I have been told that a common question from publishers inquires about the management of a Mequoda System.

As a repeating cycle, the collection of media management behaviors that make up a Mequoda System create an audience-driven content management system. The seven habits of the Mequoda System experience continuous improvement when executed correctly. Learn more about the Mequoda System and the seven habits.

When operated with precision and passion, this system can turn any special-interest content-driven publication into a successful niche empire.

However, as this system constantly needs revaluation it is important to find a staff that has an interest in the process and can effectively serve as the editor.

Don Nicholas has stated that Mequoda Systems are talent dependent and that the online editor is a key position.

What to look for in an online editor

It is important for an online editor to be able to blur the lines between journalism and copywriting. A masterful ability to weave marketing initiatives into the heart of every editorial post created should be desired.

An online editor should possess good writing and editing skills and have a strong understanding of grammar.

I’m sure this is information already known to publishers using a Mequoda System. So I won’t make this post too much like a job description. One final thing I will mention though describes the mentality one must have in the online editor position. There has to be a conscious acknowledgement of change. The internet is constantly changing and any good Mequoda System has to change with it. A one-way mentality, or a hang-up on the old print divide between editorial and marketing, will not bring success to your Mequoda System.

How to keep an online editor

After you find a suitable candidate for the position, you’ll more than likely want to hold onto that person. Not necessarily because online editors are hard to find, but mainly because of time considerations. The time it will take to educate your new editor on the ins and outs of the Mequoda System is extensive, so if your editor fits the position and hits deadlines on time, you will want to continue your relationship.

What to pay an online editor

Your online editor will typically be paid on a base/bonus system. The price range for this position should be between 30k-60k per year, depending on your geographic location.

If your editor is receiving in the 30k range per year, his or her base will be 90% of the package. This will at least guarantee a sufficient wage with a bonus that’s about 10% of the total salary. As the editor’s salary increases, there should be a bigger portion of the compensation package that is variable.

Salary:       % of Total Package that’s Salary:       % of Total Package that’s Bonus:       Bonus:

30k                    90%                                                              10%                                  $3k

40k                    80%                                                              20%                                   $8k

50k                     70%                                                             30%                                   $15k

Beyond these numbers, it’s important to remember that one reason Mequoda Systems fail is the patience behind them. According to Don, it may take an online editor 12-18 months to get a full grasp of the Mequoda System. To learn more about why Mequoda Systems fail, be sure to attend our session at the Mequoda Summit in Napa Valley.

Hiring, motivating and managing online teams is the hard part of owning and operating a successful Mequoda Content Marketing System… Surprised?

Over the past 15 years, I have guided the launch of dozens of successful Mequoda Content Marketing Systems. I have also guided the launch for dozens of failures and for many more recent launches, it’s still too early to tell.

A few of those now successful Mequoda System launches include Business Management Daily, Ceramic Arts Daily, Dark Daily, Faculty Focus, Johns Hopkins Health Alerts, HR Daily Advisor, Knitting Daily, Morningstar, Mother Earth News, Tech Republic, TSI Network, Vida Y Salud, and of course, our own Mequoda Daily. They are among the most treasured accomplishments of my 30-year career in media and marketing.

The failures no longer exist.

So with each new Mequoda System I agree to guide, I ask myself about the odds for success. I am old enough to know now that their success does not revolve around me. After all, I have worked on many successes and many failures. Other circumstances and behaviors will overwhelm my contribution to the enterprise. So why do some online teams succeed and why do others fail? I think about this a lot. If I can understand what causes Mequoda Systems to fail, then perhaps I can help a few more succeed.

The Six Reasons Mequoda System Fail (and Succeed)

1. Failure to Connect
2. Failure to Grow
3. Failure to Monetize

While these are the observable reasons for failure, I know in my heart that the real reasons lie deeper.

1. Lack of Talent
2. Lack of Discipline
3. Lack of Capital

No soldier joins the army expecting to die. No couple marries expecting divorce. And no publisher launches a Mequoda System expecting to fail. Yet soldiers die, couples divorce and Mequoda Systems fail.

There is only one sure way to prevent failure: Don’t try.

If you never launch a Mequoda System, it will not fail.

Short of not trying at all, understanding the reasons for failure and avoiding them as best you can will increases your odds of success.

My advice: Set clear business goals, hire good people, empower them to succeed, provide them with adequate resources, and be, at least, a little lucky.

It can take three to five years to discover whether each new Mequoda System is a success. It often takes far less time to fail. Expecting quick success is actually a leading cause of failure as it leads to having inadequate resources.

Expect to spend the first year designing, building, planning, hiring and training your Mequoda System online team. Expect to spend year two experimenting, testing, growing and getting to know your audience. Then in year three, expect the revenue and profit to begin to flow freely. As one of my venture capital friends says, success always starts with a trickle.

In a panel with Clay Hall, Interweave, Bob Brady, Business & Legal Resources, and Charlie Spahr, Ceramic Publications Company, publishers talked about how they’re organizing and integrating their print and online teams.

Interweave

Hall began the discussion, showing the audience how they organize their business. “If our company was much larger, or more collaborative, we wouldn’t be able to organize around our markets.” He explained that every market that they serve has their own publisher that is responsible for all products and costs within that market.

An audience member asked Hall if there would be any layoffs or re-hiring due to this structure (that is to be implemented in 2010), and he assured that the new structure was built around their existing staff, with little resistance from his employees.

Ceramic Publications Company

Spahr explained that he works with a much smaller team and has less trouble with organization. He showed that before they launched their online portal CeramicArtsDaily.com, they had a team of editors for Ceramics Monthly and a smaller staff that managed Pottery Making Illustrated and managed booked. “We’ve had websites for 10 years, but the ones we had before CAD were the worst of the worst,” Spahr joked.

Spahr then showed their new organization that only required adding one new person to their team. “It’s a luxury to have a small group”, he noted. Technically, they took an existing editor and turned her into the Managing Editor for the website. He noted that she was initially very reluctant to take the position, because her background is in editorial and writing, but said that now that they’ve built an online community, she’s much more engaged. “Now when we post a blog, its not unusual to get 10 responses within the first hour”, adding that she’s now more enthusiastic about traffic and other metrics as well because of this.

Spahr told the audience that their “capacity for online products are gained primarily though the streamlining of print and online procedures.” He also joked, “I think it’s also fair to say that everyone works a little longer than they used to”.

Business & Legal Resources

“We have to regulate our information on a regular basis, so that dictates how we run and what we do”, started Brady of Business & Legal Resources.

Originally, editors weren’t responsible for both print and online at BLR, Brady explained that once the website was launched, they were involved in both and are now increasingly involved in SEO.

“We look for people who are interested in our products and have a passion for learning and can work well on a team. They need to be creative, but not creative in an individual sense,” explained Brady. “We try not to penalize failure, in the same way that we congratulate the entire team for any successes”.

Training print publishing teams to be effective online teams is still a problem in our industry.

Your sales department may not know how to sell a hybrid print+online sales package, your editors are reluctant to use Twitter, your website designers don’t want to test your landing pages… it’s not productive.

What would be productive is finding the time and resources to put together a one or two-day training, in your office, without the need to hire a trainer or consultant.

Just think… you could sit everyone in the conference room, hook up a projector, and start training your staff on how to start adapting nasty print habits into more productive online habits.

How about a training series, online, put together by the leading research group in the online publishing space?

That’s us. It’s what we do. We spend all of our time talking to publishers, testing websites and developing case studies in order to put together best practices that online publishers and their organizations should be following.

We don’t make up the rules, we just pass along the goods.

Last week we launched our new webinar program on-demand. Previously, if you wanted to attend one of our live webinars, you would have to register for the event, or order it on CD-rom.

You can still order any of our webinars on CD-ROM for the low price of $197, or $247 for the CD and transcript.

OR you can subscribe to Mequoda Pro—our online training library for publishers and marketers—at the low price of just $297 per year, and watch ALL of our webinars and seminars on-demand, right in the comfort of your office.

Depending on what format you prefer, you can still order a single webinar on CD to have at your office, available to put in your computer and watch at any time. We know that many people still prefer ownership.

However, with Mequoda Pro, you will have access to all our webinars, training sessions, plus all future webinars, right away. In fact if you decide to have an impromptu training session this afternoon, you can!

Here is a sample of the last three webinars we’ve posted to Mequoda Pro:

Landing Pages that Work

Bob Brady and Josh Baker of Business & Legal Reports co-host this webinar with Greg Kreihbel of Kiplinger to show publishers how they’ve used Google Website Optimizer on their landing pages. They’ll show you their own A/B and multivariate tests and the results that have turned them into more profitable publishers.

Twitter for Publishers

Amanda MacArthur of Mequoda co-hosts this webinar with Kathy McCabe of Dream of Italy, Shirley Brady of BusinessWeek and Brian Dresher of USAToday.com. In this webinar, they display their own mistakes and successes using Twitter as a content marketing platform. They offer dozens of new ideas for publishers who are looking to build brand awareness and website traffic with Twitter.

Internet Advertising Basics

Maximizing revenues with Internet ad sales doesn’t happen by chance, and Dan Ambrose, who’s worked on the founding of iVillage.com, About.com, MediaBistro.com and consulted on many more, should know. In this webinar, Ambrose shows publishers how to develop their advertising sales marketing, strategy, tactics and training to achieve the excellence that will be an ongoing competitive advantage.

Are you ready to start training your online publishing team?

If you decide to subscribe to Mequoda Pro at the low rate of just $297 per year, you’ll get these three webinars on-demand along with ten bonus business-building seminars.

These bonus seminars cover topics such as SEO, key metrics, online content management, website conversion architecture, link-building and more.

Join Mequoda Pro today.

How an online publishing management team learned that “system efficiency” is not always what it seems…

Sometimes, common sense simply doesn’t work.

In direct response marketing, what might seem totally rational, can be counter-intuitive. That’s because human behavior can be unpredictable.

And some efficiency objectives that seem perfectly rational must be subordinated to higher priorities.

Here’s what I mean.

I am currently monitoring key metric dashboards for more than 20 discreet Mequoda Publishing & Marketing Systems who are my clients. Each of these Systems is run by a capable publisher. Each online publishing management team is trying to be efficient.

But the goal of system efficiency is in the eye of the beholder.  When the eye in question belongs to a well-meaning IT professional, the key metric they are managing is often not on the Mequoda System Key Metric Dashboard and its optimization often result in suboptimal decisions that compromise conversion rates and revenue per thousand that are the top Mequoda System Key Metrics.

If you are a Mequoda System Publisher, every person on your publishing team, including the IT professionals, must have an understanding of online direct response marketing.

The efficiency of the Mequoda System is judged on its ability to maximize customer lifetime value. Other efficiency goals are subordinate.

Customer lifetime value is the ultimate metric. Every Mequoda Publishing & Marketing System Best Practice is based on supporting, increasing and maximizing customer lifetime value.

Recently I observed a situation that illustrates why every member of your publishing team should be cross-trained on all of our best practices. Here’s what happened and the lessons we all learned.

A publisher’s new Mequoda Publishing & Marketing System is working well. It’s fast. It’s producing great results. Everyone is delighted.

Suddenly, the publisher hears through the grapevine that his email service provider is no longer going to require double opt-in.

Opportunity for greater efficiency? Or marketing disaster?

Our experience shows that of 100 people who sign up for your free email newsletter, about 75 percent will double opt-in. That’s very gratifying, of course, but it’s hard to walk away from those 25 percent that don’t double opt-in.

However, if you analyze them, you’ll discover that many are undeliverable names. In other instances, the user may have given you a secondary email address (e.g. Gmail or AOL or Yahoo) that in fact, may be valid.

The double opt-in process can very quickly help you identify which of these names is going to be genuinely valuable. But a portion of the 25 percent that don’t double opt-in will be undeliverable and useless.

Double opt-in is definitely a best practice.

Unfortunately, an IT professional, upon hearing that the publisher might embrace the single opt-in alternative, made a unilateral decision to turn off the double opt-in mechanism. He also turned off the confirmation email, and deleted the “thank you” opt-in instructions page.

Our research indicates that the email subscribers who double opt-in have a 17 percent greater lifetime value simply because they double opt-in.

It’s a fact. The act of getting them to open their email client to look for the confirming email and respond — before they can download your free report — causes those who double opt-in to be worth 17 percent more in customer lifetime value.

Additionally, by using the double opt-in process, you’ve managed to get many of them to white list you with their email provider — a very good outcome.

Now, the IT professional thought he was doing the right thing — making the IT process more efficient — by turning off the email confirmation process. After all, by doing so he could eliminate displaying one webpage and could send one less email.

But that also meant not confirming the new subscriber’s email address by which the publisher would contact the new subscriber 260 times over the next 12 months.

And so, while the IT professional’s objective was efficiency, he made a suboptimal decision that overlooked the publisher’s overarching goal, which is to maximize customer lifetime value.

In the rush for expediency and efficiency of server and email resources, the IT professional devalued the long-term relationship with the customer by 17 percent.

Ouch!

The Mequoda Publishing & Marketing System is not solely an IT system. It’s an interactive communication system that governs a relationship with an email subscriber and website user over a period of years.

In other words, the goal is to build your email subscriber list, so that you can maintain a constant relationship with your readers through email on a daily basis.

But the Mequoda System has many component parts, all of which have an integral relationship with each other. You can’t tweak one part without affecting the other components.

So when we write Best Practices, we do it with an overview of how they will affect the entire System.

• Is the Mequoda System a marketing system? Yes.
• Is the Mequoda System a publishing system? Yes.
• Is the Mequoda System an IT system? Yes.
• Is the Mequoda System an email system? Yes.

The Mequoda Publishing & Marketing System is all of those, and more.

It’s a complex, all-encompassing set of business processes for managing and maintaining a digital relationship with your customers.

And primarily, more than any other one thing, it’s a customer lifetime value system.

Learn how to build your own Mequoda Publishing & Marketing System at the Mequoda Summit in Boston on October 7-9th.

The content of most how-to industry workshops is perishable. That’s because Internet marketing and publishing best practices continue to evolve and change.

Stay on the leading edge. You can depend on the Mequoda Summit Boston to provide current best practices…little-known secrets…practical strategies…leading edge tactics…and proof.

Register for the Mequoda Summit today.

If you are running an online media operation, don’t underestimate the value of diversity of age, opinions, experience and skills.

Can you remember life before the Internet? …when a personal computer was another name for a hand-held calculator? …when publishing was a process that required a printing press?

If you’re old enough to remember hot type, the pica stick, and manual typewriters, and you’re active in 21st Century online publishing, you’re a “retread.” Congratulations on being smart, adaptable and unafraid to embrace technological change.

I’m 53 years old. I’m a retread, too. And proud of it.

I made the conscious decision back in 1995 to learn everything I could about online publishing. By 1999 I had sold off all my print publishing businesses and was focusing 100 percent of my attention on online publishing and marketing.

I was 43 when I made the transition — successfully, some would say. But I’ll never match the enthusiasm and understanding that my 20-something colleagues have.

At one of my recent workshops, four of the six professionals were former print publishers who have become responsible for online publishing.

Actually, two are essentially print publishers who are trying to do online publishing in their spare time — and struggling.

Two have made the transition from print, and are truly now full-time, online editors.

The other two are online marketers, and that’s all they had ever done professionally.

“What did you do before your were an online marketer?” I asked.

“Drink beer,” was the straight-faced reply. “I was in college.”

Our industry now has a whole workforce of publishing professionals, with three to five years of experience, who have never done anything else.

We all know 24-year-olds who have 10 years of documented experience in website design. They’ve grown up with the technology. And they recognize that it’s still evolving.

The value of diversity in age and experience

The successful online publishing teams that I see regularly have a diversity of contributors. Usually there is someone leading the group, who is probably in his or her 40’s or 50’s, who is a print publishing retread.

The leaders understand copywriting, headlining, demographics, human behavior, publishing economics, meeting the reader’s needs — all the factors that are not platform-specific.

And they really want the 20-somethings on their team who think that online publishing is absolutely all that matters.

These young people don’t read print newspapers. They think of newspapers as being websites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Today’s youngest publishing professionals have no nostalgia for the recent demise of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. They think it was overdue.

Digital publishing is an immature industry

The evolution of the World Wide Web in 2009 is equivalent to where television was in the 1950’s. Or where radio was in the 1930’s. Or where newspaper publishing was in the 1700’s.

All the rules are not yet clearly established. The technology is not yet firmly footed.

Digital publishing is an immature industry. It won’t be a mature industry for several more decades.

The transition is not complete. The technology is still evolving.

Today, both old and new experiences can inform the current digital publishing process.

If you are running an online media operation, don’t underestimate the value of diversity in age, opinions, experience and skills.

There should be plenty of room on your online publishing team for 40-something and 50-something “retreads” who have been retrained. They bring a wealth of valuable experience.

And make certain you recruit some young people who are impetuous and impatient, and are not nostalgic about dying print publications. They are grounded in the present and typify the future.

Want to learn more about how to pick your digital media team…how to grow your email revenue…how to repurpose your paid content into other products such as blogs, membership websites and podcasts for new revenue opportunities…how to achieve higher search engine rankings…how to succeed as an online publisher?

You can learn all of this and more when you become a member of Mequoda Pro. Register today and get our introductory offer of just $197 for a whole year of access.

Organizing an online business team isn’t an exact science. In fact, when it comes down to laying out a generic standard for online team management, we’ve found it simply isn’t possible. There are many successful publishers running their businesses in different ways. What we have discovered after interviewing and analyzing the industry are four specific types of organizational strategies used by publishers today.

When publishing companies have fewer products to manage that are typically in one platform (like print), it makes sense to organize by function –- editorial, circulation, advertising, production and finance. After all, that’s how we’ve been doing it for years, right? But in a multiplatform world, that paradigm falls apart.

For many companies, it now makes more sense to organize by platform, where you can put one manager in charge of each individual product platform. And while there is no one, perfect organizational structure or set of job descriptions for a multiplatform publishing business, we do see a pattern for online team management that is best described as “organizing activities around the content.”

Functional Organization

The basic functional organization is overseen by a CEO who has five (or more) basic functional teams underneath him. This is the classic print model that we see very often converted for online. This organizational strategy is common in older businesses who are looking to expand more but cut costs.

The five functions of this online business team may include: editorial, circulation, advertising, production and finance.

Platform Organization

As publishing companies evolve, many publishing companies we’ve seen grow into a team that is structured by the platform they’re publishing on. In this case, the teams still report to a CEO, but each platform requires “specialist” with a special skill set for media production and distribution of that platform. At the same time, expertise is shared across all platforms, whether it be cooking, investing, knitting or any other myriad of subjects that the company covers.

The five functions of this online business team may include: magazine publishing, book publishing, online publishing, tv & video and live events.

Brand Organization

This may also be called “Audience Organization. In this organizational structure, the teams are set up at the brand or audience level so that a market would be corresponding to a given brand. For example, a company may have many magazines, but each may have its own brand. Or, they may have magazines on different topics, where the topic is the brand. It all depends on how you’ve branded your publications. 

The five units in this online business team would look something like: Brand A, Brand B, Brand C, Brand D, Brand E.

Hybrid Organization

We see the hybrid organization most often in this rapidly changing online atmosphere. From what we’ve discovered, companies that are reaching across multiple markets on multiple platforms use this model most often.

In this organization, things like “finance” may be run as a functional unit, while “events” and “book publishing” could be run as platform units. Then, they might maintain three brand groups where there is a brand champion in charge of each that is responsible for developing and marketing that brand.

Choosing between these four organizational structures often depends on the age of the business.

Older companies who are looking to expand and cut costs will often organize by function. Operations that are mid-life will often choose to operate by platform as the most efficient way to get business done. Young organizations that are innovating and growing rapidly often choose an audience-centric brand strategy. Companies that are developing on many levels often resort to a hybrid model that works for them.

People.com Success Story:

During a 12-month period that corresponds to the organizational restructuring from function-based to platform-based, People.com grew dramatically—from about 200,000 unique visitors per month to more than 13 million today.

The website is no longer considered a companion to the corresponding magazine. The magazine editor and online editor are now peers, and the website is considered a destination product in its own right.


Do you staff your online business team differently? Share your thoughts with us and our readers in the comments!

Mequoda Summit “Integrating Print & Online Media Teams” Session Review:

While most publishers continue to load more responsibilities onto their existing print staff and require them to learn new skills, those in the know are hiring dedicated writers, marketers and technical staff to run their online business units. These same publishers know how to integrate their print and online teams to leverage editorial assets, cross promote print,

Web and email circulation and create advertising synergies for sponsors who are demanding multiplatform marketing solutions.

In the days of old where publishing companies had fewer products to manage that were typically in one platform (like print), it made sense to organize by function. In other words, you had someone responsible for:

• editorial
• circulation
• advertising

But in a multiplatform world, that paradigm falls apart. A manager can’t be an expert at:

• magazines
• books
• online
• events
• television

It now makes more sense to organize by platform, where you can put one manager in charge of each individual product platform.

People.com Success Story:

During a 12-month period that corresponds to the organizational restructuring from function-based to platform-based, People.com grew dramatically—from about 200,000 unique visitors per month to more than 10 million today.

The website is no longer considered a companion to the corresponding magazine. The magazine editor and online editor are now peers, and the website is considered a destination product in its own right.
While there is no one, perfect organizational structure or set of job descriptions for a multiplatform publishing business, we do see a pattern that is best described as “ organizing activities around the content.”

In this session you will learn:

• How to hire and staff an online publishing team
• How to build a strong online publishing team the produces dedicated results
• How to write job descriptions for new media and online editorial positions
• Why it’s critical to isolate your online teams before you integrate
• How to eventually leverage all you editorial assets, cross promote print, Web and email circulation, and create synergies for sponsors
• The staffing models of several successful online publishing businesses

Internet Media Review announced today that they have launched a revised version of their site and hired seven new contributing editors.

After getting feedback from their members, IMR redesigned their category pages and added a new Browse by Author feature. The new categories are: Website Strategy and Content, Design and Usability, Driving Website Traffic, Selling Information Products and Publishing Technology. Each category consists of Skill Builders, Website Reviews and Resource Reviews designed to help website publishers succeed.

IMR has hired Bob Bly, bestselling author of The Copywriter’s Handbook, Roger C. Parker, bestselling author of Looking Good in Print, John Clausen, editor of Writing for Money, Peter A. Schaible, Director of Subscription Website Publishers Association (SWEPA), Jane Zarem, former editor of Ancillary Profits, Fred Gleeck, bestselling author of Publishing for Maximum Profit and Micah Baldwin, CEO of CurrentWisdom.

Editor Don Nicholas, Research Director Roxanne O’Connell, Publishing Technology expert Stephen Laliberte and Managing Editor Kim Mateus will continue writing reports and reviews for IMR, bringing the editorial staff to 11 writers.

Full access to IMR is available to paid members and IMR 14-Day Free Trial members. An annual membership to IMR is $297. The site is updated weekly with 3-5 new reports, giving members access to over 150 reports and reviews annually. IMR’s Weekly Research Update is available free of charge to all registered users and features research summaries.