Audience Development Strategy posts focus on how to drive more website traffic through organic and paid sources, including search and social. You’ll also learn how to convert website visitors into email subscribers.
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
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
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
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):
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
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
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
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
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
Improving email revenue? I certainly didn’t learn that one in school, and you probably didn’t either. In fact, in four years of journalism school, I never even had a single lesson in newspaper economics.
My professors were experienced reporters and editors, but none had ever figured out the business of publishing a newspaper. And none had
If you want to improve email capture rates, you have to know three things: What it is, and the many ways you can test to improve it. But it’s always helpful to see what other publishers are doing in order to get their best conversion rates, so today we’ll review all of the above, including
At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After
In theory, it should be very easy to use basic subscription marketing principles and write a direct mail campaign for content that already exists, rather than content that does not. But we find that copywriters don’t typically love to work that way.
We hope to see you on a special Zoom webinar we put together to help you discover, track, and improve your top-trafficked posts.
Do you know yet, why optimizing your content is worth the effort?
Do you know how to identify your top-ranked pages in Google Analytics?
Have you ever tried using our SEO Scorecard, and do you
I’m going to let you in on a secret. This is the scorecard that we use at Mequoda, and the SEO scorecard we use to train our content partners on writing SEO’d website content.
It’s a very simple outline that helps new editors cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s. We developed this SEO
In the past we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing. We have shared the success that one of our publishing partners has experienced after launching a high-frequency Six Sigma email spotlight program focused on selling more magazines. This publishing partner
Do you want to know how to find your top trafficked posts, and improve them in ways that will help them drive more traffic, and convert more visitors?
If your answer is yes, or even “heck yes,” on December 9 at 1pm ET, we are hosting a FREE webinar, 21 Steps for Mastering the Mequoda SEO
We see SEO (great content + great keywords) as a primary driver of website traffic for successful publishers who are doing it right.
These publishers are building a steady stream of dependable organic traffic by writing great editorial content and repurposing legacy content for the web in the form of keyword-optimized website portal posts. They get
Do you clean your email list regularly? Most publishers we know have their own methods or non-methods for doing so. Sponsor-driven publishers may be hesitant to clean their lists with too much frequency in an effort to maintain their email circulation, while publishers relying on direct revenue from subscribers might favor regular and frequent list
The last time you watched a complete video online that you were ultimately interested in, how long was it? Have you ever looked up video length best practices for your niche?
On average, you’ve probably heard that people have increasingly shorter attention spans of 8 second or less, which is shorter than that of a goldfish;
Have you ever wondered why your online competitors get more traffic, and have larger email lists than you? Do you see them growing year over year, while your business is forced to make budget cuts?
Most of the time when a company comes to us, they come in a slight panic, wanting new strategies to generate
It’s rare for marketers to get direct feedback from the Google Gods in regards to SEO outside of Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines and their SEO Starter Guide. But recently, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller must’ve been feeling share-y and engaged with Twitter users on the subject of content length. It led us to share what
While not everybody agrees that Google should control search results as much as they do, we think we can all agree that machine learning for SEO has been a very different ride than the days when it was more manually operated by what we imagine was something like Sergey Brin and Larry Page as the
Most of the time, the advice you read about ways to improve your SEO or email capture rates are long-term strategies. Do the good thing, and good things will come to you, right? Today we’re not sharing that kind of advice. Instead, we have a quick, tactical lesson you can spend the next hour doing,
“Audience development” has been an online publishing buzzword term for nearly two decades. But, what exactly does it mean—and are you doing everything in your organization, the right way, to ensure that your audience-development efforts are actually growing your audience?
Let’s start with what “audience development” means. For us at Mequoda, audience development is about finding
There are a few places you can make really good, or really bad first and last impressions in your email copywriting. Get these right and you’ll build loyalty from the start and get those subscribers to stay with you longer.
Please disregard this post if you can’t immediately answer yes to these four questions:
Does your email list contain at least 100,000 email addresses?
Do you want to increase your email open rates and customer engagement?
Do you want to sell more using a robust email marketing system and program?
Do you currently pay more
We often talk about using Six Sigma as an email strategy for selling online magazines and memberships, but it’s helpful to have evidence to show it works. So today, I’ll review some of our top-performing publishing partners.
First, let’s recap how the Six Sigma email strategy works, and then we’ll give you the results of our analysis.
Most
Who wants to sell more magazine memberships with email? Everyone, right? One of the best ways to ensure success is to “follow the leaders” and emulate formats and frameworks that are successfully working for others. The magazine membership email marketing frameworks you’ll learn below include which top formats are working well for many of Mequoda’s
An important tool for growing your email subscriber list is the often-overlooked Email Confirmation Message Series. We’ve all seen instances when a user comes to your site, enters a valid email address, and that’s it. They don’t open your welcome email, they forget about claiming their free download, and they don’t become confirmed on your
Our annual award for website growth goes to a financial advisory that’s grown 72% in the last 12 months
The Mequoda Rocket Award annually recognizes and honors the fastest growing website among Mequoda’s Gold Members, many of whom are using our Haven Customer Experience Management System (CXMS) software platform.
Over the years, Rocket Award winners have been the
If you think that your website should be the main driver of your revenue, think again. Email subscribers are responsible for between 60 and 80% of all digital revenue generation, while passing website visitors and social followers make up the balance.
Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t immediately turn into buyers. They simply remain
Why would you give away content for free, in order to make money? Sounds crazy, but that’s how the smartest publishers we know have grown at an exponential speed.
Selling magazine subscriptions and memberships is part of a four-step process that begins with giving away free content.
By giving away free content, like downloadable reports, you can build
This week we’re focusing on engagement, in How Can Engagement (E) Be Improved? The ‘E’ in the Mequoda Method’s ACEM, is really about retention, and the idea that if you’re a subscription-based publisher, that the link with relationship with your customer is key.
ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.
In the last three to five years we stumbled upon a process we now call blockbuster management. Our blockbuster management program acknowledges that any given website over time might have thousands of posts, but the remarkable thing is a relatively small number will ultimately be capable of driving 80% of the traffic.
Five steps to increase your email capture rate starting today
Converting website visitors into email subscribers is a key metric driver of your membership website. At Mequoda, we currently operate more than a dozen membership marketing systems in partnership with some of the country’s leading content brands including Prime Publishing, Yankee Publishing, and Cabot Heritage Corporation.
Testing website
Your average email open rate can only get better (with these tips)
The thing about metrics and the KPIs you track is that everyone needs a baseline. So while you can compare yourself to the rest of the publishing industry, the best thing to compare yourself to is yourself.
With that said, the average email open rate
What makes you open an email? Urgency? Benefit? Brevity? What we’ve found is that the most attention-grabbing subject lines rarely have a lot in common at first glance.
If you search around the web for the best performing subject lines, you’ll find ones like, “I was right – and that’s not good for you” and “We’re
When is the last time you looked at your unsubscribe page? If you have a high unsubscribe rate and your answer isn’t “recently” then it’s time you reviewed what people see when they try to unsubscribe from your email newsletter.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, believed that economic progress was most possible by the division of labor into specialist groups. That an organization could be hugely more efficient by breaking down production processes into many small tasks, performed by specialists.
Your magazine SEO efforts will determine how much traffic arrives and eventually converts into subscribers – what are you doing to find and plug any holes in your website?
Google is the business we all love to hate. If you run a big website, one of your jobs is magazine SEO for your website. There will
An Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) code is the way that businesses track sales from their origination point (like a tweet, email or a brochure) down the funnel to their conversion page. Every audience development campaign is packed with UTM codes to see which campaigns perform best. In Google Analytics, these codes can be tracked under
It’s amazing to see the evolution of the email newsletter – how brands use it to communicate, how the designs have changed over the years, and how the strategies of staying relevant have advanced.
Even though email newsletters have been around for years, they are still valuable for digital publishers. They are often a publisher’s largest
Should you be trying to acquire linkless mentions?
You may have heard the phrase “linkless mentions” rolling around in social media and your email inbox over the last year or so. The concept is explained exactly as it sounds: a linkless mention, also called linkless attribution or an implied link, is the mention of your brand
It was a very informative 2017 for all of us search-optimized publishers. Google has recently given us some insights into how they use seo meta descriptions within search results. Thanks to their monthly Google Webmaster Hangout Videos, Google has been pulling back the curtain and letting us know how and why they use meta descriptions.
You probably remember the good old days when there was this thing called “article marketing.” It involved marketing your articles, most often by re-publishing them as guest posts on external sites in an effort to get inbound links, and also sharing them with other bloggers in the hope they might share or comment on the
If you’re not serving the needs of your readers and Google, then at least half of your content marketing efforts are failing.
When you publish content on your free website Portal, you have two major influencers taking note of your content. And whether or not you’re able to please them will determine how quickly your website
Consistent channel conversion zone architecture (3c), when applied to a publishing website, is a fancy way of saying that every channel (or portal topic) consistently aligns with a product that converts the user into a subscriber or paid user of your website. Together, they create what we call a zone. Using this zone to increase
Your floater, also referred to as a pop-up is most likely the most effective conversion element on your website. For most publishers we know who have floaters, they see 60% of email captures come through this element. And for those who launch them, they see a 20-50% lift in email capture rates right away.
