Publishers are getting creative with digital magazine ads on Facebook, and they don’t even need to leverage the ad platform to do it.
Before you read on, if you’ve ever subscribed to a magazine from a Facebook ad, or if you’ve seen a big response to your magazine marketing techniques on Facebook, please leave a comment
Category: Audience Development Strategy
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.
Design email newsletters that are easy to read, share and use by identifying these characteristics of an email newsletter that people stay subscribed to.
Your email subscribers aren’t cash machines, they’re humans. How often do you feel good after opening an email newsletter that tries to sell you every step of the way? Probably never, because
One main advantage of multi-platform publishing is recycling content into videos.
Think about it: what entices a website viewer more than a video sample of exclusive, paid-for conferences? These events are the single biggest revenue channel for many publishers, where extra care is put into providing ticket purchasers with an experience they won’t have anywhere else.
What copywriters don’t want you to know about writing the best email subject lines
Be a thief.
If you need to write professional email subject lines that deliver high open rates, one of the best ways to do it – and one that’s shared by almost all copywriters – is to steal ideas. And unless you live
The good, the bad, and the ugly (but mostly good) wrapped up in a semi-formal LinkedIn ads review
Advertising your business on social media, particularly one like LinkedIn, is a tricky process. What inspired me to dig into LinkedIn ads, is that so many of our clients are now surfing the social media ad game, and
Every once in a while I receive a good subject line in my inbox and think, “Bravo, friend; Nailed it.” Then I copy it like a thief and save it for later.
Mequoda has been writing about the top email subject line archetypes for years. The clear and winning archetypes for subject lines that work include:
An email welcome series designed to retain new email subscribers
Have you ever compiled a series of blog posts, and turned them into an email welcome series? Buffer just performed a month-long experiment where they spent the month recycling content instead of producing new content. During that time, they used old posts to create new email
Many publishers believe in single-topic email newsletter templates in which every article of content is aligned around the same theme, in order to promote a related product. The exception to this rule is the weekly email newsletter template for subscribers who prefer to be contacted only once a week.
Nobody ever learns how to write a Facebook post, they just do it. Now you can do it better than everybody else.
Working in the B2B realm, Facebook isn’t exactly our go-to resource for getting social media traffic. Sure, we use it to help with SEO and some of our content does get passed around, but
Use this list to optimize every new and old article or blog on your site in order to attract the most search engine traffic.
Creating a robust editorial schedule for your blog isn’t only about making sure that your categories are getting published in regularly. It’s also not about fulfilling the need of all the different types of readers that come to your site. And it’s not even just about writing quality content.
Your editorial schedule is where you have
B2B stands for Business to Business. Because I’ve worked in B2B my entire career, I didn’t realize that there are B2C (Business to Consumer) marketers who haven’t heard the term. Sometimes when I attend events, I’ll blurt it out like second nature and it results in a furrowed brow and a, “what’s B2B stand for
One game we used to play at every Mequoda staff meeting, was to look at some of the top publisher websites and play “find the email signup form.” People.com was always our favorite fail, because they were so big, even at that time, but we knew they could be even bigger if they attempted to
Mitigate spam complaints by finding out who’s putting you in the junkbox
An email feedback loop (FBL) is a service that many ISPs will provide to companies who send bulk mailings. On their end, it’s beneficial because it identifies pro-active companies and reduces the amount of spam sent to their users.
Whenever someone hits the “junk” button,
Want to increase the click-through rates on your email newsletters? I’ll give you a couple hints: the first is to start using snippets of your content, and linking back to the full-length content on your site. That’s a test we ran two years ago when we were running full content previously, and it’s a test
A couple of tips for enhancing your social media strategy with Twitter lists
One of the most-used features of Twitter is the Twitter list; except sometimes people forget that they’re even using them.
When I was at the Mequoda Summit talking about social media strategy last week, I found that Twitter lists were one of the hardest
When you think of the term “email analytics” there are two metrics you probably think of first: open rate and click rate.
If those are the only two you can think of off the top of your head, it’s probably because most email service providers use these primary metrics in most of their dashboards.
Most publishers have three basic sets of online analytics to look at: website, email and social media. There are smaller buckets that fit into each category, but for the most part, these are at the top.
Within email analytics, there are two numbers that we have the greatest ability to work with. The human element of
The one thing publishers complain about when it comes to Twitter is that it doesn’t generate a ton of revenue for them.
And the one thing publishers forget to do on Twitter is promote their magazine. D’oh.
Dell is the company most famous for making money on Twitter and may be to blame for the expectations set
Winter, spring, summer or fall, all you have to do is call, and your evergreen content will be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We’ve talked about evergreen content and it’s antithesis, deciduous content, like news, or the process of newsjacking. Like a pine tree, evergreen content is alive and well all the time. And unlike a lilac,
The term evergreen is quite literal when it comes to botany, when it’s referring to any plant that stays green all year long, in any climate. Forever. It’s ever green.
Conifers, like pine trees, are evergreen. No matter whether it’s snowing, or if you’re in the middle of a four year drought, the needles on a
How to get your readers to act with buttons and text
The best emails are fully engaging; the content interests the reader enough to go through the entire email while the relevant calls to actions persuade the reader to get more involved with a brand. This can equate to purchasing a product, signing up for a
Save a few notches on your social stress meter by using these social media calendars to get ahead
Social media is my favorite thing to write about next to recycling content in fun and unusual ways. When you’re launching a new digital magazine, or bringing your existing magazine brand online, there’s a list of to-do’s and
Today’s new media landscape can be utilized to better serve your business
Have you embraced new technologies and trends within the online publishing environment?
By now we’ve all heard about the benefits of online components like social media; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are all utilized to build closer relationships and portray a sense of transparency. Yet,
Uploading your videos to YouTube has its benefits. Your videos get indexed on the world’s second largest search engine, it’s free and life is good. But what if you have premium video content on your website? You know, the video content that took you hours, days, and months to produce? This video content is secure
Social media is undoubtedly the best way to get your articles shared. Since 2007 or so, the social media world has become a go-to spot for businesses who are looking to create content and then market it to the masses. Some would argue that social media is meant to be a one-to-one platform, but realists
In your email marketing system (EMS), there’s a dashboard that gives you your email open rate – the percentage of users who opened an email from you. Typically 16% is an average number for the publishing industry, so if you have anything above, consider your efforts above average.
Unfortunately, on the web, you may find
No matter how well you’re doing, you can always do better. So is your retention rate too low? Yes! If it’s not 100% (it never is) then your email retention rate could improve.
To determine your email retention rate, use this formula:
Tiered Rate cards can be used for calculating hosting charges, interest rates, credit card fees, the list goes on.
Email pricing for publishers, the rate they’re charged to send emails, looks a bit like how retailers are charged to process credit card payments.
In retail, two popular forms of payment processing rates are the most prevalent today:
Put simply, an email subject line is the 50ish character sentence you write that causes people to open your email (or not open). Publishers don’t often ask the question of what an email subject line is, because they open and answer emails every day. Every time you get an email, it comes with a subject
First in our series on Twitter Audits, we defined a Twitter Audit, including what one looks like, and then we talked about how to get the information that will beef up your Twitter Audit. Now let’s talk about what you can do with the results of your Twitter Audit.
One service that we offer to our gold member clients, that is often part of the ongoing process of keeping publishers on task, is performing social media audits. This process is very manual, going in and checking whether or not content is being promoted most effectively.
There are four main principles of the Mequoda Method: Attract, Convert, Engage and Monetize.
Engagement is one of the most important steps in the process of audience development because if you fail at keeping subscribers on your email list, or fans on your Twitter page, then you will never monetize them. If they don’t like
How do you currently build your email list? For most publishers, there are two main drivers of email subscribers: 1) a measly “subscribe to our newsletter” box floating around the site, or 2) a check box on magazine subscription forms that opts them in.
Exciting, right? Subscribers must be flocking to your email list.
If this is
Ev Williams’ Medium – the long-form digital publishing platform that launched a couple of years back – has steadily grown in both audience and users, crossing off each item on its to-do list along the way. Gradually shedding its silly “platisher” tag and emerging as a leader in a media strategy, Medium has now moved
Pinterest isn’t always in the conversation of the social media platforms to target for digital publishers and marketers. Facebook and Twitter tend to lead that discussion. However, the growth of Pinterest is something worth noting as it may become more significant in the future.
Audience Development is at the center of the Mequoda Method. It’s the foundation of our methods for building large, profitable email lists. Since Mequoda has been Mequoda, we have written about effective audience development, and this year we went back to update some of our most fundamental lessons – many that ended up on the
After the early years of SEO copywriting, every guru on the Internet suddenly decided that SEO copywriting no longer means including keywords in your copy because it’s not natural and Google only rewards natural copywriting.
Oops, I just made the mistake of writing a completely natural sentence with the keyword phrase SEO copywriting in it twice.
Which social network do you think works best for magazine publishers who want their content to get liked? If you guessed Facebook, you guessed correctly.
Sometimes it’s easy to guess the primary audience for some magazines. Other times it’s more surprising to see some of the statistics.
Google Panda has been strong-arming content producers into improving their content since 2011. Occasionally they update their algorithm, just like they recently updated Pirate 2.0 and Penguin 3.0., to make sure we’re doing our due diligence.
As a company that packs consulting, website development and content development into one package for our Gold Member clients, we
Ever wonder how various magazines perform on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram? You probably have an idea on how your industry and audience fares, but looking at overall data can present another perspective for you.
Buying and selling directly on social networks has been around before but it appears to be escalating, especially after Twitter recently started testing the “Buy” button on tweets.
Some publishers have found Facebook to be a significant form of referral traffic, especially since Facebook has taken efforts to highlight publisher content.
We’ve been talking about the value of organic traffic for years. Audience members seem to trust it more and we’re seeing its value in terms of website referral traffic as well. A new article from eMarketer highlights data from BrightEdge, which looked at organic search traffic between June and July of this year.
The New York Times has released a new major feature to its homepage, making it a whole new desirable destination, reports Talking New Media.
Social media has transformed digital marketing strategies over the years. At first, brands weren’t on board with social as they couldn’t understand how to benefit from it. Then, after social grew in popularity, many turned towards it without knowing how to actually maneuver the landscape, and did so just because others did it.
Recycling and repurposing content is a successful strategy used by digital publishers, and one we recommend to all of our clients. Why constantly create new content when you have archives of content ready to be utilized online?
New data from eMarketer shows that the average time spent on Facebook by the average adult is 21 minutes per day.
Twitter continues to make moves that will help the company fair better as a publicly-traded entity. The social platform has toyed with a variety of enhancements, including its “Buy” button, and an array of advertising options. Now, its releasing an upgrade to its Promote Tweet options, reports Ad Week.