I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on March 16 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, Giving Life to Your New Digital Magazine Idea. This is your only chance to get these best practices for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in Mequoda Pro
As we move into the brave new world of digital magazine publishing, one thing has not changed: your people are the absolute key to your success.
Over the past year and a half, we have built a new digital magazine publishing team from the ground up. I thought I would take a few minutes today to share with you
Digital magazine publishing is and continues to be the current and next frontier, with unlimited revenue stream options coming from creative use and integration of text, images, video, social content, native advertising and so much more.
Print advertising rates have always been robust. After all, magazine ads have been superior to broadcast ads in several ways: They offer a targeted environment, they offer adjacency, and they’re self-paced, giving readers as much time as they want, not just 15 or 30 seconds.
Digital magazine advertising offers the same enticing features. And these ads
Digital magazine publishing has come a long way from its inception. Some publishers are still offering digital magazine apps, however, the future of revenue for digital magazines comes from web editions that are sold through magazine subscription websites. Web editions are superior because they can be accessed easily from any device, giving them vastly more marketing
It’s hard to determine how to spend both your time, and your resources within a business. The way we look at every decision you make is this:
Is whatever you’re thinking about doing, going to help you build an audience, improve capture rates, increase engagement rates, or monetize more visitors?
Your audience development efforts fall into three
The best thing you can offer in an ad package is exclusivity, although few publishers can. Back in the days of print-only publishing, there was little opportunity to be an exclusive sponsor of anything, but what brought them in was a separate but aligned strategy: scarcity. The most scarce and desirable sections of a magazine
If you have an idea for a new digital magazine and are considering the many options for publishing it, you’re reading the right words, at exactly the right time, and the time to launch your digital magazine idea might be soon.
Our team has been launching successful digital magazines and their support systems for more than a decade. Some
A magazine sales letter full of content and detail works best for selling premium information products online. No matter how hard we try to make winners out of short sales letters (after all, they’re much less work!) we still see A/B split after A/B split show that longer magazine sales letters work best.
Happy 300th anniversary to the newspaper publishing industry! The first official American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick was shut down after only its first issue in 1690, so the true “business” of newspapers began in 1721 with the New England Courant, and the presses have been running ever since.
The difference between a business
The true audience development definition requires maximum outreach while retaining results for future sales
Just like “inbound marketing” was the buzzword of the online marketing industry last year, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity. HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing”, which basically means bringing customers to you.
Last week we asked what is audience development?
Are you itching to launch a new digital magazine, but you want to do it right, and you don’t want to waste money on trial and error? That’s completely understandable, why couple a big risk with a big loss?
When we launched Food Gardening Network and its magazine Food Gardening Magazine in January 2021, we did
The concept of carefully curated collections of magazine content that can be reformatted into special issues is not new to the publishing world, and was in fact a mainstay of most of the print magazines I’ve published over the years.
SIPs or Special Interest Publications often accounted for as much as 20 or even 30% of
Some helpful hints on generating revenue through online advertising
What comes to mind when you think about revenue models on the Internet? Is it a relatively new model that was designed specifically for the Internet? Or do you think of traditional business models that have transformed from the physical world to the digital world?
That may have
Online magazine design has taken a number of steps forward in recent years, starting with the launch of the first-ever web magazine in 2014 called I Like Crochet. An online magazine, also known as a web magazine, is a premium publication that is read through a magazine subscription website. In our definition, it is not
A multi-platform website enables a publisher to create dynamic content on multiple platforms. Some of these platforms might be online streaming through a membership library of training videos, or it could be a web magazine—formatted for, and read on the web.
But multi-platform website doesn’t just refer to the number of ways you recycle content across
There was a time when investors were shying away from publishing media because “journalism” is “expensive” and user-generated content is “cheap”.
But as the world changes tides and begins to preach the quality over quantity sermon, investors have begun to appreciate journalism again. It reaches specific audiences. Now, who else do we know who creates that
Our primary goal at Mequoda is to build the best subscription website marketing systems for publishers. We want publishers to have a system that attracts visitors, captures their email address, engages them with great content, and monetizes them through subscriptions. A simple website may not do all of the above, but a subscription website marketing
“I simply don’t understand the opportunity,” one veteran magazine publisher told me at a recent industry conference. “My magazines are sponsor-driven. My issue archive includes hundreds of back issues. I have all these vendors and partners offering to digitize my back issue archive and make it available online. But I don’t have a clue how
We developed the Email Newsletter Scorecard with our friend and email marketing expert Jeanne Jennings. Let’s look today at #9: the all-important footer. In addition to abiding by CAN SPAM laws, having a footer resonates with the email recipient because it gives them a way to communicate with your brand, manage their subscription or opt
There is one major newspaper out there that people may think of when they think of the “click to subscribe, call to cancel” strategy. And without naming any names, let’s just say the newspaper rhymes with Bew Bjork Grimes.
So if you have ever subscribed to this newspaper, you may still be on their list simply
When it comes to launching a digital magazine, there’s no single FAQ online that can answer all your questions. What type of digital magazine should you build? How should you price it? Which software is best, and is it still advisable to build a tablet edition, or should your primary focus be on building a
An effective technique in digital content marketing is “self-liquidating premiums”—having the value of premiums exceed the entire purchase price of your product.
For example, let’s assume you have a product, perhaps a downloadable book with a list price of $49.97. You’re selling it online at a discounted purchase price of $29.97.
Let’s also assume you’re giving away three
Contrary to what you’ve probably been thinking, the ultimate digital magazine is built in a browser, not an app. That’s why web magazines are skyrocketing to success because users are quickly figuring out that they’d rather use a web magazine than an app magazine.
Not convinced? Below we’re going to talk about the most important digital
We often hear about predictions for digital magazines; how they will grow, the revenue generation expected throughout the industry and the time frames associated with these numbers.
These predictions are important, as they help publishers better prepare for the future. What’s more interesting, however, is discovering how people who are already consuming digital magazines are enjoying
If you’d asked us five or six years ago if it was a good idea to publish a digital magazine app on a tablet so that it could be downloaded in some of the world’s largest newsstands, the answer would’ve been a resounding yes. At the time, publishers reported that 20% of their subscription sales
Your email capture rate (ECR) is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your website captures each month, by the number of unique new visitors passing through your website in a 30 day period. Your goal is to capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include
While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.
Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities.
The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is
Creating the best subscription website business models starts with understanding your minimum information units—both the free minimum information units you’ll use to build a loyal audience and the premium minimum information units you’ll use to build your premium information product or products.
A minimum information unit or MIU is the smallest piece of a publisher’s content that
You would have to be living under a rock to have not noticed that premium membership programs for publishers are all the rage. After flirting with all forms of digital advertising, magazine, newsletter and website publishers have concluded that consumers will pay for premium content.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is what we call the process of optimizing your content and your business, for social media.
Typically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes first. This is the process of creating content that has been optimized for some set of keywords that our target audience is looking for.
The first rule of choosing a business model that’s ad-driven is being sure that you can make more money from advertisers than from your own products. Clay Hall once said to me that the great thing about having your own products is knowing what your ad space is worth. Because why would you let an
For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.
Membership websites are defined in part by the fact that users access the content on-demand, when they have a question they need to be answered or a learning tool they need to access. A membership subscription website archetype provides paid members with a library of information on a specific topic of interest or a cluster of
A magazine subscription website model is set up to sell subscriptions for a related print or digital magazine and to provide access to back issues and other premium content.
For the past 20 years, our team has been working in online publishing with the top subscription-based websites. This has given us a deep understanding of what
Only five years after the advent of the tablet, strategies for successful digital magazine publishing are starting to sort themselves out and deliver measurable results. Of course at Mequoda, we’re all about documenting these things so digital publishers don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
Here are 10 things you must do if you want to join
How would you like to expand your product line with something that’s based on content you already have, increases your credibility in your niche, offers your customers immediate gratification, and will sell in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands … or even millions?
People don’t just like getting gifts for the holidays, they like them all year round. Maybe that’s why our “You’ve Been Gifted” email subject line and template works so well.
The concept is that your subject line includes the words “You’ve Been Gifted” and it’s paired with an email that frames the features and the entry
The scenario plays over and over again: A publisher invests the time and money to build a multiplatform publishing website, only to wonder why they’re not generating as much subscription revenue as expected. When we audit their efforts, we find they’re not sending any promotions for their magazine. Coincidence? Or maybe their magazine promotion ideas
You may not know it, but there are things you could be doing on Facebook right now that are against their rules, or are strongly suggested against.
You may have been violating these rules in the past, too. Did you know that for a long time, you weren’t allowed to hold a contest on Facebook without
If you could, you’d hire a professional email subject line writer. You would, because you depend on your email list to sell magazine subscriptions or ads to advertisers, so smashing together 50-100 characters on the fly every day is a stinky approach to accomplishing those goals.
Ten years ago, apps and responsive website design weren’t even on the radar of a webmaster, and website analytics weren’t nearly as dynamic as they are today. Websites back then were simpler, and for publishers who want to fully leverage their content, databases and brand, websites have evolved into complex and integrated digital publishing and
A couple of years ago, Don outlined the attributes of a premium content subscription: not a website itself, but the thing that customers buy – the content subscription.
In updating this post (as we often do with our website content – a Mequoda best practice), we decided to give you an actual example of the perfect
Do you want to know how to start a magazine? In her book How Not to Start a Magazine, B. Ann Bell says the number one way new magazines fail is through poor budget planning. Poor planning for printing, postage, and marketing are among the top expenses in her book, originally published in 2006. Fast-forward fifteen
At Mequoda, we call any promotional email that features a single product or membership a Spotlight. When you’re designing a promotional email, it’s best to ask yourself: “how can I get the visitor out of this email and onto a purchase page as quickly, and as informed, as possible?”
The idea behind the Spotlight email template
Back when many current print journalists were beginning their careers, their job descriptions looked very different than they do now.
Yes, the basic idea of being a journalist is still the same—finding, researching, investigating, and writing pieces that share important news and tell a story. However, how that is accomplished and what happens after an article
“Mad Men” may have died, but in the digital age, advertising’s been born again. In fact with a 21st century propensity for growing new tentacles, the conventional ad is evolving into a new lifeform of Star Ship Enterprise proportions, boldly going where no man (or woman) has gone before.
First, no matter how platforms change, ad-driven
Although we work with many established legacy publishers, we also work with publishing startups. In fact, these startups benefit from our years of work with legacy publishers teaching them how to start an online magazine. Meanwhile startups can teach a thing or two to the digital retread legacy publishers.
If you’re a publishing startup, or are
Aggregating great content is just as valuable as creating great content
Content aggregation is often given a bad name, because it’s often done incorrectly.
The best content aggregators approach the process as the valuable art form that it is. Content aggregators recognize the web is all about content aggregation, and their work allows users to reach
These days, when people talk about newsletter best practices, they’re usually referring to free email newsletters, used as a marketing tool to drive inbound traffic to websites. But because some of us are old-time journalists here at Mequoda, we also think fondly of paid newsletters, a classic journalistic form that survives today in the digital
