Test your landing pages, because 9 times out of 10, snap judgments will prove you wrong
In case you haven’t heard, Susan Boyle is the unlikely star of Britain’s Got Talent, a televised talent show over in the UK (and a sister to the US-based “America’s Got Talent”.) … Continue Reading »
Turn One Book into an Online Publishing Empire
On the web, a book, or anything else you publish, can turn into a freemium, a webinar, a podcast, you name it.
View the book as your base from which to build. Spinoff activites are likely to have an even greater income potential than the base itself. … Continue Reading »
Take a lesson from the mistakes of others when starting and running a successful newsletter or magazine
If you are contemplating starting or converting an online publishing company, take a look at Starting & Running a Successful Newsletter or Magazine by Cheryl Woodard. This book will be very helpful. … Continue Reading »
Most users are now broadband users, and they expect your site to load in 4 seconds or less! … Continue Reading »
Our list of the best PR websites to submit your press releases for maximum SEO and traffic opportunities … Continue Reading »
Can you really master Web 2.0 if you haven’t gotten the fundamentals of Web 1.0? Here are 6 steps picked up at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in NYC that will help bring your brand up to par before Web 3.0 approaches. … Continue Reading »
How are you recommending related products on your shopping cart that both offer a helpful service and increase revenue at the same time? … Continue Reading »
10 Criteria for Increasing Open Rates and Conversions on Your Email Newsletters or Promotions … Continue Reading »
Know your blogging competitors and figure out what they’ve got that you don’t
Brodeur recently conducted a “Survey of Beat Reporters on Social Media , and the Blogosphere”. The survey focused on which blog and news sites that reporters and journalists use regularly.
This is important to us as publishers because it would be smart to know who our competition is in the field so that we can follow their lead, editorially. The consensus of the survey showed that journalists and reporters read web-grown blogs more often than those of traditional newspapers and magazines. However, in some cases, they considered blogs from sites based on traditional print media more credible. … Continue Reading »
An effective Internet marketing strategy means anticipating customer hesitations and removing obstacles … Continue Reading »
Identifying and prioritizing your usability lab results is the most interesting and valuable part
Once you conduct your usability lab, it will become very obvious to you very quickly, which areas need improvement. More often than not, there will be more than one user who will experience frustration with certain tasks on your website. … Continue Reading »
Do you want your book to open doors, or do you just want to hold your own words, bound and printed? How you publish affects your income, reputation, and your leverage. After our article on self-publishing that we did a few weeks ago, we got a nice letter from subscriber Shel Horowitz, a consultant that explained that he works with authors to get their books published, and some of the “self-publishing” and “print-on-demand” publishers we listed toward the end of the article may need a little more explanation to go along with them. … Continue Reading »
How to keep smart shoppers happy and provide them with a thorough, yet user-friendly online shopping experience. Normally, we don’t recommend shopping carts to our users, because we see the highest conversion rate on sales letter landing pages. However, we realize that many publishers have too large of an inventory and feel that shopping carts work for them. That’s why today we’re talking about shopping cart optimization. … Continue Reading »
Part two of this week’s series How to Start a Link-Building Campaign. How to analyze your backlinks and credibility (and that of your competitors!)
On Monday, we talked about discovering your potential external sources for a link-building campaign, and today we will talk a little more about analyzing those sources.
Many of your sources have already begun their own link-building campaigns. But the ones that you should pay the most attention to are your competitors. Finding out where they are receiving their backlinks may be a big help in uncovering sources you may have missed in your initial research. … Continue Reading »
It’s happening to all publishers as open rates continue to drop across all industries. Luckily, the email service providers have stepped in to shed some light on the situation.
Two of the most important delivery rate factors are the “from” address and the subject line. However, if you want your emails to get opened, your subject line has two tests to pass: the spam checker, and the email checker. You want your email to get delivered, but you also want it to get opened. … Continue Reading »
When attracting advertisers, it’s not about the hair and makeup, it’s about the adroll and tagroll
What kind of world are we living in, where even ad-space has a place in social networking? An online publishers world, that’s what!
If your website is ad-driven, you might be interested in this new online advertising haven called Adroll.com. This free ad-network was created by Jared Kopf, a young entrepreneur listed amongst BusinessWeek’s list of tech’s best. Adroll.com is still in private beta, but if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on an invitation (we have a few, if you’d like an invite let us know), or wait the 24 hours it takes to process a beta application, this new venture has a lot to offer the online publishing industry, and we should be watching closely. … Continue Reading »
Requesting an email address in exchange for permission to send additional offers
Dedicated landing pages are hardcore, direct response pages. Their only goal is to get the user to complete a transaction.
Dedicated landing pages are designed to receive targeted website traffic and convert users into buyers or subscribers. They can coincidentally attract organic traffic, but are designed primarily to convert traffic, regardless of the source.
Dedicated landing pages are designed to receive targeted website traffic and convert users into buyers or subscribers. They can coincidentally attract organic traffic, but are designed primarily to convert traffic, regardless of the source. … Continue Reading »
Some publishing skills have not changed and are not expected to
Publishing’s transition from print to digital has caused a lot of changes over the years. Your office is loaded with computers. You have website, an email newsletter and digital reports. You might not even consider your business a magazine or a newsletter anymore, but a provider of useful information. Has anything stayed the same?
Copywriting, for one, has been a vital skill for decades, and it’s unlikely to disappear or change anytime soon. … Continue Reading »
Celebrity news sites are making gains on the Mequoda Blog 100 with content added several times an hour
The February results are in for the Mequoda Blog 100, our list of the top 100 media blogs in the US. Tech-blog Engadget dropped from the top five, leaving it mostly to entertainment news blogs, and there are ten new additions to the list. … Continue Reading »
TMZ’s constantly updated celebrity news draws more unique users by a wide margin.
Entertainment news hub TMZ dominated the Mequoda Blog 100 this month, generating more unique visitors during January than the two closest contenders combined. … Continue Reading »
Looking back on an expert’s claim that website usability testing proved promotional language imposes a cognitive burden
It’s nearly a decade now since website usability expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen proclaimed that “that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”
“Users detested ‘marketese’—the promotional writing style with boastful subjective claims,” said Dr. Nielsen in 1997. … Continue Reading »
Great testimonials can be very persuasive. The value of member corroboration and its ability to get new subscribers to your membership website cannot be under-estimated.
Know this about the buying process: Whether they know it or not, everybody has a personal strategy for rationalizing his purchase decisions.
All purchase decisions are emotional, but in order to be congruent, buyers need to create reasons for their choices. … Continue Reading »
TimesSelect generated more than a half million new subscribers in its first 12 months
After previously having offered access to its archived content for free, and charging only for access to its celebrated, syndicated columnists, a new revenue model has emerged at the New York Times.
The Times now offers three levels of information. At the lowest level, most of the current day’s news is available without charge to all The New York Times website visitors. … Continue Reading »
As an online publisher, part of your job is to make information easier to manage for your subscribers
The majority of membership websites and email newsletters are instructional. Members join or subscribe in order to access content that is not available to non-subscribers. Much of this proprietary information is of the how-to variety.
If you’re a publisher of an email newsletter, and you’re stuck for a story idea, think checklist. You’ll almost never run out of ideas and you’ll provide your subscribers with valuable tools that increase your credibility as an expert. … Continue Reading »
Brand Websites are used by all manner of non-online product and service organizations to build brand preference for the organization’s offline products and services. Brand Websites exist to alert consumers to online and brick and mortar retailers where purchases can occur. … Continue Reading »
Mequoda views Internet Hubs as one of the most important website archetypes available to a publisher. Without a well-designed, well-marketed Internet Hub, an online publisher is forced to rely on other websites and other media to drive targeted website traffic. … Continue Reading »
Relieving the anxiety of online financial transactions
My wife once worked for a bank where the corporate culture included this little bromide: Every financial transaction is an emotional transaction.
What does that mean, I wondered out loud? … Continue Reading »
I’ve discovered an amazingly effective strategy for getting what I want. It works most of the time, and when it doesn’t, you can try it again, usually without penalty. And it’s not just an online publishing secret.
So fasten your seat belt and get ready to take copious notes, because here is an online publishing secret that will reveal everything you need to know to get what you want from someone else: “Ask!” … Continue Reading »
In Psychology 101 we all learned the basic principles of attraction and avoidance. Pleasure and pain. Reward and punishment.Boiled down, I think of it this way: You either want something you don’t have, or you have something you don’t want.If you suffer with back pain, you have something you really don’t want, and you’re not alone. … Continue Reading »
The four-legged stool technique was developed originally by Bill Bonner of Agora Publishing, strictly for selling financial newsletters.
Expert copywriter Robert W. Bly noticed, however, that these four elements also work for 90 to 95 percent of all information products.
The concept is pretty simple: a four-legged stool is very stable. If you pull one leg off, it’s only relatively stable—you can still sit on it, but not as comfortably as you would a four-legged stool. … Continue Reading »
Publishers sometimes forget that they, themselves, are retailers; publishers do sell subscriptions, memberships, books, ancillary products, events, etc. It’s smart for a publisher to think like a retailer: Get people into your store, where they can become your customers. And when they become your customers, get them to come back for more. The “store,” of course, is your website, your hub.
… Continue Reading »
The Mequoda Library recently did an Internet Hub Case Study on America’s Test Kitchen. A brief recap: the company takes the 2.9 million viewers from their TV show, America’s Test Kitchen, and pushes them to www.AmericasTestKitchen.com, a Mequoda Internet Hub, where viewers can get recipes featured on the show for free. … Continue Reading »
When we review landing pages, it’s common for us to come across letter copy that’s competent but average, and there are many things in the copy that our copywriters would change.
For example, on www.26-Feng-Shui-Secrets.com, a landing page dedicated to selling a Feng Shui book, there is no bio of the book’s author. So we don’t know his credentials or qualifications as a Feng Shui expert, except for some mention of learning Feng Shui from his grandmother. If that’s his only credential, more should be made of that story; maybe grandma should be positioned as the Feng Shui master. … Continue Reading »
We were first introduced to InvestmentU.com when we interviewed John Phillips, who heads up search marketing for the website. He and his team have done a very impressive job of bringing visitors to the InvestmentU.com site with a combination of organic and paid search. In this review, we look at the landing page that InvestmentU.com uses to convert these visitors to customers for its lead product, The Investment U Course. … Continue Reading »
The “Content Freshness” guideline asks the question, “Is there a reason for the user to return frequently to the site?” The Internet is a 24/7 medium, and visitor attention and enthusiasm can be very short-lived. Research indicates that websites with a high update frequency generate more repeat visits per month per unique user. Therefore, websites should be considered “works in progress” that are constantly updated—if only to avoid boring repeat visitors. … Continue Reading »
Here’s a shortcut to membership website success: find online businesses that are working for other people and model them. Study what they are doing correctly and do likewise. To help build and maintain your own successful site, make a habit of analyzing other sites for form, function and design. … Continue Reading »
Few things destroy the credibility of a landing page sales letter 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?
It’s also important to remember that some of your potential customers may only visit your landing page once. If they don’t buy immediately, they may never return. … Continue Reading »
The Motley Fool Website Provides Relevant and Engaging Content in a Readily Accessible Fashion, Combining Effective Use of Content Webification, Relationship and Community Building and Proper Navigation
Tom and David Gardner have made a career of being foolish, and foolishly brilliant. They have created a brand that is well recognized within the investment community and without. They created this brand by respecting their audience and by offering real value to those tens of thousands of viewers, listeners and readers. … Continue Reading »
Mr. Levinson has been busy practicing, developing and evangelizing guerrilla marketing since 1984, with great success. Many startups and small companies use Mr. Levinson’s techniques to produce tangible results with minimal cost. However, established companies such as Smirnoff and Vodafone have also integrated guerrilla techniques into their marketing mix. The concept of guerrilla marketing has been especially well received by Internet companies, which typically operate on limited marketing budgets, and has given rise to other marketing techniques such as viral marketing and search marketing. Guerrilla marketing is characterized by extreme statements that are intended to grab the audience. … Continue Reading »
With 1.6 million paid subscribers, ConsumerReports.org has more paid subscribers than any other publication-based website.
That may not be a huge surprise considering their print magazine has a paid circulation of 4.1 million and growing. Yet we can’t help but wonder, while so many other magazine publishers are still so confused about their Internet publishing model, how has Consumer Reports been so clear from the very beginning? … Continue Reading »
At Harvard Health Publications, the bottom line isn’t profits. It’s serving its public health mission and, most important, protecting the university’s credibility and reputation.
When you publish under the aegis of Harvard University, your primary objective is not simply to make money; it’s to improve the health and quality of life for the general public. And protecting Harvard’s brand is of utmost importance.
An informative interview with Ed Coburn, Publishing Director, Harvard Health Publications, provided valuable insights into a profitable business model whose highest priority isn’t profits. … Continue Reading »
What criteria would four of America’s most successful copywriters use to create better sales letter landing pages? And how would 26 landing pages from a variety of large and small publishers and authors hold up under their intense scrutiny?
Over the past 12 months, John Clausen, Peter A. Schaible, Robert W. Bly and Peter J. Fogel have used a list of 12 guidelines designed to increase landing page conversion rates to critique 26 successful (and a few not-so-successful) sales letter landing pages for a variety of books, magazines and newsletters for Mequoda’s Creating Landing Pages That Sell. … Continue Reading »
How to Make Money Selling Other People’s Books
Many of the best affiliates of Amazon.com are losing opportunities to make money. Poor navigation on their web sites and lack of attention to crucial details is preventing them from reaching their potential as moneymakers. Of the sites we reviewed, there are those that are doing outstandingly well, some who are gliding along, and others who are falling way behind. With a few critical changes, these sites could begin earning top dollar as affiliates. … Continue Reading »
The Economist is the premier weekly news and international affairs publication with an average circulation of over one million copies a week. The Economist began publishing in 1843. According to its contents page, its goal is to “take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” Subjects covered include international news, economics, politics, business, finance, science and technology and the arts. … Continue Reading »
This landing page works mainly because it engages the reader, teasing you with their wonderful fascinations, while not overwhelming you with clutter. The copy does a strong job of building your trust and presenting its credibility on its main portal homepage (and subsequent landing pages). If this was a free standing micro site, you’d need more information. Bottom Line presents an overall strong communal feel to its readers on their overall site (not necessarily on this Store page). … Continue Reading »
Doctor Douglass’ Real Health Breakthroughs Landing Page by Agora Demonstrates How Traditional Long Copy, Captivating Headlines and Effective Story Telling Convince Readers to Buy … Continue Reading »
Roll Call Website Remains True to its Founding Principles By Using Simple, Effective Website Design, Yet Misses the Boat on a Few Small Details. … Continue Reading »
Mequoda guidelines outline the 12 characteristics a landing page needs to successfully close sales online. And to incorporate all 12 characteristics typically, at least for a consumer product, requires medium-to-long copy on that landing page. But should you send your traffic directly to that long-copy landing page? Or will visitors be put off by its length? … Continue Reading »
Devoting Too Much Homepage Real Estate to Website Navigation and Graphic Images Demonstrates a Compromise in the Selling Power of Text—a Major Mistake for a Lead Generation Site like CareerCoach.com … Continue Reading »
Integrity and professionalism abound on the Briefings Publishing Group’s website, but their “all business” approach may be responsible for letting a lot of potential business remain unsold. It seems Briefings.com’s future may be based on satisfied readers, not website “sell.” … Continue Reading »
