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.
Every successful niche publisher we know uses email as the central resource of their audience development toolbox
As you know, our clients are some of the most incredible before/after examples of niche publishers who have turned their businesses around when they went multiplatform. And there’s not a single Mequoda client without email as the core of
When syndication is used for audience development, magazine publishers should be wary of duplicate content
Publishers have a long history of building audiences around specific topics, or niches. But the internet economy changed the audience development model significantly. Many of the traditional practices still work, but the digital economy requires a more expansive, and agile, approach
Every publisher should develop an audience development program specifically for social that stretches throughout the year
Previously, the only purpose of building an audience was to sell print subscriptions. Now, publishers are looking to sell digital subscriptions, develop leads for sponsors, increase memberships, and build communities. As the uses for your audience have expanded, so have
If your audience development strategy doesn’t incorporate search, you’re not thinking of the long term
When you are a Mequoda publisher, the goal of audience development is to get people on your email list. You will use that list to eventually sell them a product or monetize them through a sponsored message. The strategies we use
How to use anxiety in your sales letter landing page copywriting
Someone once reduced all human motivation to the simple pleasure/pain principle.
“You either want something you don’t have, or you have something you don’t want.”
It’s Psychology 101. We either seek pleasure or we avoid pain. Those are the two principal motivators.
Based on that simplistic summary of
Build an email list by creating free downloads that fit the content theme you are already selling
Freemiums have become the ultimate way to build an email list. The difference in email capture rate between a site that asks readers to sign up for their free newsletter, and one that asks them to sign up and
If you maintain a keyword universe like we do for our clients, you may want to follow our lead on this update
Mequoda is built on a structure of best practices. Best practices are standard conventions, methods, or processes that have proven to be successful through testing. We can’t stress enough the importance of paying attention to what
The social algorithm ecosystem is becoming just as important to watch and analyze as search algorithms
Have you ever had someone in your life who asks you to do something, but then always changes their mind about how they want it done? Or maybe they can never really decide the best way to do it, but
Voice commands for search and bots for magazines – why niche publishers should prepare for the new wave of data consumption
Beyond the latest trend of kids walking into telephone poles while playing the new Pokemon Go game, you’ve probably noticed people everywhere spending more time looking down at their phones than their surroundings. But let’s
Like the best email subject lines, report titles should be short and sweet
In today’s multiplatform publishing world, there’s no such thing as standing still. So when data starts whispering “change” in our ear, we listen.
That’s why, right now, we’re officially revising our longstanding Best Practice on how to write a special report title. Freemiums in
Searchers will snooze right through your listing in Google if you don’t pep up boring old SEO headlines
SEO doesn’t need to be the killer of headlines, but those who adore punchy headlines might tell you so.
Do SEO headlines tend to be a little stinkier than the old journalism templates we know and love? Sometimes, but
We’re surrounded by a goldmine of creative video ideas in magazine publishing – which one will inspire you?
I sit here writing this as I just finished watching six videos in a row on Vogue’s site, all 73-questions long, about celebrities I don’t have an interest in, in a format that felt heavily scripted.
I don’t know
When your magazine marketing job gets boring, that means your customers are probably just as bored. Pep up your magazine marketer game in 10 days!
Being a magazine marketer is fun, because you have the epitome of fun topics to promote. Hopefully you’re working in a niche that you’re passionate about, which makes everything you promote
For a very long time PR was pretty straightforward, and for many publishers, highly automated. The guidelines for how to pitch a press release started with writing your press release, posting it to your site, posting it to your PR distribution channels of choice, and waiting to see what happened. For bigger publishers, there may
I don’t know about you, but the world’s a’changing when it comes to audience development. For a while, I felt like we were so ahead of the curve at Mequoda that we were pretty cool in our pants for a bit, but as we’ve been doing a lot of testing the past few months, it
Google’s kind of the king of mixed messages. They tell publishers not to optimize, and to “just write great content” but their team says that yes, in fact, good keywords are great indicators that Google uses to rank you. It makes sense, Google isn’t yet smart enough to rank you intelligently for words you’re not
How we’re seeing a larger return on our marketing investment by recycling marketing campaigns across platforms
When I first started working at Mequoda almost 10 years ago, we wrote a lot of promotional copy. We sent several promotions per week, and each one was brand spanking new. For a company that was limited on resources at
A couple weeks ago I attended an SEO conference called SearchLove hosted by Distilled. One of the speakers was Rand Fishkin, better known as the Wizard of Moz. At the very end of his presentation, completely off topic talked about the time he saw that Hubspot posted 49 articles in a week, and wondered if
All SEO keywords are not equally important—volume and competition matter!
The most effective SEO keyword strategy is to compete vigorously for top placement for the most popular keyword suggestions returned by the Google Keyword Planner for a given root keyword phrase.
While bloggers are out there buying generic images for a dollar on stock photo sites, one nice benefit magazines typically have is an archive of photographs from past issues. One way that Mequoda suggests niche magazines improve their SEO is by digging into their old magazine archives, finding their most evergreen content, and recycling it
Do you realize that a large percentage of your most loyal customers may only hear from you once a month, when you send them your magazine?
It seems like when you have customers who are paying to hear from you every month, they might be pretty easy to sell to again. If you just had a
Social media for magazines should be equal parts branding and content marketing – with a new perspective on why magazines really market content on social
One of our clients recently conducted a 6-month test to increase their post reach, and one of the things we determined – after several months of testing every element available on Facebook
Have you ever received one of those birthday cards in the mail from one of your “funny” friends, where you open the envelope and glitter basically falls everywhere?
That’s close to how customers have always felt about magazine blow-in cards that try to sell magazine subscriptions. Maybe the cards don’t nestle themselves into the cracks of
Magazine marketing thrives in the new world of PPC and organic search
What’s the one thing that magazine publishers have in abundance, more than any other business on the planet?
Content.
And who’s the paramour of content? Google.
Think about it – all of the companies out there struggling with SEO and frantically hiring content farms overseas, and, bless
Getting your emails opened is the most crucial part of email copywriting
A couple of weeks ago, we recieved tons of great feedback, retweets and love for an article we wrote called 4 Email Subject Lines That Are Proven to Get Opened. In the article, I used MailChimp’s subject line suggester to test some of our
Recently, media site The Verge hired a position for someone who will basically take some of their content and republish it on other user-generated publishing platforms like Medium and LinkedIn Pulse.
If you’re a SEO-savvy publisher, you’re probably thinking, “what are they, crazy? Have they lost their darn marbles?”
Well, truthfully, Verge aren’t exactly getting eyeballs based
Are your social posts converting fans and followers into buyers? You may never know until you start implementing social media tracking.
Whenever we publish a new article on Mequoda, we use our 12x12x12 social media method on Twitter. We write 12 unique Tweets, schedule them for 12 days, then once a month for 12 months.
This social
Mequoda reveals the best SEO software publishers can use to extend the life of all their articles — more effortlessly.
The benefits of video advertising increase as trends are discovered, users are targeted, and call-to-action buttons are put into use.
Although consumers don’t generally love the 10-15 seconds of advertising they encounter when discovering new YouTube videos, or videos they find on publisher’s websites — they do, in fact, wait through them, at least to the
How to pump up the jam on your B2C email marketing efforts
Last week we dug into best practices in B2B email marketing. Business-to-business email marketing is particularly different because products are typically higher priced, copy is longer, and the best times to send email are typically during the 9-5ish hours.
B2c email marketing, or business-to-consumer email
Based on the results of a collection of A/B tests here’s a list of B2B email marketing best practices (and tests you can try yourself)
In their free time, some people like to ski or walk their dog, but I get kicks out of sitting back with a cup of tea and reading through results of
Take a look at these three case studies to better understand how you can combine content marketing strategy and relationship marketing strategy to sell while you sleep
Working with the fantastic Mary Van Doren, our lead copywriter, has turned me into a marketing words geek. I cheerfully admit it. Words that can sell products are constantly in the background of my brain … bubbling around, vying for my attention, waiting to be assigned to just the right product. If a friend convinces
Google reveals the guidelines it uses to teach Search Quality Evaluators the difference between high quality content and low-quality content
There’s no three-word phrase we hear more in content marketing than “high quality content,” and even though legacy publishers have always been proponents of high quality content, this specific term has taken on new meaning when search
In the next year, publishers focused on audience development will double down on more dynamic content to engage readers on all platforms
When I first started working with Mequoda a decade ago, not only were brands clueless about content marketing, but the kings of content—publishers—still had a long way to go in terms of understanding how
Our most-read audience development posts of 2015 reveal a desire for better understanding of email marketing, search optimization and social media best practices
This year we’ve tackled everything from email marketing to creating blockbuster posts and creating social media plans in our Audience Development articles. However, there are a few that have consistently been our highest
Publishers are paying more attention to social media optimization through their featured images and seeing higher reach
If you’re simply choosing stock photos from a library and using them as the featured graphics in your Facebook posts, you’re way behind the times, baby.
If there’s one thing social analytics are telling publishers, it’s that if content is
At Mequoda, one of our basic principles is to give things away. After all, how can people trust your content until they have a sample? And how will they ever find you again, unless you ask for their email address in exchange for the free product?
Facebook Instant Articles are creating a platform for publishers to host ads on social networks, rather than placing them
Ever thought magazines would be placing native ads on social networks? Me either, and that’s not exactly happening just yet, but it’s an interesting thought, right?
Back in May, Facebook launched Instant Articles , a content publishing platform within
The Facebook flex and-or exclusion targeting can help you narrow down your target audience for Facebook ads like never before
Remember the days of putting your paid Facebook advertising budget money into a massive digital marketing black hole, because the ad targeting only allowed you broad audience options?
Well they’ll soon be faded from memory like a
Convert more website visitors into email subscribers by perfecting the art of writing and positioning your text ads
About 100 words into every article we write, and into every article our clients write, you’ll find a little snippet of text that alerts the reader to a free download. When I use the term “text ad,” it’s
Save your social media team time and simplify their workflow with these three social media scheduling tools
Publishers practically invented content management systems, but one area we find publishers lacking in, is their social media management.
When we’re all sitting around at the lunch tables at our quarterly Intensive, we talk about our 12x12x12 social media strategy that’s
There’s a growing trend in which media reporters are investigating why certain websites rank so well. They want to differentiate the white hat SEO from the black hat.
If foul play is afoot, these reporters expose the black hat SEO practices and the offending websites typically feel the consequences. Google has penalized JC Penney, Overstock, Demand
How to jump start and run a successful SEO campaign
An SEO campaign starts with a keyword and evolves into a multi-media marketing program. When a marketer finds a keyword that he feels can dominate in search engines, the goal is to create a product that can utilize the title, to either sell or start collecting
How to get a tag page ranked higher in search by turning it into a hugely resourceful page of answers
A tag is a keyword or phrase you assign to a page or article, and a tag page is the automatically generated page that is created whenever you create a tag in a CXMS like Haven
Consumers are deciding to pay for online content as they tire of filtering the whole Internet for high-quality articles
“So I’ve figured out how to get traffic — how do I make money?”
That’s a genuine quote from a new Gold Member, and one we hear often, although usually without the “I’ve figured out how to get
To be a responsive website designer, you must know how to design a website to be viewed effectively on any platform. For example, a responsive website design would never include flash, because around 30% of the smartphone market is carrying a flash-unfriendly phone. Additionally, you find new ways to deliver pop-up ads that don’t slide
Use these content tests and learn how to reach more people on Facebook with your posts
There’s nothing more frustrating than looking at your Facebook page, with 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 or more fans, and seeing that your posts are only being seen by 100 people. 500 people. 900 people.
The days of posting whatever you want and
Google quick answers are being featured at the top of their search results pages—here’s how to nail that prime spot.
Are you publishing high-quality content? If you’re one of the many established publishers that we work with every day, then the answer is probably “yes.” You’re the stronghold in your niche. You’re the New York Times
A thorough look at what a complete Twitter Audit should tell you
In the past we answered the question, what is a Twitter audit and showed you the first 11-question part of a Twitter content audit.
Many companies think the number of followers they have equals their influence in the Twitter ecosystem, but that’s the furthest metric from
