Don Nicholas

Founder & Executive Publisher

Don Nicholas serves as Executive Publisher for Food Gardening Network and GreenPrints. He is responsible for all creative, technical, and financial aspects of these multiplatform brands. As senior member of the editorial team, he provides structural guidance, sets standards, and coordinates activities with the technology and business teams. Don is an active gardener whose favorite crops include tomatoes, basil, blueberries, and corn. He and his wife Gail live and work in southern Massachusetts surrounded by forests, family farms, cranberry bogs, and nearby beaches. Don is also the Founder of Mequoda Systems, LLC, which operates and supports numerous online communities including I Like Crochet, I Like Knitting, and We Like Sewing.

Articles by Don Nicholas

Digital Magazine Publishing

Newsweek Pricing Makes a Splash, But Not in a Good Way

Today we bring you another installment in our ongoing magazine pricing series, What Big Publishers Are Doing Wrong. OK, it’s not really a series. But lately we’ve been taking up the

The New TIME.com Design: Same As the Old TIME.com?

It’s all good until you see that money still lying on the table. That’s how we think of TIME.com here at Mequoda. Last week it unveiled its new website design,

Digital Magazine Publishing

In-House Digital Publishing Help

If you are unable to attend any of our live workshops, but realize the information is crucial to future success, we provide options for you. This comes to mind as a

How Portals Maximize User Satisfaction

One of the most successful subscription websites in the world is The Economist, where the venerable news publication posts dozens of news articles every day, unique visitors from the US

Digital Magazine Publishing

Scientific American Pricing: When Good Publishers Go Bad

What is a “lifetime” product? At Scientific American, it’s their brand-new all-access bundle of print magazine, digital and a massive 150,000-article archive, dating back to the magazine’s first issue in

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Content Marketing for Digital Publishing Consultants

“So what exactly does Mequoda Group do for a living?” people ask us. I have been involved in Internet marketing and publishing since 1995, when I was running an agency called

Introducing: The NEW Mequoda Pro

If you’ve ever contemplated attending one of our Subscription Website Publishing Intensives, but the time – and budget – just haven’t been right, I have a new way for you

Controlled-Circulation Publisher Finds Internet Success

One of Mequoda’s primary reasons for being is to help legacy publishers cross the digital divide. And when it comes to Farm Progress, we’re talking serious legacy publishing – a

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

How to Publish a Book on Amazon with a Custom Imprint

Every publisher we work with and will work with has an archive of free, downloadable products. They are sometimes tools, recipes or knitting patterns, but they also include hundreds of

Digital Magazine Publishing

Making the Digital Magazine Leap from Replica to Reflow: Bonnier Counts on New Readers, New Ads

Field & Stream gets it right the second time If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know that we’re big fans of Bonnier Corp. for its embrace of digital

Subscription Website Portals are the Key to Success in Every Niche

When the Internet burst on the scene and magazine publishers decided to get on the bandwagon, a lot of people simply shoveled their content up to the Web and called

Digital Magazine Publishing

Small Niche Digital Magazine Sells Like Gangbusters … but Apple’s Newsstand isn’t the Main Source

The “World’s Largest Circulation Biblical Archaeology Magazine,” as Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) bills itself, lives in a small niche, parented by a nonprofit organization. It’s dedicated to studying the oldest

The Membership Subscription Website Business Model

TheLadders.com, Match.com and SSWUG.org utilize membership subscription websites to properly serve their audiences The membership subscription website archetype is a very complicated model. It may be structured as a pure-play site,

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Natural Health Advisory Knows How to Recycle … Content!

More than 30 years ago, Tom Vick, Executive Editor and CEO of Natural Health Advisory, first discovered that a common ailment he was suffering from, allergies, could be helped significantly

Cooking Site Masters Subscription Website Publishing to Compete with the Big Players

“Give consumers what they want.” That’s both the motto and the business model at Prime Publishing, where a whopping 17 craft websites and 13 food sites – including one recently-launched

Why B2B Portals Matter: Legacy Publisher’s Subscription Website Supercharges Revenues

There’s no better example of how critical a subscription website can be to a legacy publisher than the story of Psychotherapy Networker. This 30-year-old magazine was launched by a group

Digital Magazine Publishing

How to Start a Magazine Company in the 21st Century

Some folks like to talk about the decline of magazines. And yet, the Google search question “how to start a magazine company” is asked 1,680 times a year (and 1.1

Top 10 Subscription Website Publishing Posts of 2013

Subscription websites are at the core of modern online publishing and have even been considered the Holy Grail of the industry. The popularity surrounding subscription websites stems from the fact that

Digital Magazine Publishing

Top 10 Digital Magazine Publishing Posts of 2013

We often hear about predictions for digital magazines; how they will grow, the revenue generation expected throughout the industry and the time frames associated with these numbers. These predictions are

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Top 10 Multiplatform Publishing Strategy Posts of 2013

This year we published more than two-hundred new articles about multiplatform publishing, digital magazines, audience development and subscription websites. Out of those 200 articles, there were ten multiplatform publishing articles that

Regional Magazine Publisher Redefines the Concept of Local Publishing

From augmented reality to trends in nontraditional gift-giving, Bayou City magazine’s subscription website publishing adventures epitomize the 21st century. Bayoucitynetwork.com launched in early November, exactly one year after it was born

Digital Magazine Publishing

Google Play Newsstand: Taking Digital Magazine Publishing a Step Beyond

When we first heard about Google’s new Play Newsstand for Android devices … we were underwhelmed. “Ah,” we thought, “Google is about to prove once again that they may understand search,

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

5 Best Practices for Selling Premium Digital Content Inside a Multiplatform Publishing Business Model

The New York Times continues to lead the transformation of the subscription publishing industry. In the next few months, they're rolling out a brigade of new multiplatform publishing products that

Digital Magazine Publishing

TIME Enters The Modern World of Digital Magazine Publishing

At last. We’ve noted here that it seemed simply astounding that a publisher with the vast resources of Time Inc. was putting out a blurry product. TIME magazine – granddaddy of

Digital Magazine Publishing

Nutrition Action Doubles Traffic With New Mequoda System

On October 14th, a print newsletter publisher blossomed into a multi-platform publisher. That was the day we helped launch one of our newest Mequoda Systems, NutritionAction.com, the home of

Natural Health Advisory’s Subscription Website Sees 160% Growth

One of the most revolutionary things about the Internet for the publishing industry is that it has allowed people who might never have had access to an audience to become

Digital Magazine Publishing

Outside Shows Vigor in Digital Magazine Publishing Efforts

As a 36-year-old, Outside magazine from Mariah Media is, naturally, quite physically fit. Established in 1977 by Rolling Stone co-founder and publisher Jann Wenner (also current owner of Men’s Journal

Who’s Winning the Subscription Website Publishing Wars?

Subscription website publishing: It’s the core of every publishing business today. The website is where you drive traffic, post content to enthrall your audience and sell lots of products, including

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Harvard Health Masters Multiplatform Publishing

When you publish under the aegis of Harvard Medical School, your primary objective is not simply to make money; it's to improve the health and quality of life for the

The Blog Subscription Website Business Model

A riddle: What’s quick and relatively easy to set up when you want to become a publisher, but can still be quite lucrative? The answer, of course, is a subscription

Digital Magazine Publishing

Digital Magazine Statistics: AAM’s Top 25 Digital Magazines by Circulation

Every six months, the Alliance for Audited Media issues its top 25 lists of reporting magazines for various data points. Most recently, this past June, it issued its list for

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

The Future of Digital Content as Predicted by The Motley Fool

Publishers have one major thing to think about in the next couple of years. What is the future of digital content? Ten years ago, the question might have simply been "What

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Stuart Hochwert Inducted Into Mequoda Digital Publishing Hall of Fame

Established in 2006 to honor individuals and organizations who advance the art and science of digital publishing, the Mequoda Digital Publishing Hall of Fame now includes nine members.

The Application Subscription Website Business Model

An application premium subscription website archetype allows access to specialized online software that allows users to input information, use calculators and/or search a proprietary database, and access results. When we first

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

10 Fastest Growing Mequoda Websites of 2013

Each year, as the Mequoda team gets together with our Gold Members at our annual Mequoda Gold Member Summit, there's a bit of magic in the air, it feels like

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Our Top 10 Content Marketing Strategy Posts

This week, as we pack our bags for Boston and get ready to mingle with publishing professionals at the Mequoda Intensive, we decided to take some time out to share

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

How BLR Recycles Content on Many B2B Platforms

Mequoda has worked with many publishers over the past 10 years. If I were to describe the "average" Mequoda client, it would be a small to medium, independent publisher with

Audience Development Strategy

Using Content to Drive your Audience Development Plan

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

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

The New Yorker Embraces Multiplatform Publishing (And Does it Better Than Most!)

The New Yorker just boasted a milestone of 10.7 million unique visitors to their website from across the globe. Meanwhile, their circulation is up 17.7% year-over-year to 1.05 million. Editor Nicholas

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Vida y Salud Launches the Latina Health Letter

Of the more than 100 websites I've worked on during the last 20 years, none has given me more personal satisfaction than Vida y Salud. Each year, the site

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Ed Coburn Joins Mequoda as CSO & Lead Consultant

After three years of single digit revenue growth, I was beginning to wonder if Mequoda Group was a mature company. While we had experienced double-digit growth from our launch in

Audience Development Strategy

How to Create a Blockbuster SEO Article

5 tips for writing and titling blockbuster SEO articles that will generate more Google visibility A blockbuster SEO article is a post that will show up in the first three

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

The State of Publishing After Penguin 2.0

It was just a couple weeks ago that Matt Cutts announced Penguin 2.0 and made content publishers fear for their long-tail lives, as he often does, usually without so much

Digital Magazine Publishing

Digital Magazines Dominate by 2020

Did you ever think that consumers would prefer digital magazines over print magazines? We do, and we think it'll happen within the next seven years. And that judgement isn't even based

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

10 Content Marketing Mistakes That Get Mequoda Editors Fired

To put this post together, we banged together the heads of everyone on the Mequoda team to consolidate some of the mishaps that have occurred with our clients. There have

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

How to Create a Profitable Website

I'm a big fan of planning. And I believe that your website is a reflection of your entire business and business model. A visitor to your website should quickly be able to

WatchTime Publisher Spearheads World Bicycle Relief

I got a note earlier this week from Dominik Grau, publisher of WatchTime USA. Dominic is a very busy guy. With his finger in publishing operations on three continents and

Digital Magazine Publishing

Saving TIME Magazine: or, the Future of All of Us

Digital magazines can thrive, but they can’t be Yahoo On March 3, 1923, TIME magazine was born. It was what most publications were in that era: an aggregator, dedicated to rewriting

Merging Usability Testing Methods from the Past and Present

Website usability tests are performed to determine if websites are functioning correctly. If they aren’t, users will have a hard time executing on their desired tasks, leading website publishers to

Digital Magazine Publishing

Digital Magazine Publishing Software for Distribution

Three issues on the functionality and design of digital magazines There’s been a tremendous amount of speculation on what the perfect digital magazine might be and where the future of digital

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