perhaps this is all part of the “curation” subscription website publishing business model – presuming that visitors will be so overwhelmed by the free content that they’ll gratefully seek out and pay for a nice, neat, curated magazine.

Or is it simply hubris? Is MSL Omnimedia carefully monitoring rising revenues that prove this strategy is working, or is the company simply supremely confident that the name and the lavish content will magically convert passing visitors all by themselves?

A blog of this size isn’t going to get the attention of anyone at a company named “omnimedia” who could answer these questions. But what is certain is that advertising, not subscriptions, is a huge part of their revenue strategy.

With thousands of pages of content, there’s ample room for ads. The site utilizes one of Mequoda’s favorite advertising strategies, the floater, to great effect – though Mequoda clients use their floaters to promote their own products, while MS floaters come from advertisers such as Fage, Bounty, Panera and Kohler.

In fact, MarthaStewart.com loves floaters so much, they’ve sold space on their subscription page! Now that’s confidence – MS is willing to risk losing a potential subscriber to a company that makes paper towels!

Another fascinating thing to note: All videos are free, but you cannot access a single one of them until you’ve sat through an advertising video. All the thumbnails sit there, just below the Kitchenaid video, tantalizing but greyed out and untouchable. You can’t even fast forward the ad. You just  … have … to … wait.

Clearly MSL Omnimedia is relying on the eyeballs it can deliver to advertisers to drive profits. And as we’ve seen, MarthaStewart.com employs Mequoda strategies to a certain degree. Incredibly optimized for search? Check. Free content? Check. Blog? Check. Forums to build relationships with visitors? Check. These things will drive advertising revenues, if not subscription revenues. It must be working for Martha, right?

Maybe ….

How not to survive a recession

While it’s tempting to assume MSL Omnimedia knows exactly what it’s doing, based simply on the awesome success of Ms. Stewart, media watchers know it’s not exactly going the way you’d think for the company. Back in November 2012, the company announced that in addition to laying off 12 percent of its staff, it would respond to declines in advertising revenue by folding one of its four publications, Martha Stewart Everyday Food, into the flagship publication.

A 2004 acquisition, Whole Living Magazine, would be put up for sale. In the end there were no takers, and Whole Living has also been folded into MSL.

That leaves MSL itself and MSL Weddings as the only remaining publications in the stable. As the New York Times noted:

The company’s publishing fortunes now rest heavily on magazines with very mixed results. Martha Stewart Living’s advertising pages declined by 30 percent in the first half of the year, according to data tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau. While its overall circulation has grown slightly, its newsstand sales dropped in the last year to 163,571 copies in June from 198,700 copies the same time the year before, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

And while MSL.com’s Online Media Index is a reasonable 1.66, showing that the site is pulling in more visitors for free content than it has paid circulation, it’s still not what we’d call healthy for a publication that’s losing advertising revenues, eliminating premium product and cutting staff.

If you can’t attract vastly more traffic to a free website, even with the Martha Stewart name attached, than you can attract paid consumers, something’s wrong with your audience development program.

And if advertising and newsstand sales aren’t cutting it, that leaves premium content to improve the bottom line. MSL.com has plenty of that, but it needs website traffic of three times its paid circ or more – as several other large consumer publications have – and it needs to put more effort into converting them into paying customers.

Perhaps there’s just too much media in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and the magazine side of the business is being overlooked, as has happened at TIME magazine. Whatever the problem, Martha won’t continue to be a publishing diva forever at this rate.

It leaves me wondering … is it time for a paywall at MarthaStewart.com? Or will we be reading about more layoffs and content cutbacks in the future for this omnimedia company? What do you think?

Who remembers this one?

The more I write about the future of magazines and subscription marketing, the more I realize what a sea change the Internet has created for the magazine industry. When I learned the trade, I was learning what the publishing generation before me had learned, and the generation before that.

And then came the Internet, and everything changed. Except for one thing: subscription marketing. Don and I are still teaching the fundamentals of subscription marketing at Mequoda’s Internet Marketing Intensive, with just a few tweaks related to Internet marketing.

And since we’ll be delivering an Intensive in a few days, I figured I’d crack my knuckles, figuratively speaking, and get in a little practice right now.

Subscription marketing basics: Price

I recently dug out Don’s book, Secrets of Successful Subscription Marketing, that he wrote back in the days of paper direct mail. You might think that such material couldn’t possibly be relevant today, but then again, some things never change. The first of these is the art and science of pricing your product.

Unlike most marketers, in subscription marketing you can sell the same product at different prices each time it’s purchased. Our customers buy a new subscription from us at one price, and then we can use a different price to get them to renew the first time. We might even use yet another price for the third and subsequent renewals – if we’ve hung on to them that long.

Don has identified four different subscription marketing price tactics: KISS, Introductory, Step-up and Decoy. I’m describing them in basic terms, and I’m not addressing the packages you offer, such as universal pricing for a print, web and digital product vs. separate packages for print only or print-plus digital. Don and I have discussed those issues quite a lot lately. Whatever you decide for a package, you can then apply these tactics to the package prices.

KISS: Of course this is Keep It Simple, Stupid! Everything is the same price at every stage of buying or renewing a subscription. You don’t confuse the customers, you don’t risk having people let their subscription lapse so they can get a lower introductory price later, and no one complains about getting a different price from someone else.

KISS pricing, however, doesn’t usually maximize the overall profitability of the subscription marketing process.

KISS pricing: $18 for a new subscription, first renewal and all subsequent renewals.

Introductory: This tactic gives brand-new subscribers a discount, because we know they’re more price sensitive than renewing customers. All subsequent renewals are sold at full price.

Introductory pricing: $12 for a new subscription, and $18 for all renewals.

Step-up: If you have a low introductory price, you can also step up gradually to your maximum price. By the time a subscriber has bought from you twice, they’re really hooked! This generates the best overall response and profitability for many publishers.

Step-up pricing: $9 for a new subscription, $12 for the first renewal, and $18 for all subsequent renewals.

Decoy: This one is more complex, and it’s one that Don has developed for investing and B2B publications in the Internet era. Now that we don’t have to worry as much about print and delivery costs of print products and paper bills, we can play around with terms.

This tactic rewards subscribers with a lower monthly price for a longer term. The idea is that once a customer looks at the higher prices for monthly, quarterly or six-month subscriptions, they’ll generally want to go for the longer term. In this case, since billing by email is so simple, you can even offer a monthly “subscription,” which is to say, the subscriber is billed that price every month.

Once you determine your annual subscription price, you set shorter term prices to create the appearance of choice and convenience for the subscriber … but which drives them to go for the annual subscription anyway.

Decoy pricing: $29 a monthly subscription, $49 for a quarterly subscription, or $97 for an annual subscription.

Subscription marketing basics: Offer

Once you’ve established your price strategy, the next problem to solve is the offer you make in your subscription marketing campaigns and on your website. Do you give then something for free as an enticement to subscribe? Do you give them a trial subscription?

This decision has actually gotten easier in the Internet era. Don invented what he calls the Offer Continuum, and in ancient times, that included 12 types of offers. Today, because we don’t do things such as “cash only” or sweepstakes offers, we’ve boiled it down to six.

Through literally decades of testing, we’ve also determined the success rate of each type of offer, which we call the response index. The most successful offer is baselined at 100, and less successful offer types will only get a certain percentage of that.

Not surprisingly, the offer that gets the best response is a soft offer, which means you give them a free issue or more to try you out. You also offer a premium, and you bill them to see if they’ll take you up on a full subscription.

The least successful offer is a hard offer, in which they pay with their credit card up front, and get nothing else — no trial, no premium. This offer delivers only 25% response compared to the #1 offer.

In between is the soft offer with a premium included, but the subscriber gives you a credit card number and has to contact you to cancel, instead of being billed.

Of course subscription marketing includes long-term calculations such as how many renewals you get from subscribers who came in on the softest offer vs. the hardest offer. That means years of testing your offers to determine which ones work for your audience and your bottom line, but this continuum is the place to start.

Subscription marketing basics: Creative

Once you’ve established your price and how you want to offer your subscription to customers, you’re ready to think about ways to entice, persuade and convince them, whether it’s sell copy on a landing page, or an outbound email. Few subscribers ever make a decision to buy from you based solely on your price or offer!

My colleague Amanda went into some details of good creative in email marketing yesterday. As always, Mequoda hammers away on meeting customers’ needs and on conveying benefits instead of features.

And at the Intensive, I offer several examples of these strategies that date back as far as subscription marketing itself – starting with the godfather of copywriting, Claude Hopkins, who advised, “Ads are based entirely on service … They cite advantages to users.”

When did he write that? 1923. Hopkins was so successful as a copywriter, the advertising agency he worked for paid him $185,000 per year. In 1907.

When I mention this at the Intensive, I always have to pause while the audience collectively drops its jaws.

Amanda also wrote about telling personal stories as a sales device. Another example I use is the famous ad for the U.S. School of Music, written in 1925. It led with the headline, They Laughed when I Sat Down at the Piano. But when I Started to Play…

Even if you’ve never read this absolutely classic copy, you can guess where this one is headed: A personal story of the writer’s anguish over being musically inept, and how surprised all his friends were when his lessons from the music school paid off.

You’ll still see variations on this theme today:

1. They grinned when the waiter spoke to me in French – but their laughter changed to amazement at my reply.

2. They thought I was crazy to ship Live Maine Lobsters as far as 1,800 miles from the ocean.

3. Imagine me … holding an audience spellbound for 30 minutes!

Nope, humans never change. Neither do the fundamentals of successful subscription marketing. It never hurts to get back to basics! And as I mentioned, in a few days, I’ll be discussing the basics of subscription marketing and much more in New York City at the Intensive. If you’re in the neighborhood, we invite you to sign up and meet Don, me and the rest of our team, while digging into everything it takes to be a success in subscription marketing in the digital age.

In the meantime, I invite you to share ideas with me for great creative – especially if you have classic copywriting favorites, because I’m a complete geek when it comes to that stuff – pricing, and offers.

Take a trip with me today to the Big Apple, home of The New Yorker magazine. This venerable publication, like everyone else in the industry, has struggled in the Internet era with declining ad sales and even more recently, with consumer disdain for print media.

But unlike many other magazines, The New Yorker has mastered subscription website publishing so that not only has it stabilized its declining readership, but – and I hope you’re sitting down – raised its subscription price at the same time.

In addition, The New Yorker has seen ad sales leap by 221% between 2009 and 2012, according to publisher Lisa Hughes, speaking at the recent MPA Swipe 2.0 conference. But that’s post for another day … right now I’m agog at the readership and price data, and what lies behind these success stories.

Successful subscription website publishing, Part 1: The OMI

At Mequoda, we talk a lot about the importance of OMIs in subscription website publishing. That’s your online media index, a ratio of your print circulation to your unique website visitors. Divide your monthly unique visitors by your print circulation to get the number.

Have we mentioned that your visitor number should be higher than your print circulation? It’s a lot easier to get people to read free content than to convert them to paid subscribers, so if your OMI is much less than 1, you might need some audience development training. That, of course, is something Mequoda focuses on for our clients and Internet Marketing Intensive attendees. (Shameless plug: We’ve got one coming up in just a few weeks.)

Not only is a high OMI number a good thing for publishers who accept advertisers, it’s a strong indication of whether your organization is going to thrive or fail going forward into the digital media age.

At the moment, The New Yorker currently has an OMI of 0.7. In the Mequoda universe, that’s a grade of C. But because their digital circulation is currently taking off like a rocket, we expect them to pass 1 any day now. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The New Yorker went from 29,325 digital circulation in 2011 to 59,471 in 2012 – almost double. That trend will almost surely continue, as I’ll discuss later on.

Bottom line for The New Yorker’s subscription website publishing: A strong online presence driving increased digital circulation despite a price increase.

Successful subscription website publishing, Part 2: A feature-rich website

Actually having a subscription website in the first place is enough to make The New Yorker stand out. Most leading consumer publications have no such thing – that is, a website full of free content that drives subscriptions to its paid content.

And what a gorgeous subscription website it is!

The reader revels in page after page of free content, from news to culture to books to humor – just like the magazine itself. Daily blogs cover photographs, news, politics, feminism, science, and opinion on everything under the sun – all of it free. Now this is juicy subscription website publishing!

And while you’re paging through the site, you can’t miss the first two navigation tabs: Subscribe and Magazine. On the magazine page, the prime real estate at the top left includes the current issue cover, a link to the table of contents, and a link to a free trial subscription.

Content from the magazine is listed below that, with a blue lock icon that indicates premium content available only to subscribers. Some of the magazine content is provided for free. But unlike some other magazines engaged in subscription website publishing, the paywall is obvious, and has in fact been in place since the beginning, Hughes noted at Swipe.

Successful subscription website publishing, Part 3: A tablet edition

The New Yorker launched its tablet edition in May 2011, within six months of the release of the iPad. Again, this is a rewarding experience for the reader: It’s simple to use, and offers a plethora of digital-only, multi-media content, including video, slideshows and content read by the authors.

Unlike The Economist, whose universal, all-access pricing policy we praised recently, The New Yorker is slightly more complicated when you decide to subscribe. You can choose to buy a single digital issue for $5.99; get the digital edition including tablet and iPhone access plus the complete digital archive for $59.99; get print only again for $59.99; or get all of the above for $69.99.

That’s a great deal for all the content you get digitally, and as a magazine addict and trained historian like me, the inclusion of the archive is icing on the cake. It’s certainly a fair price for what The New Yorker is putting into its subscription magazine publishing.

And yet, the deal has been even more amazing in the past.

If you’ve been in the magazine business since the print-only days, you know that US magazines established the incredibly obtuse precedent of practically giving away their content in the early days. Thus consumers became accustomed to buying their Hearst, Time Inc., Condé Nast and other publications for $9.99 or $19.99 per year – paying literally pennies for thick, glossy, expensive-to-produce issues.

Thankfully, the American subscription magazine publishing industry is catching on. The New Yorker previously offered its subscriptions for similarly dirt-cheap prices – $19.98 per year for 47 issues in 1998. That was half of its rate base price of $39.95. When it launched its online edition in 2008, the single-year price was still $39.95, but the last issue of 2008 saw a slight single-issue price increase from $4.50 to $5.99. One-year price was still $39.99.

And then, subscription website publishing at its finest: The day The New Yorker launched its tablet edition in 2011, the announced prices were $59.99 and $69.99, as I mentioned above. Nowhere was there a mention of the old $39.99 price; nowhere did The New Yorker announce a price increase. Within days, the last few outlets selling print for $39.99 had fallen into line.

The new tablet edition allowed the bundled price, and the bundled price disguised the price increase. Pure genius. At last a publication was charging a fair price for its product. And by August of that year, Ad Week was reporting that The New Yorker had sold 20,000 iPad subscriptions.

Best of all, that year, 2011, saw New Yorker circulation increase a full 5%, according to ABC — while the industry as a whole gained the merest .04 percent! While the 2012 circulation dropped slightly by 3%, we’d guess that most of it came from a drop in renewals as some subscribers were uninterested in digital and in paying the higher price for print alone. That trend will be reversed as new, younger subscribers join the party, with no knowledge of any other price.

And that’s still a 3% circulation increase over the past two years, along with the price hike. Indeed, based on this evidence, we say that subscription website publishing is being redefined by The New Yorker.

What do you think of The New Yorker’s strategy? Agree, disagree, or have something to add if you work there? We’d love to hear it in the comments.

If you’re looking for an easy answer to online publishing success, stop reading. We don’t have one.

We know dozens of publishers who have made online publishing a large part of their revenue stream.

But we don’t know one who’s done it without putting in the effort to learn what actually works – as opposed to what they “heard” works – and then spending the time and money it takes to execute the business model.

So I’m going to tell you where our clients have found the money. It’s not where you think: It’s not your website, it’s not social media, and it’s not the awesome gadget app you just built.

The answer is one of the biggest secrets of online publishing. It’s email newsletters: the medium that gets no respect from publishers.

The power of the email newsletter

Let me put it this way. In the olden days before the Internet, you wouldn’t try to launch a profitable direct mail campaign … and then refuse to buy any lists. You wouldn’t try to sell more single copies at the newsstand without increasing your print run.

Yet that’s essentially what many publishers do when they try to make money while ignoring the most powerful sales tool to develop out of the Internet revolution.

At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After all, if they show up on your website, they’re bound to subscribe to your magazine, right?

Wrong.

Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t turn into buyers. They simply remain … passing website visitors. Who is your prime audience? The folks who like you enough to subscribe to your free email newsletter!

But what about social media? That’s the latest Internet marketing fad, so I have to spend more time and effort on Facebook, right?

Wrong again.

The publishers who use email newsletters, such as Rodale, Meredith and all our clients, know that a consumer publication can generate about $7 per subscriber, per year, selling subscriptions, advertising and ancillary products. From Twitter and Facebook followers? Less than $1. And those numbers are lower for B2B.

And as for gadget apps (as opposed to the magazine app your subscribers need to access your digital magazine) – why try to become a software company, when what you’re really good at is producing content? On the other hand, email newsletters work incredibly well, and it’s what you’re good at anyway, so shelve the app ideas until you’re as big as, say, Condé Nast, and then you can afford to throw money at apps just because it’s hip. Otherwise, put gadget apps wayyyy down on your priority list.

Websites, social media and gadget apps simply don’t help you build the relationship with your audience that keeps them engaged and loyal. Content-driven email newsletters from a publisher, however, speak directly to the audience. They’re free, daily, user-friendly, highly-targeted and personally-delivered love letters to your subscribers.

Study after study has proved that content-driven email newsletters (as opposed to strictly retail newsletters from, say, Nordstrom’s or Staples) are among the most popular media that consumers read today. And if you think that’s just older folks, think again: Our own Digital Native Study found that digital natives – those 30 and under – are highly attached to their email newsletters, for all the reasons given above.

If consumers are passionate about something, they want the newsletter that talks about it to them, every day.

Want some numbers? From some of our clients: Investing Daily, competing in a huge market, has 50,000 email subscribers. A small niche publication, Ceramics Daily, has 100,000. And Knitting Daily, who jumped on the email newsletter train in 2007, has a whopping 400,000 subscribers who live and breathe their email newsletter and its rock-star-status editor.

Here’s how to do it yourself

If you’ve read this far, you’re still with me. But as I said, you have some way to go – this isn’t a quick and easy way to score big on the Internet. There are three steps to success, and the dozens of clients who’ve taken the time to implement it will tell you it works.

• Build an optimized website to attract traffic.
• Convert that traffic into email newsletter subscribers.
• Then sell subscriptions and ancillary products to your email list, and boost your advertising impressions thanks to this dedicated audience.

Do you need a website and passing traffic? Absolutely. But the website isn’t the endgame. Rather, it’s the steppingstone to building a big, fat email list of engaged customers who can’t wait to find out what content they can buy from you.

Of course, to understand how to build an optimized website, convert visitors to subscribers, and finally sell to those subscribers, you’d also have to learn the nitty gritty of the Mequoda Method. We spend three days teaching it at our Internet Marketing Intensives – and many people come back more than once to really absorb it all – so I can’t squeeze it all into this post. In a little bit I’ll tell you about some free white papers you can download to read more about the skills and strategies you need to fully implement the Mequoda Method.

In the meantime, there are three key metrics you should be monitoring, and improving, to dip your toes into this phenomenally successful method. We’ll start with the Mequoda Strategy Model, which we use to introduce the Method at our Intensives. At a mere 26 lines, it’s the simplest, most user-friendly way to understand the Mequoda Method we’ve come up with yet.

If you can’t wait for the next Intensive, you can download the Mequoda Strategy Model from our website.

Visibility Index

The first metric is the Visibility Index. That’s impressions divided by searches. In our fictional business model for “Green Gardens Press,” that number is 20%. If you’re not visible to Google on the Internet, you don’t exist, so the higher this number is, the better.

Brands that dominate their space can get it into the 60s. Some publishers stick at around 2-10 percent. But most publishers can make plenty of money by maintaining a number in the 20s. Want to increase your VI? Work on your organic marketing, which is where 94% of traffic comes, generally speaking. Again, there’s plenty more information on driving organic traffic at our Intensives, and you can also read more about it in our free white paper, Organic Audience Development Strategy.

Note: The numbers in our model relate to consumer mass niche publications – travel, food, business, news and investing are the Big Five. For B2B publications, the search universe will be smaller, but the average revenue per order (line 25) should be higher.

Email Capture Rate

The email capture rate, or conversion rate, is also within the publisher’s control. Of the 70+ websites we’ve built for clients and including our own, 4% is average. Industry average, however, is less than 1%. This number is easy to calculate, even though most publishers fail to track this one: For every 100 visitors you get, how many new email subscribers did you generate? Remember, email is key to the Mequoda Method. Without building a large email file, you simply can’t make a lot of money – or if you’re a really big brand like Time, for instance, you can make money … but still be leaving piles of it on the table. If you want to read more about converting these visitors to subscribers, and don’t want to wait until the next Intensive, check out our Landing Page Handbook for free.

Orders per Thousand Emails Sent

This is another easy metric to capture, and one that you can improve with rich content in your email newsletters, compelling sales copy for promotional emails, and well-thought-out offers. Remember, if you need more instruction on those specific topics, we have it in plenty at our Intensives, or you can read our free white paper, Email Copywriting Basics.

Bottom line: If you keep building your visibility, focusing on that email capture rate, and improving your orders per thousand emails, your sales and revenues will blossom.

Print publications are dying a slow but inevitable death. We notice it almost every day – in fact, it’s so much a part of our current culture, that last December, the Onion satirized the trend: Dunbar Family Forced to Discontinue Print Edition of Christmas Newsletter, ran the headline. “Amid a rapidly changing Christmas-letter landscape, the printed word has become a less effective way to keep you informed about Dunbar family affairs,” wrote editor-in-chief Phyllis Dunbar.

It’s funny … but not, if you’re a traditional print publisher. If you’ve got a print magazine, you’re surely planning to go digital soon, in you’re not there already. Everyone knows that with the advent of tablets, online magazine subscriptions are the future of publishing. Problem: Few publishers understand how to monetize their content online.

Without a clear vision of how to actually profit from digital publishing, many publishers simply upload their magazine to the Internet and cross their fingers that it will work. Of course at Mequoda, we have a bulletproof plan that makes finger-crossing unnecessary. And one of our clients, the Biblical Archaeology Society, is proving that online magazine subscriptions done right can be a solid revenue stream.

Online magazine subscriptions done right

The Biblical Archaeology Society has figured out a brilliant way to monetize its content online, offering not one, but two digital subscriptions. One is for their legacy print publication, Biblical Archaeology Review. And they manage to sell a healthy number of online magazine subscriptions at $19.95 for six issues per year.

The other subscription is for their massive library, including more than 6,600 articles from 35 years of Biblical Archaeology Review. Many publishers are finding ways to monetize old content now that it can be made searchable and thus more usable and appealing than a stack of dusty print magazines. The kicker for the Biblical Archaeology Society is that they can also include articles from two magazines they no longer even publish: 20 years’ worth of of Bible Review (1985-2005), and eight years of Archaeology Odyssey (1998 to 2006). That makes for a truly valuable product that appeals to researchers, scholars, archaeologists and Bible history aficionados.

Of course each subscription has a companion retail subscription website, an important feature which my colleague Aimee Graeber wrote about last week. At biblicalarchaeology.org, you’ll find both, and all roads throughout the site lead back to the offer for both online magazine subscriptions.

With two online magazine subscriptions available, BAS can leverage their content profitably:

• BAR digital at %19.95
• BAS digital library at $29.95
• BAR digital + BAS library at $34.95

Here’s where the magic happens: Since the launch of BAS’s online magazine subscriptions last September, 59% of their sales have been for the pricier BAR digital plus library product. In other words, by making their library of old material available digitally, BAS can get more than half of subscribers to spend an extra $15. That’s what I call money growing on trees!

In fact, only 18% of new online magazine subscriptions since September have been for the magazine only, at the $19.95 entry point. The second highest price point, the library at $29.95, attracted 23% of new subscribers.

Bottom line: online magazine subscriptions for BAR, the BAS digital library and the combination subscription for both accounted for 6.4% of BAS’s revenue stream in 2012, and publisher Susan Laden reports that that income has doubled in the first two months of 2013.

Added value in online magazine subscriptions

Something many publishers don’t understand is that selling online magazine subscriptions is about more than simply uploading their print content to the Internet. As we just saw, smart pricing of these products can drive sales in totally unexpected ways.

In addition, as we always urge online publishers to do, BAS has enhanced its digital version of BAR with video and photo slideshows. That justifies the $19.97 price for online magazine subscriptions, as opposed to the $13.97 price for the print version (which also includes a free trial issue on top of the six annual issues).

Bonus: BAS, like other publishers we know of, also groups its library offerings in “collections,” which, in addition to allowing subscribers to focus on specific topics when they browse, also serve as themes for emails that promote the library. For example, the Historical Jesus Special Collection was the theme of a promotion that mailed last December, bearing the subject line, Bring Jesus to Life this Christmas, and the headline, Meet the Jesus You Never Knew.

In the text, the letter begins, Become a member of the BAS Library and meet the Jesus of history and tradition that you never learned about in Sunday School. The email included snippets of the articles included in the collection, and clicking to any of them brought you to a landing page which invited you to subscribe to the library in order to read the article.

Selling online magazine subscriptions

Even if you haven’t started selling online magazine subscriptions yet, you may have bought one yourself from the Apple newsstand, Amazon, or other publishing partner. When publishers partner with these companies, of course, they have to share the profits.

Apple currently keeps 30% of all sales, Amazon keeps 40%, and Barnes & Noble keeps 50%. But I just bought online magazine subscriptions to BAR and the BAS library for my iPad, and Apple didn’t get a dime of my money. Why? Because their companion retail subscription website collects data and payment, then sends you to Apple to download the free app. Apple isn’t involved in the transaction other than as the repository for the app. This is a wonderful thing for small publishers!

But why does Apple allow this? It’s because they’re more interested in selling iPads than in selling subscriptions. And the catch is that the companion website where you sell online magazine subscriptions and collect payment must have content that users can search for and read. It can’t be a retail-only site. That’s why, in addition to serving as an SEO gateway to selling online magazine subscriptions, your blog and free content are vital to your magazine’s retail subscription website.

Creating your own online magazine subscriptions

It’s important to note that BAS hasn’t simply pasted its content into a content management system and let it go at that. All BAR content has been translated into HTML format by BlueToad, allowing for a pleasing user interface with flip-book technology.

At the same time BAS isn’t spending money indiscriminately. Rather, the organization has followed a strategy we urge all publishers to incorporate, no matter how much money you think you have to throw at an online magazine subscriptions project.

First, start with less expensive replica editions of your publication. This means that one page stays the same on every device it’s viewed on, and everything on that page will shrink in order to fit on the smaller screen of a tablet or iPad.

Second, build your companion retail subscription website, whose purpose is to sell online magazine subscriptions and other products with a blog and free downloads of related content, according to the Mequoda Method.

Third, once you’ve established traction with your fat new revenue stream, you might choose to opt for reflowing your content into a replica plus format. In digital replica plus, or DRP, the content stays at a size the user chooses, and fits whatever it can at that size into the device screen.

But at BAS, Laden isn’t in any hurry. She notes that the magazine is rich with features such as sidebars, contests, and footnotes, and she doesn’t want to clutter it up with more bells and whistles. Instead, her next project coming up right about now is to produce PDFs for newsstands at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Zinio and Google. These versions will be sold through those partners and will be simpler than the iPad app, but, she notes, “This market is growing, and our subscribers are requesting this.”

Online magazine subscriptions should become a healthy part of your publishing revenue, not just because print will eventually disappear, but because for now, you can still sell both print and digital products, allowing you to build revenues that will sustain you throughout the next 10 years or so of transition. It’s not a simple process, but if a non-profit organization like BAS can do it, so can you.

Share your experiences and wisdom gained from transitioning to selling online magazine subscriptions! And if you need help in getting started, I urge you to attend our Internet Marketing Intensive in April, to understand the entire process from start to finish!

Although the marketplace uses both names interchangeably, there are big structural differences between a membership and subscription website.

Misunderstanding the characteristics and attributes of a membership website compared to, say, a subscriber-access-only magazine subscription website is a common misunderstanding when publishers are launching a paid-access-only website.

A membership website is an online medium, a destination in and of itself.

• Example: Consumer Reports

It may be structured as a “pure-play” site, which doesn’t depend on a primary relationship to, or experience with, an online or offline product.

Or it may be structured as a “companion” website, which does relate to an online or offline product.

Either way, “members” or “subscribers” register and pay to access information organized by topic of interest. It can also include research information or provide answers to a question.

There are also a few mistakes that publishers often make when building membership websites:

• Choosing the wrong format for your membership website.
• Having too much content.
• Lacking content.
• Charging too much.
• Charging too little.
• Lacking market access.
• Ignoring legacy business model.
• Ignoring organic marketing.
• Lack of cost-effective paid marketing.
• ….more about those.

Subscriber-access-only companion sites, often confused with membership sites, are more correctly defined as retail subscription websites, where the subscriber can access or download PDF versions, or extra copies of the related publication or application.

A few different types of subscription sites might be for a newsletter, club, magazine, periodical, application, or reference reports.

• Example: The Motley Fool

Motley Fool subscribers get access to the electronic versions of their newsletters as well as a small community related to the newsletter to which they are subscribed.

They don’t meet our definition of a membership website because they aren’t destinations. They are companion retail subscription websites where newsletter subscribers can download PDF versions and non-subscribers can purchase a newsletter subscription.

Unlike a membership website, which is content-based, a retail subscription website is commerce-based with an overall objective of increasing product sales and providing customer service to existing subscribers.

A retail subscription website includes, for example, a customer-service functionality to manage the ongoing relationship with the subscriber; it might also allow the user to download back issues, perhaps for an additional price. Most importantly, the organization of information on a retail subscription website is by issue date, not topic of interest.

Misunderstanding the characteristics and attributes of a membership or subscription website is common when launching a paid-access-only website. Just get the facts before you launch, or you could really spin your wheels and get nowhere fast!

The simplest subscription website pricing strategy is Universal Access and The Economist uses it well.

I’ve spent hours, and several hundred dollars, buying digital magazines. I’ve bounced around between my iPad, Kindle Fire, and the World Wide Web. I purchased from Condé Nast, Hearst, Rodale, and The Economist.

The Economist offers subscribers the best customer experience

I started by purchasing a one-year subscription to The Economist on the iPad. The experience was clean and effortless. I chose the one-year offer, entered my Apple password, agreed to share data with The Economist and set up an account that would give me unrestricted access to The Economist website. Unrestricted website access allows me to read the entire archive back to 1997, breaking content, and the weekly audio edition delivered as a podcast. The subscription offer on the website also informed me that my subscription granted me access to the Android and iPhone editions.

Obviously, the above is a very customer friendly offer. It grants me access to the same content in different formats. It accommodates my need for snack reading on the iPhone, in-depth reading on the iPad, audio listing on the go, and archive research from my iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and iMac from anywhere in the world.

Four reasons publishers should adopt universal digital access

No subscriber left behind: If I had to handicap the various formats on which we are currently publishing magazines and magazine content, the World Wide Web looks to be the best contender for long-term stability and success. The iPad and iPhone would be numbers two and three in my digital magazine winners circle. I’m also pretty sure print is not an edition The Economist or any other magazine will be serving up in 20 years (with the possible exception of hardbound collector’s editions). Thus, it’s important for publishers to build direct relationships that are simple and straightforward with their customers on every conceivable platform that may come and go over the next couple of decades. Universal Digital Access, as a policy, creates an environment where subscribers can safely sample different platforms without fear of being left behind. From the publishers point of view, a subscriber is a horrible thing to waste, and anyone who subscribes to our content on any platform, in any edition, should be given the big bear hug of love that includes premium access to our subscription website.

Note: If you don’t have a premium subscription website, build one, now.

Permission to communicate: When a customer buys a print edition, an iPad edition, an iPhone edition, a Kindle edition, a Nook edition, a Zinio edition, or any other non-website edition, the publisher should make it priority-one to get that customer registered for unrestricted website access. There is an old direct marketing adage that marketers should never ask for information they don’t need, and get the information they need by giving the customer what they want. A robust next-generation subscription website with HTML archives, issue archives, audio content, video content, and an engaged and interactive user community provide the digital or print customer with plenty of reasons to claim their right to unrestricted website access. The claim, of course, grants the publisher permission to communicate via the website, e-mail newsletters, and perhaps Twitter and Facebook. Permission to communicate is the lifeblood of a multi platform niche media publisher.

Building customer relationships: While I am incredibly excited about the rapid adoption of tablet computers and digital magazines, I still believe the World Wide Web is the nexus for niche media customer relationships. A well-designed niche media website will include a next-generation magazine subscription website, plus an open portal for building and maintaining affinity relationships, and an online store for marketing books, videos, software, and the myriad of special interest merchandise that a niche media publisher can recommend to its constituents.

Keep more money: The Economist can promote to subscribers to buy their subscription on their website, which allows them to keep subscriber information and all of the revenue from the sale. Buying directly on the website gives users credentials that activates on iPad or Android with no additional money being spent as well.

The short and the long of it

While charging customers separately for the same content or similar content on multiple platforms in multiple editions may provide the opportunity for some short-term profit taking, it is not in the customers’ or publishers’ long-term best interests. It looks as if many publishers may take a decade or more to discover their long-term best interest. For the moment, we can look to publishers like The Economist for inspiration that transcends short-term thinking.

Do you have a case study that exemplifies Universal Digital Access? If so, please post a comment and share it with the Mequoda Community and me.

Disagree with my position? Then post a comment, and make the case for short-term thinking.

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Originally published on Nov. 28, 2011