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.
Removing your brand name from your subject line could boost open rates up to 18%
Back in 2007, MailChimp published the results of their top seven performing subject lines. Seventeen out of the top 20 email subject lines (with a 60%-87% open rate) included the company name. These were the top seven of all time. When
Social media is not the enemy of email. In fact, it can be used to build email circulation.
Some might argue that email is more personal than social media because an email gets delivered to your inbox, whereas you need to log into Facebook or Twitter to read a message or post. I would. What can’t
This week we’re taking a blog-cation as we pack our bags for Boston and get ready to mingle with publishing professionals at the Mequoda Intensive. In the spirit of always refreshing good content, we decided that this week is all about our top tens.
Make your email promotions sound exclusive and your readers won’t mind receiving them
Chicago Magazine caters to the upper crust crowd of Chicagoans. The average print subscriber is a female, aged 25-54, a college graduate in a managerial position with a household income of $255k and a net worth of $1,518,800. She also owns a house
How recycling, repurposing, and repackaging content can create alignment in your marketing efforts
The number of steps required to create an effective audience development plan often confuses people new to organic content marketing. One of my favorite tricks is to use the acronym ARM to help people remember that there are three distinct elements or parts
Although a large percentage of the publishers we work with generate revenue by selling products, we work with many who generate their revenue either through ads, or through a product / ad mix.
When we design email templates for our clients, there are three different ways we’d design a daily email depending on which way they’re
This week I had the pleasure of spying on one of our best Mequoda operators, Black Belt. Over the last few months I’ve been peeking in on a variety of publishers with large email circulation numbers to see where they excel.
If you’re not familiar, Black Belt has been published since 1961 and features interviews, historical
It’s no wonder Mother Earth News saw a 70x increase in revenues with enlightened email tactics in design, strategy and community
Different strokes for different folks, and different email layouts for different business models
What is the intention of your email newsletter? You spend a lot of time and effort trying to collect these email addresses, so certainly your email newsletter needs a defined business goal.
In my recent escapades of combing through the email calendars of publishers large and small, I’ve discovered a few secrets about the brands I’ve been spying on. The biggest secret of all is that rarely do any of them stick to a systematic system of email publishing.
Typically all of our emails are written, edited and
5 tips for writing and titling blockbuster SEO articles that will generate more Google visibility
A blockbuster SEO article is a post that will show up in the first three pages of Google, preferably page-one, and remain there for an extended amount of time.
Blockbuster SEO articles do not happen by chance. Although, I suppose if
New York magazine has become one of our favorites around here. And not just because their iPad app is one of the more innovative ones we’ve seen, but also because we keep watching them innovate.
Lately we’ve been analyzing the email calendars of our favorite magazine brands to discover any trends in consistency timing and promotional
Knitting Daily, a crafting website that anchors Interweave Knits, is a Mequoda best-practice website. Over the next few months I’ll be analyzing the editorial calendars of publishers, and given that the folks at Interweave have always been our golden children, we decided to start with them.
On KnittingDaily.com, a user is given unlimited opportunities to sign
Would you like to see an increase of 700% in your monthly email marketing statistics?
Email is an interesting medium that’s used differently by an array of businesses. I’ve worked with email marketing and newsletter creation for publishers and non-publishers, for-profit companies and non-profits. Although there is certain overlap, many companies do it differently and still
When someone discusses the components of the best email design, what do you think about? Is it the physical look of the email newsletter or marketing piece? Or does it go beyond the look?
Top email marketers look at the whole picture before defining the best email design. They consider their own list growth, the
As humans, we are drawn to shiny things. You can have a 200-page book, but when you add pictures, examples and visual case studies to a page, you’re keeping the readers’ attention for longer, while they examine the image.
The same goes when you are selling a product. Someone recently asked us in our members-only Mequoda
Everybody checks their email daily. I’m one of those millennials that stereotypically uses my phone as an alarm clock and checks my email before I even roll back the blankets and crawl out of bed in the morning. Personally, I find urgent morning emails a great incentive to wake up!
Organize email marketing campaigns by creating an editorial and promotional calendar that keeps editors on track and in line with email revenue goals
If an email gets sent to an inbox and lands in the junkbox, does it make a sound?
Emails not getting delivered once in a while is typically an anomaly, but…
Have you ever sent an email that ticked off an inbox or two (thousand), sending it careening down the dark hole that drops your email into
You can build email circulation over forty different ways, and we’ve got all the case studies to prove it! If you’re subscribed to our email newsletter, then you’re living proof that the tips I’m about to share actually work. One of them even worked on you
Don thought it would be fun to write a post that “explains our methodology for quantifying an uber market.”
Do you know what that means? To quantify an uber market?
Thankfully I know enough to write this post, but I’m fairly sure that 99% of you out there don’t. And that the remaining 1% is probably exclusive
Now’s the time to plan for tablet and smartphone email platforms
Just when you thought you’d mastered all the new copywriting techniques demanded by the 21st century … mobile devices are about to shake up your world.
When I have my email copywriter hat on, I enjoy the opportunity to flex my marketing writing muscles without the
“Oh great, one more thing to do,” thinks every editor you’ve ever approached about search engine optimization.
Because of this common adverse reaction, it’s important to emphasize the longevity of articles when they’ve been search optimized.
Write less but create powerful headlines
Which of the following headlines do you think will perform better?
As online professionals, we spend a lot of our time testing, researching and applying new strategies to create “best practices”. Sometimes these practices apply to everyone and sometimes they just apply to us. It’s the “testing” part of it that’s so crucial to determine which is which.
Best blog names contain a keyword phrase
One of the huge advantages of creating a new portal brand is having the chance to pick the name with SEO in mind.
This is our absolute favorite strategy for naming blogs and portals. In this principle strategy for choosing the best blog name we take your uber phrase and
Blending compelling copy with keyword strategy takes practice. Lots and lots of practice.
Online copywriting has made it necessary for us, ah, mature copywriters to update our existing skills to meet new demands. And even if you’re a digital native who learned online copywriting right off the bat, the strategies for creating copy that’s both persuasive
Every publisher has a love/hate relationship with backlinks. We love when they’re high-quality and make us look good, and we hate when they’re bad and make us look spammy. For the most part though, backlinks of all shapes and forms at least provide a smidgen of proof to Google that we’re worth reading.
How easy is it to interact with your email newsletter?
Marketers can get carried away with email. Some will hide the unsubscribe link with tiny text. Others will use more calls to action than a drill sergeant. These marketers forget that people, not cash machines, are reading the email, and they should be treated well.
10 email marketing template best practices for success
With email being one of the most effective ways of marketing our products, it’s always a good time to review Best Practice email marketing templates. And while I admit this kind of cut-and-dried work isn’t as much fun for us writers, it’s still necessary to good marketing!
So contain
It might be true that some sites are “winning” the search engines simply by existing and being a well-known reputable sources, like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
But it’s even more true that most of us have to work at it.
Don calls SEO “the new direct mail.” Keyword research and implementation is perhaps
Link building in itself is sort of black hat. You’re putting in effort to create inbound links that weren’t created organically.
But as marketers, you have a duty to pay attention and try to build quality backlinks. Thankfully, there are still plenty of white hat, legitimate strategies out there for you to try.
You too can build a digital publishing empire with this Mequoda marketing method
Did you ever hear the one about the small, special-interest publisher who made more than $2 million from a single, 12-page PDF?
Would you believe me if I told you that content was free?
Believe it. It’s not a fairy tale – it’s a true
Can your email management system do all this?
A Mequoda System is built as a package to be SEO optimized, full of content, withstand a ton of traffic every month, accept payments and easily distribute content through social media and email marketing. To do this, we have ongoing relationships with companies like PayPal (payment processing) and
When it comes to SEM, publishers are very, very special
There are literally hundreds of individuals and companies on the Internet who call themselves a search engine marketing consulting firm. One such firm even promises to get you ranked in the first four spots in Google search results without a website – using YouTube and custom-made
A look at email marketing statistics you must know
Email is the cornerstone of your audience development and product selling goals. An online editor’s primary responsibility is to reuse, recycle and repurpose premium information product content as free email newsletters and website posts. If you’re a Mequoda System editor, your main goal is to build the
You may never be Rupert Murdoch.
But you could become Consumer Reports, Morningstar, Meredith or any of the many publishers who are currently making millions from their content on the Internet by attending Mequoda’s Internet Marketing Intensive this January in New York City.
Gutenberg is dead. And you will be, too, if you don’t make the transition now to meet the public’s growing demand for digital information.
Fortunately, there is one resource, one unique program that can change the way you, your staff and your entire organization think of the Internet and help you catch up to the future.
So, you’re the keyword checker in your publishing company. Maybe you’re the editor, who writes blog posts and optimizes them for the web. Or maybe you’re the analyst who compiles the keywords for the editors and copywriters to use. Either way, your sacred title of keyword checker comes with great responsibility to help your business
Components all email newsletter templates should share
We’ve discovered that the best performing email newsletters — those with the highest value, as measured by producing the highest revenue per thousand — reflect a total alignment between the subject line, headline, subhead, body copy, embedded text ads, display ads, and the featured product.
These SEO copywriting tips will help you rank higher, attracting new audience members
SEO copywriting is a unique creature, pairing creative content with technical guidelines. To be successful at the craft, one must strike a chord with the audience members by appealing to their emotions, self interests and mind set, following keyword phrase parameters that have
Last chance to register for today’s live webinar on crafting breakthrough sales letters
If you don’t know how to write great sales letters, you will fail as a copywriter.
This sentiment resonates even more online. Words are the key to audience development and content marketing revenues online. They are more important than ever before – are you
Where there’s a search engine, copywriting must follow
Once upon a time at another company, far far away, the editorial director wandered over to the marketing department and asked me to rework the leads in the articles our highly-educated writers were producing. These articles were written about the business side of the biopharma and device industries,
Three or four times a year I get to help launch a new website. Given that we use organic sources like search engines, links from referring websites, and social media to drive qualified traffic, getting those first visitors to a new website is an interesting challenge. The tips provided below will help increase website traffic
Join us Dec. 4 for Writing Breakthrough Sales Letters and receive a template you can use for creating killer direct response copy
It’s called copywriting for a reason!
All of the best copywriters steal techniques, subject lines, and calls-to-action from other writers, then they test the copy on their own audiences.
Your primary keyword phrases, also known as keyword clusters, are typically based on your most broad keyword phrases. These keywords are usually topics or main categories on your website.
Our Writing Breakthrough Sales Letters webinar will teach every element to writing emotionally charged sales letters, proven to increase conversions.
Unique selling points (USP) were introduced to marketers more than 70 years ago, and their ability to convince consumers to buy is still strong today.
The main reason unique selling points still work is because they focus
Publishing is at a crossroads. Are you ready?
No one is in business to fail. But with demand for digital content off the charts, no one can afford to put off making the transition to online publishing. Why, in just a few weeks, Newsweek will publish its last print edition ever. Are you ready to make
We tend to spend hours upon hours optimizing our sites and articles and rarely give a thought to who’s competing for those same keywords. Competition has gotten fierce since the last Penguin update and it’s more important than ever to check your rankings and try to capitalize on those niche keywords.
So how can you find
The Internet Marketing Intensive is characterized by the comprehension of its parts
The Internet Marketing Intensive is a holistic program. It’s designed to take all things digital, and put them in the context of your overall digital publishing strategy. This program isn’t a tactics course; it’s a strategy program.
If you must meet the needs of current
