Tag: information product

Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week … Continue

Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week … Continue

Organize email marketing campaigns by creating an editorial and promotional calendar that keeps editors on track and in line with email revenue goals … Continue

With an online editor’s job description changing from print to digital, it’s important to understand the role for digital publishing success

In order to succeed online, publishers need to have staff that understand the digital evolution.

A significant portion of our consulting strategy relies on properly staffing an organization. If you choose the wrong staff members, or … Continue

How recycling, repurposing, and repackaging content can create alignment in your marketing efforts

The number of steps required to create an effective audience development plan often confuses people new to organic content marketing. One of my favorite tricks is to use the acronym ARM to help people remember that there are three distinct elements or parts … Continue

Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week … Continue

A look at email marketing statistics you must know

Email is the cornerstone of your audience development and product selling goals. An online editor’s primary responsibility is to reuse, recycle and repurpose premium information product content as free email newsletters and website posts. If you’re a Mequoda System editor, your main goal is to build the … Continue

No matter how well you’re doing, you can always do better. So is your retention rate too low? Yes! If it’s not 100% (it never is) then your email retention rate could improve.

To determine your email retention rate, use this formula: … Continue

Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week … Continue

Digital content marketing drives surge in digital product sales for publishers

While many organizations have discovered the power of digital content marketing to sell products and services, perhaps no organizations are being impacted like the publishers of books, magazines, newsletters and videos. … Continue

What your ecommerce website design should look like from the first page to the thank-you page

Publishers sometimes forget that they 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 … Continue

What are the attributes of a blockbuster subscription website?

Every now and then, I’m asked to facilitate the creation of a new subscription website. While a subscription website is the thing we’ll build, a premium content subscription is the thing we’ll sell, or perhaps even more importantly, what the customer will buy.

Deconstructing the phrase “premium … Continue

These things are what make a Mequoda System. Options you have when building a publishing website are somewhat resilient in the way that while we always grow to adapt the tools we’re working with and the architecture to stay modern, but the end-goals don’t waver. … Continue

Three critical questions every website publisher must answer.

Who runs audience development for your organization? When a website publisher asks me to help them increase website traffic and build a loyal online audience, the first question I ask is, “Who runs audience development for your organization?” I get a wide variety of answers. At smaller independent … Continue

It’s with great excitement that I announce that my friend and colleague, Ed Coburn, will be joining Mequoda Group as Executive Director of our reconstituted Mequoda Advisory Board. As many of you know, Ed is publishing director for Harvard Medical School, past president of the Specialized Information Publishers Association, and an active director of numerous … Continue

Developing new channels and partnerships gives strength to online publishers.

Offering content for little or no money puts direct emphasis on the need to have volume. To succeed as digital publishers, it’s necessary to develop a digital retail network and affiliate networks so you have more sources for selling and promoting your content. … Continue

3 Subscription Pricing Strategies that Work

While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape. Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities. The marginal cost of delivering a … Continue

5 ways to pay better attention to email marketing fundamentals

Many look at “making waves” as a bad thing. It’s used to describe the creation of a disturbance or controversy. Today however, the only disturbance we are discussing is the way to make favorable changes to your email marketing program.

Since the majority of email relationships begin … Continue

The recent Facebook IPO and surrounding uproar has created a robust discussion about the future of online advertising business models.

Advertising works for a couple of fundamental reasons. Advertising works when it helps someone find something that they want or need. Advertising works when it makes someone realize they have a want or need. And advertising … Continue

These methods will help you add more registered members to your email lists
… Continue

The Digital Publishing Bootcamp takes a comprehensive look at digital publishing strategy. Our instructors don’t only discuss the aspects of content creation, distribution, and measurement; they also cover the foundations for running and optimizing an online publishing business, including the website.

In order to grow, a multiplatform publisher needs website that can drives traffic, build relationships, … Continue

The art of audience development blogging requires great service journalism wrapped around a best-selling product

While audience development blogging can take many formats, I teach my clients three basic templates to begin a new blogging program. A typical blog calendar might go for as little as four weeks to as many as 26 weeks. It might … Continue

For consumer marketers, there is perhaps no better audience development program than one anchored by a well-run audience development blog

I almost never meet a publisher who tells me their audience could not be larger. And for the most part, they are absolutely correct. Most niche media publishers never reach more than three to five percent … Continue

Order this new, 90-minute webinar and discover digital publishing components that are needed for making fundamental decisions as the digital transformation continues. … Continue

Tim Baskerville, Principal, Media Service Group, West Hills, Cailf.

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
TIM: As a senior in high school, I decided I wanted a career in broadcast journalism. Every week I’d call up the woman at CBS in Hollywood who managed editorial assistants, … Continue

In 2012, the publishing industry will continue to shift manufacturing and distribution costs to the consumer, causing unit pricing to fall and publishers to introduce more premium editions

In a free market, economics is a predictable science. Over the next few years, consumers will snap up more than 300 million tablet computers. These network devices will … Continue

Unless your website portal, subscription websites, online stores, customer lists, digital books, periodicals and videos are state-of-the-art, you probably shouldn’t be doing the following three things in 2012.

Most publishers I know, including me, suffer from a mental illness called BSOS or Bright Shiny Object Syndrome. Someone who suffers from this malady exhibits behavior that resembles … Continue

Legacy publishers have the opportunity to expand their brand by developing a magazine-centric URL structure.

In doing so, your magazine content can remain the center of your online activity, while your brand grows through the additional of digital channels. … Continue

Roger B. Wilson, Jr., newMeetia, The Conference Department, Inc., Winchester, Mass.

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?

ROGER: I pounded nails when I graduated from college, continuing a construction business I had started before college and operated through college. I employed as many as 5 guys. … Continue

Why product, price, and offer have never been more important

The rush to create and sell digital information products is leaving a lot of money on the table. While I believe every publisher should be partnering with Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Zinio to sell digital magazines, newsletters, and books, the opportunity is much larger.

The … Continue

Some niche media publishers are charging up to $150 per M for Tweets

While I know many writers, editors and publishers who use their Tweets to promote their own blogs, books, magazines, events and other information products, I was surprised to hear that some publishers are now selling them like banner ads and email blasts.

The going … Continue

4 reasons why you should have a well optimized free report marketplace

If you aren’t offering free download products yet, here’s what you are missing:

An opportunity to start key relationships with the people searching for content on the topics you cover.

The chance to get brand ambassadors to spread … Continue

Communicate to the right audience segment with the best possible message

Internet marketers are becoming more experienced at segmenting their customer database.

By targeting buyers and prospects separately with unique messaging, sales and revenues will increase. It only makes sense that someone who has already purchased from you should be communicated to in a different manner than … Continue

5 magazine assets online publishers need to utilize for growing your online business

Magazine publishers have an advantage when they turn to the Internet.

Unlike most online self-starters, print magazine publishers who realize that the Internet is a key to surviving and thriving in the digital landscape can leverage magazine assets. … Continue

Mequoda System Strategy Workshop discusses why Google AdWords should be in your traffic mix

We don’t always talk about this directly, but it’s important to bring people to your website who are ready to buy.

For any publisher with a store, AdWords will almost always be a positive part of the mix for selling aligned products like … Continue

Best selling author John Locke uses the characteristics of a Mequoda System to make money online

Can you imagine selling over one million eBooks in under five months?

John Locke, the self-published author, does not have to imagine such a feat as he’s sold over one million eBooks through Kindle in five months. … Continue

Press releases can be your friend in the digital age if you create them properly

Have you posted a press release online? Did it yield the results you wanted, or were the results lacking?

For those of you unsure of the success press release can have online, let me say first hand that they can have a … Continue

All online businesses need to track metrics, and pay attention to the numbers that equal successful revenue generation

At the recent SIPA 2011 event in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to sit in on David Meerman Scott’s keynote entitled “Real-Time Marketing and PR – Why Journalists and Marketers Should Care.”

This session focused on the concept … Continue

The seven audience development steps of a successfully repurposed product

The good folks over at Mother Earth News have an admirable approach to thinking about content development.

“We think of an idea first, like energy-efficient lighting or solar power, and then we start asking ourselves how to best present that idea in a magazine article, in a … Continue

Order this new, 90-minute webinar on CD and discover an audience development checklist containing 29 ways to increase website traffic. … Continue

The keys to a high converting landing page is urgency and fresh content

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

Why it’s important to let go and allow your users define your website

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the great success of Anne Holland’s new venture, Which Test Won, it’s that we must test our websites to find out what works. Also, that whatever we think will convert better, is probably not the one that … Continue

4 ways the online editor position has changed in the digital realm

If you told journalists ten years ago that in 2011 they would be writing, editing, engaging on social media, learning SEO, tracking metrics and handling audience development requirements, they probably wouldn’t believe you.

If you told them there would be better tools for discovering the … Continue

The most effective landing pages follow these four checklist items

Have you ever seen a sales letter that included a bulleted list of items… and the last item in the list said, “and much, much more?” Well, here’s a news flash…nobody with an IQ higher than room temperature believes that there is “much, much more.”

If you … Continue

Successfully syndicating content will leave you with new, healthy revenue streams

The concept seems easy to understand: content syndication is profitable when utilized.

Have you ever thought of the reasons why syndicating content is a good practice for online publishers to master?

Most online publishers probably have not thought about it because although it can be a great … Continue

President Obama signed the “Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act”, so here are the rules that apply to us.

A Subscription Website is an online information product. It is a gated, content-based site that requires registration and payment in order to view the content (or most of the content) that has been placed behind a firewall.

Similar to … Continue

Website components for more conversions

Online publishers have a challenging job nowadays.

Many Internet users have a belief that the web is synonymous with free content. This is an initial thought at least, as many who experience free content are often persuaded to pay for additional, aligned content. … Continue

Digital content marketing systems are replacing other marketing strategies at a pace never before seen.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the online publishing environment is not only changing dramatically, it’s changing at a faster rate than we ever could have anticipated.

In a mere 15+ years, since the dawn of the commercial Internet, we’ve … Continue

Three quick tips for online editors who manage email marketing campaigns

As an online editor, your primary responsibility is to create reusable editorial content, recycling it in numerous media. Your core job is to reuse, recycle and repurpose premium information product content as free email newsletters and website posts. If you’re a Mequoda System editor, your … Continue

How to manage multiplatform brand development

Successful publishing companies have reinvented themselves over the last decade into multiplatform publishers. The most successful of these online publishing companies deliver any information the customer wants, in any form the customer wants, whenever the customer wants it. As a result, the publisher’s potential audience has exploded.

A multiplatform publishing strategy … Continue