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.
Last week we talked about how to measure your domain authority, and this week I’d like to talk about how to improve it through link-building strategies.
A client of ours, when they first launched their Mequoda System, had a domain authority of 27, which is not a bad or unusual domain authority for a publisher,
Link-building. It seems like that term is as old as the marketable internet. Since publishers have been developing content, we have known that we need traffic to our websites, and that inbound links are the way to do it. As Google came along and trained us on their search optimization best practices, link-building became even
Have you been seeing emojis in subject lines lately? They’re not just the earrings of the inbox, they actually serve a purpose— increasing open rates! And since several of our clients have been testing them and seeing success, we figured it was about time to talk more about sending smiles 😀, poops 💩, and prayers
Driving website traffic happens beyond Facebook in the world of social; Meredith launches brand for Facebook and hubs; Google outlines Flexible Sampling for publishers
Driving website traffic is always on the mind of audience development managers. We’re seeing publishers acting in accordance with this notion, as they dive deeper into a variety of locations, including Facebook,
Although a text ad could refer to any ad consisting of text, we’re currently referring to those that are part of your conversion architecture. These ads are placed in the dead center of all your articles and invite your website visitors to download a free product that will get them on your email list.
Consider the rise of talent shows on TV like America’s Got Talent and American Idol. When it comes down to it, they’re simply performing good old-fashioned market research. Why sign an unknown singer to a record label, or sign a new act to a Vegas casino, when you can see how the world responds to
This year, our winner was Countryside Network, who launched their Mequoda System in February 2016. Countryside was founded in 1969 and today includes four farming-related magazines (Backyard Poultry, Countryside, Dairy Goat Journal and Sheep!) and a portal at CountrysideNetwork.com that spans all four niches.
In the words of Heraclitus, “the only thing that is constant is change.” And working in publishing, you probably find this especially true. Google changes every day, and so do we. Certainly other professions have their own versions of change to deal with: mechanics had to cope with the switch to electric cars, and environmentalists
In the book The Giving Tree, a young boy visits a tree and forms a relationship with it. At first he simply wants to swing on it’s branches, but as he gets older he becomes more materialistic. He asks the tree, which has grown fond of him, to turn its apples into money, it’s branches
We talk a lot about how to convert website visitors into subscribers when we discuss email marketing for publishers, but once someone is on your email list, what should you do with them? I’m sorry to say, there are lots of publishers out there with large lists who aren’t using them effectively. They don’t want
This handbook takes you from the big picture of building an audience to the minute but critical details website architecture that helps you build email lists. You’ll learn how the most successful publishers optimize entire sites for Google, from picking keywords to writing optimized content.
When building email circulation, by most accounts, email capture rate is a proxy metric. You’d be mistaken to say that it’s an exact metric because when we talk about email capture rate, we’re usually talking about the number of people who came to your site from search and social and hit the email capture conversion
Content recycling—it’s all around us! At some point you’ve probably had dinner, maybe watched the news, and watched an early-evening episode of Big Bang Theory, or Two and a Half Men. Maybe it was on its normal station, maybe a different one, like TBS. Either way, this is just one way of experiencing content recycling,
The one advantage magazines have over the majority of information on the internet is legitimacy due to credentials and facts. Let us not forget that nobody trusts what they read on the internet, especially not in the current blight of “fake news,” but they do more often trust established publications like magazines.
Search Engine Land releases report on worthy SEO factors; Google reminds us of rules for putting links in large-scale audience development campaigns; Publisher fades in Google results after blocking Google users
It’s recommended to stay current with best-practice SEO if you want to rank organically in Google. Today we share news stories that look at these factors,
Ultimately the goal of social media is to improve your search scores and drive traffic to your website. But social can be used to build an email list, and vice versa, email can be a great way to build a social following. And if you can capture a visitor on both platforms, then if they
In practical terms, many publishers don’t really need a shopping cart. Many publishers have only a few products to sell. If your business offers one or two magazines, a few books and not much else, a direct offer management system is probably all you need. But if you have many products to sell – multiple
A client used this scorecard on their blockbuster articles to improve search visibility by 34%
A blockbuster article is a piece of content on your site that attracts a significant amount of traffic over a long period of time. For many publishers, this timeline might be years. For those just learning about blockbusters now, many will
A few tests to prove which subject lines make for great open rates
Studies show that most people decide whether to open and read an email message based entirely on a quick glance at the sender’s address and the email subject line.
If you’re an email newsletter publisher or marketer, you have four tasks: You need to
Online content marketing is antithetical to anything we knew prior to 20 years ago — something Seth Godin terms interruption marketing. Everything I learned in college and during my early career, whether space ads, TV commercials or direct response, employed hardcore, confrontational marketing messages.
When it comes to social media for publishers, you could be spending less time and getting more out of it
There’s no doubt about it, social media for publishers is an investment. You have a lot of content, and too many options on where to publish it.
[text_ad]
We meet far too many niche publishers who have editorial
Get more page one rankings in Google by being a better keyword density checker for your business
Our SEO process has several layers that starts with keyword research and ends with article marketing and an accompanying white paper. Somewhere in the middle of this process we take what we see as a great keyword and drop
Imagine you own a landscaping company. You cut lawns, trim shrubs, design landscapes and you even shovel in the winter.
Now imagine you throw a dinner party where your brother brings home his new girlfriend. This is the tenth girl in 10 years who has sat at your dinner table, so you assume that you may
There are 201,000 people searching for the term “apple pie recipes” every month, but that doesn’t mean you should break out the measuring cups and write about it, if your magazine is for car enthusiasts. But if you’re a magazine for diabetics, you could certainly write about “diabetic apple pie recipes” of which there are
Most publishers are only using one or two of these email call to action ideas for building an email list to sell more magazines
Did you know that by pairing unproductive employees with productive employees, you can actually improve productivity overall?
Cornerstone OnDemand conducted a study of more than 2,000 tech company employees with a dataset of
Increase email revenue by determining your ideal revenue per subscriber, and then using service journalism to keep them on a path toward monetization
A Mequoda online publishing and marketing system measures revenue produced by email newsletter subscribers differently from the way that print publishers have traditionally measured the lifetime value of a subscriber.
The revenue per email
Thanks to fake news, there’s a surge of interest in “real news” sites, which could turn the news industry around
We’ve written a bit about fake news lately. How Google is banning it, how Facebook is blocking it, and how it’s being blamed for the results of our presidential election. But one thing I find interesting
Choosing good keywords and using them correctly is more than a strategy, it’s a lifeline for your investment in content and can keep traffic flowing indefinitely.
When you’re in the business of content, search engine optimization isn’t just a hip thing to do, it’s a necessity. Think about how much time your team spends every day
Email copywriting is a fine art. You can spend hours writing an elaborate salesletter or in-depth article that never gets read, simply because someone threw a half-thought-out subject line on the email blast it’s encapsulated in.
Every email copywriter keeps an arsenal of subject lines that capture their attention in their own email inboxes. I have
How to make highly converting Floaters, pop-ups and mobile interstitial ads SEO-friendly
As you probably know, earlier this month, Google told publishers everywhere that they would begin penalizing them for pop-ups and Floaters which interfere with content on mobile pages. They’ve also told us not to show OFIEs to mobile users, the little order flows that
8 steps for writing and structuring a SEO-friendly URL that is easy to read by humans and search engines
I’ll bet you didn’t know there were so many types of URLs. Vanity URLs, which are short, simple URLs, are used in direct mail and other print promotions. They are meant to be easy to remember and are
Actionable audience development steps to make your next interview article filled with engaging content
Conducting interviews are a great way to produce content for your blog, website and publications. People love to hear from experts in your niche. It’s really a win-win situation. Your interviewee gets to share his or her expertise with your readers, and
Intent, alignment, and engagement take the stage in 2017 for audience development professionals
I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to see how audience development changes in 2017. Over the last year I’ve seen content marketers in particular get aggressive with link building again. Not just through spam commenting (boo!) but also guest blogging (yay!)
Improve open, click-through, and conversion rates with these email template testing ideas
Even our best-performing emails tend to drop in engagement rates over time. In fact, every time we change email templates we will typically see a boost in click-through rates. This reason is mostly based on something new and shiny appearing in people’s inboxes. Even
Our top-read audience development posts of last year show an interest in subject lines and the power of email newsletters.
Despite the rise of social networks, most publishers we know still get the majority of their traffic from organic traffic and email. That’s why it’s no surprise that our most-read posts on the Mequoda Daily this
Social media users are highly engaged – but if you want to master social media for magazines, you must approach each network differently
Most publishers we’ve talked to say social media isn’t a huge sales driver for them. Sure, they’ve made a few bucks here and there, but they’re not making Dell money or anything (Dell
Search engine optimization is kind of a game, right? It’s an important game – a necessary one for any publisher – but mostly it’s just us trying to play by the rules while Google giggles and changes those rules whenever they like.
At Mequoda, we stress the importance of a freemium strategy. Freemiums are free downloadable
How to promote content on three tricky social platforms that publishers want to love
Every once in awhile one of our clients asks us how they can leverage platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, or Pinterest as a content marketing platform. All three are completely viable social platforms for a social media strategy, and none of them I
How will Google alter their algorithm to combat fake news in the future, and how will it affect the rest of us?
I’m going to assume that you’re not one of those news sites that published fake news to garner clicks and ad revenue during the election.
But if you were, you probably made a heck of
How to listen to the data from your audience development efforts and move forward
The inability to see the forest for the trees means that the detail of leaves, pinecones and the immensity of trunks and height will deter you from seeing the blanket of green on a mountain, and the patterns that might enable to you find
If you’ve ever been to one of our events, or you just got dropped on your head when you landed on one of our articles, you’ve probably seen the acronym OFIE here and there.
Around here, using OFIE it in a sentence (pronounced OH FEE) is as common as saying the words “website” or “conversion”. Say
If you teach editors to write evergreen content, you’ll have a larger, more useful catalog down the road.
A friend of mine works at MIT developing interactive online courses, and one thing that hangs heavily on his brain is how to make them evergreen. Because when you work with a team of academics and researchers, content
As more users go mobile, these tips for making accelerated mobile pages will keep your posts at the top of search results
Page speed is at the top of everyone’s minds right now. In April of 2015, Google told publishers that mobile-friendliness would be considered a ranking signal. They even offered up a mobile-friendly guide and
Social posts with links need to be strong in three areas: image, article title, and description. If you nail the trifecta, your posts will get more reach, shares, and traffic.
An image is worth a thousand words, am I right? Consider how little a social post could be worth without an image, or worse, no image
Call it what you want, but here at Mequoda we’ve assigned the title Rapid Conversion Landing Page to a landing page that collects an email address and offers a free product (freemium) in exchange. You’ve seen them around here, here, and here.
If you’ve read our blog before, attended one of our Intensives, or a Summit,
These audience development models create marketing-qualified leads through freemiums that build larger, more monetizable email lists
“Audience development” is one of those terms that many people instinctively understand, but usually underestimate. Although media professionals have worked with the term for years, most have not bothered to define all the things that go on when executing an
The very successful publishers that we always turn to when evaluating our best practices have used some or all of the following strategies to convert website visitors into email subscribers. Not to say that they don’t also use ample space on their website to sell new magazine subscribers, they’ve just also spent the time to
How to use direct mail campaigns as an audience development tool that builds email lists and primes email subscribers to become paying magazine subscribers
Direct mail is a traditional marketing channel for publishers, but it also has a lot of value for audience development. Although the ROI for direct mail will be lower than for some
Audience development is one of those terms that many people instinctively understand, but usually underestimate
Although media professionals have worked in audience development for years, most have not bothered to define all the things that go on when executing an audience development strategy.
And at its most basic, that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s about building an audience for
Retail can be used to boost your audience development efforts, because newsstands come with their own marketplaces
There are seven major Audience Development models we have identified: search, social, syndication, email, retail, paid advertising, and direct mail. Today, I’m focusing primarily on retail, and using Green Gardens Network as an example. If you’re new to Mequoda, please
