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Audience Development Strategy

The 12x12x12 Twitter Strategy: 12 Tweet Ideas That Future-Proof Your Content for 12 Months

When an article publishes on your website, how do you go about promoting it in social media?

When I pose this question to a room full of magazine editors from different publications, their answer is typically that they wait for the post to be published and then they promote it. If they’re super savvy, they might

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Audience Development Strategy

Free Webinar Reveals How to Successfully Launch Your Digital Magazine Idea

I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on March 16 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, Giving Life to Your New Digital Magazine Idea. This is your only chance to get these best practices for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in Mequoda Pro

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Audience Development Strategy

15 Audience Development Strategies Most Publishers Avoid and Shouldn’t

It’s hard to determine how to spend both your time, and your resources within a business. The way we look at every decision you make is this:

Is whatever you’re thinking about doing, going to help you build an audience, improve capture rates, increase engagement rates, or monetize more visitors?

Your audience development efforts fall into three

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Audience Development Strategy

Audience Development: Definition & Purpose

The true audience development definition requires maximum outreach while retaining results for future sales

Just like “inbound marketing” was the buzzword of the online marketing industry last year, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity. HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing”, which basically means bringing customers to you.

Last week we asked what is audience development?

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Audience Development Strategy

Effective Call-to-Action Examples for Selling Subscription Website Memberships

Our primary goal at Mequoda is to build the best subscription website marketing systems for publishers. We want publishers to have a system that attracts visitors, captures their email address, engages them with great content, and monetizes them through subscriptions. A simple website may not do all of the above, but a subscription website marketing

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Audience Development Strategy

Email Footer Examples and Best Practices for Keeping Readers Happy

We developed the Email Newsletter Scorecard with our friend and email marketing expert Jeanne Jennings. Let’s look today at #9: the all-important footer. In addition to abiding by CAN SPAM laws, having a footer resonates with the email recipient because it gives them a way to communicate with your brand, manage their subscription or opt

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Audience Development Strategy

How Does Your Email Capture Rate Compare to Other Publishers?

Your email capture rate (ECR) is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your website captures each month, by the number of unique new visitors passing through your website in a 30 day period. Your goal is to capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include

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Audience Development Strategy

What is SMO? Develop Your Social Media Strategy in 8 Steps

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is what we call the process of optimizing your content and your business, for social media.

Typically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes first. This is the process of creating content that has been optimized for some set of keywords that our target audience is looking for.

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Audience Development Strategy

Increase Magazine Subscriptions With One Simple Trick

For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.

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Audience Development Strategy

Facebook Black Hat and White Hat Practices for Increasing Post Visibility and Getting Banned

You may not know it, but there are things you could be doing on Facebook right now that are against their rules, or are strongly suggested against.

You may have been violating these rules in the past, too. Did you know that for a long time, you weren’t allowed to hold a contest on Facebook without

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Audience Development Strategy

13 Examples of Professional Email Subject Lines

If you could, you’d hire a professional email subject line writer. You would, because you depend on your email list to sell magazine subscriptions or ads to advertisers, so smashing together 50-100 characters on the fly every day is a stinky approach to accomplishing those goals.

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Audience Development Strategy

Designing a Promotional Email: The Spotlight Template

At Mequoda, we call any promotional email that features a single product or membership a Spotlight. When you’re designing a promotional email, it’s best to ask yourself: “how can I get the visitor out of this email and onto a purchase page as quickly, and as informed, as possible?”

The idea behind the Spotlight email template

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Audience Development Strategy

A Successful SEO Press Release Example

PR is so different now than it was even five years ago, nevermind ten or twenty years ago. Because major news outlets still require press releases, we still publish them, however there are secondary efforts too. After publishing, you may contact a few journalists that typically cover your niche. At Mequoda, we also keep track

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Audience Development Strategy

The 21 Best Email Subject Lines Proven to Increase Open Rates

Discover the carefully guarded source of the world’s most effective email subject lines that most professional copywriters don’t like to share

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Audience Development Strategy

Free Webinar Reveals 7 Subscription Landing Page Tests You Can Do Now

I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on December 8 at 1:00 PM ET for a FREE webinar, 7 Subscription Landing Page Tests You Can Do Now. This is your only chance to get these test ideas for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in

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Audience Development Strategy

58 Online Copywriting Power Words and Phrases

If you’re experienced in online copywriting, you know that “you” is generally considered to be one of the most effective copywriting power words, ranking right up there with free, new and save.

As direct marketing legend Herschell Gordon Lewis says in The Art of Writing Copy, “Unless the reader regards himself as the target of your

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Audience Development Strategy

Social Media Marketing for Magazines: How Top Publishers Get Seen

If your magazine doesn’t have a consistent social media presence by now, then you’re light years behind the competition. It used to be a struggle to get buy-in from the higher-ups and prove the value of social media marketing for magazines (heck, any industry), but all of that has changed. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest—they’re

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Audience Development Strategy

Subject Line Spam Trigger Words

Email subject lines are just one part of the email delivery equation. Emails are delivered to inboxes based on subject lines, content, and reputation. In some cases, engagement is even applied to this filter.

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Audience Development Strategy

The 14 Most Clickable Social Media Headlines

Everything we’ve read as observers of social media and publishing communities tells us that most marketers don’t get a click rate on a Tweet of more than one percent, and in fact most marketers get less than that.

Meanwhile, publishers on Facebook are most often reaching less than 10% of their fans due to Facebook’s algorithm

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Audience Development Strategy

The Best Audience Development Job Description We’ve Seen

Audience development personnel have a very specific, and incredibly important job, within an organization. Writing an audience development job description and then finding the right audience development staff can mean the difference between thousands of email subscribers and tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue.
After decades of training and supporting audience development editors at our

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Audience Development Strategy

The Best Paid and Free Press Release Sites

On content-driven, information-rich websites we use press releases for more than the basic announcement. We also use them to release free white papers because we know they offer more opportunities for inbound links and the SEO benefits required to get a landing page ranked well in Google.

Since Google now holds us responsible for the inbound

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Audience Development Strategy

Your Introduction Email Subject Line is Critical

“Hello, sailor. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Do you come here often?”

Of course these silly pick-up lines are good for a laugh, but do you know how to really introduce yourself to new prospects? When you’re about to launch a relationship with new customers, the subject line for introduction email is the first time you

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Audience Development Strategy

The 10 Best Content Marketing Podcasts for Editors and Magazine Marketers

Before we get into content marketing podcasts, let’s talk about podcasting in general. Podcasting has had a culture that has been behind the scenes lurking in the background for well over a decade. When media organizations were brushing the platform off as a fad, independent podcasters were happy to stand in and take millions in

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Audience Development Strategy

Use Website Floaters to Increase Email Conversion Rates

When website users are asked whether they like pop-ups, they say no. They’ll say they hate them. They’ll tell you they’re the most annoying things on the Internet. They might even tell you they never fill them out.

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Audience Development Strategy Subscription Website Publishing

Building a Google Visibility Report: A Step-by-Step Guide

Our clients publish in many different niches: food, investing, archaeology, environmental infrastructure, natural health and clinical pathology among many others. When they first come to us, they have nothing in common with one another, but after working with us for six months to a year, they all have one thing in common: a Google Visibility

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Audience Development Strategy

The 6 Most Important Email Analytics for Magazine Publishers

How to turn six email analytics metrics into a big picture about the performance and plans for digitally marketing your publication

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Audience Development Strategy

7 Ways to Create a Freemium That Attracts New Email Subscribers

We’re all about the mighty freemium around here. Create content and give it away for free so that people know how good your premium content is – and they’ll buy it later, or subscribe. And they do. But do you know how to create a freemium that does the job?

We’re in for the long haul

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Audience Development Strategy

25 Email Design Best Practices for Publishers for Mobile and Desktop

It’s been reported that the average email users spends at average of 51 seconds on each email newsletter they read. If this average pertains to your market, you need to develop a way to maximize your email’s ability to connect with your audience.

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Audience Development Strategy

Does Email Contact Frequency Impact Email Engagement and Retention?

Little-known fact: If you send out an equal number of (1) content-rich email newsletters and (2) straight product spotlight promotions versus sending only promotions, email engagement improves. In fact, the length of time you’ll retain an active email name will almost double.
Again: The active lifetime of an email name almost doubles when you email an equal number

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Audience Development Strategy

The Truth: How Online and Email Copywriting Sells

Words matter. Imagery matters, too. But, the purpose of imagery in direct marketing is not to please or entertain—the purpose of graphics in direct marketing is to get your audience to read the accompanying words!

The art of crafting compelling words for email is known as email copywriting—it’s really an art and a science. Artful in

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Audience Development Strategy

A New Day for Newspaper SEO

Earlier this year, I read with something between amusement and dismay a recent piece about how the Wall Street Journal, one of my favorite news sources, is trying to do a better job addressing newspaper SEO (search engine optimization).

In an article from Business Insider, Steven Perlberg explains how WSJ is asking staffers to focus more on

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Audience Development Strategy

Free Email Newsletters Are Hot

I continue to read with interest how free email newsletters are the hot new thing. A recent Digiday article shared that The New York Times, who has 15 million email subscribers “debuted a deck of 18 new and existing subscriber-only newsletters to readers” this month. Additionally, Quartz, who has 1.3 million newsletter subscribers and 11

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Audience Development Strategy

Free Webinar Reveals 7 Email Templates You Need to Succeed

I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on October 13 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, The 7 Email Marketing Templates You Need to Succeed. This is your only chance to get these templates for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in Mequoda Pro for $49/mo.

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Audience Development Strategy

The 3 Truths of Building a Magazine Audience

If you want to build a magazine audience, the foundational principles of Buddhism teach you that life is suffering, and that to live a better life, you must learn how to be content with that. No sugar-coating, just “yes, you’re right, life is hard, now let’s get on with it, shall we?” By starting with the

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Audience Development Strategy

The Best Email Newsletters Stack Content

When you go responsive, it makes you focus on your top one to three primary goals. I can’t tell you what your goals are, but I can tell you how to make them clear in your next daily email newsletter design.

For a long time, the best email newsletters had a sidebar. We and all our

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Audience Development Strategy

How to Lift Your Freemium Conversion Rate With Freebies People Actually Want

Do you know what your freemium conversion rate is? Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list is one of the most important items on a publisher’s to-do list (or at least it should be.)

At Mequoda, we’ve been singing this song long

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Audience Development Strategy

The 14 Best Words That Get People to Open Email

Do you know how to get people to open email? In a presentation called The Science of Email Marketing that we attended a while back, analytics nerd Dan Zarella said bluntly, “I would rather have an email subscriber than a Twitter follower.” We’d like to think it’s because email subscribers respond better to promotions, but according to

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Audience Development Strategy

5 Reasons to Recycle Content on Twitter

Twitter isn’t just about the here and now. In social media, you could post the same article ten times a day, but your traffic would only be driving traffic to that one page. That’s why it’s always a smart idea to recycle your articles on Twitter using our 12x12x12 method, so that blog posts from

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Audience Development Strategy

How to Check Email Reputation and Sender Score

Recently a publisher came to us interested in our email marketing services, in which we develop, test, manage, monitor, and react to a series of email marketing campaigns developed using the Six Sigma method.

They told us that copywriter after copywriter had failed to convert free email subscribers into paying subscribers. They asked us to take

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Audience Development Strategy

5 Quick Tips for Writing the Best Email Subject Lines

The best email subject lines provoke open rates and persuade subscribers to read your email newsletters

There are dozens of methods, tricks and tips for writing great headlines. Unfortunately, this isn’t direct mail, and we have spam filters to adhere to, and character counts to abide by when it comes to writing great email subject lines.

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Audience Development Strategy

Gaining SEO Mastery: Beg, Borrow, or Buy

By far the most lucrative source of website traffic you can acquire as a website publisher is the traffic that comes from search engine optimization. But to get to the point of constant incoming traffic through organic search, you need some form of SEO mastery at your helm in the form of SEO writers. The

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Audience Development Strategy

Meet Us on Zoom and Let’s Talk Subscription Offers

Do you feel like working at home more than usual has made you want to gather more than ever? We miss attending events and meeting new people who love working in this industry as much as we do. Normally, this time of year we’d be meeting in Boston with our publishing partners for a powerful

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Audience Development Strategy

Free Webinar Reveals 17 Better Ways to Sell Subscriptions

You’re invited to join us on June 9 at 1:00 PM ET for a FREE webinar, 17 Ways to Sell More All-Access Magazine Subscriptions. If you run a subscription website, you’ll definitely want to attend, so register now and get on the list, because it’s filling up quickly.

If you’re not quite sure if this webinar

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Audience Development Strategy

3 Most Deadly SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them

An easy fix for the top five SEO mistakes

These innocent mistakes may be costing you the highest price of all – better search engine ranking. If you want to move up the ranks double check these five points:

Search Engine Optimization Tip #1 – Think like your customer. Search for keywords and phrases your customers

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Audience Development Strategy

The Paywall Model vs SEO: How to Win at Both

The paywall model isn’t an SEO-killer, even though it’s been billed as one. Technology has advanced a long way since the days when content was either locked, or unlocked. Firstly, there are two types, a hard paywall, and a soft paywall (and varying degrees in between):

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Audience Development Strategy

Three Types of Content You Can Publish Daily

Typically we find that content falls into three buckets: news, evergreen, and blockbuster. Most Mequoda partners publish these three content types daily because each type serves a different purpose.

News content keeps your readers up to date on current events in your industry, and also fares well in social media.

Evergreen content allows you to create content

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Audience Development Strategy

What is a Blockbuster Post and How Do I Use This Secret Weapon?

One time I wrote a great post that drove 5,000 unique visitors per month to a site. Then the publisher broke the link during a yearly upgrade and Google dropped it from their search rankings. Oh wait, no, they decided to update the title to something “more catchy” and Google dropped it from their search

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Audience Development Strategy

How to Write a Blockbuster Post That Sends Consistently High-Quality Traffic for Years

I’ve always adored SEO when it comes to content creation. After all, don’t you want to write about the things people are searching for? Why would you write about anything else? A blockbuster post, which we consider any post that drives a considerable percentage of your website traffic every month, is usually in your top

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Audience Development Strategy

A Custom Marketing Program We Can Build For You

Our digital marketing teams at Mequoda have tons of fun managing comprehensive email and web marketing programs for our publishing partners. Our services range from being strategic advisors to being hands-on executors of all aspects of these comprehensive digital marketing programs for more than a dozen publishing systems.

Each of our digital marketing teams include a

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Audience Development Strategy

How to Update a Blockbuster Post and Save it from Google Damnation

Every month, if you’re great at SEO, the majority of your website traffic comes from search through blockbuster posts. That’s great because it means you can spend less on paid traffic, like PPC. It also means you’re likely to have some key players driving all that free traffic.

For example, our publishing partners enjoy the majority