If you’re making plans for your own digital publication, it behooves you to also plan how to make money from it with strategic digital magazine marketing.
After all, buying a list and mailing a big direct mail package, in hopes of getting a bunch of people to subscribe as we all did in the old print
We are thrilled to announce that as of November 1, we have acquired GreenPrints gardening magazine in a complete asset-purchase agreement with GreenPrints founder Pat Stone. Acquired assets include GreenPrints magazine with 12,000 premium subscribers, a product line of books and notecards, and an online store at GreenPrints.com.
GreenPrints was founded in 1990 by Pat Stone,
Knowing how to start an online magazine requires first understanding the differences between an online magazine and the dozens of other publishing models available to you in the 21st century.
These differences range from the obvious – a comparison with print products, for instance, is pretty straightforward – to the more nuanced: say, discerning an online
Back in 2006 I read an article comparing the fidelity and convenience of watching a movie on an iPod, a home theater, or in a state-of-the-art movie theater. The author cleverly pointed out that the three media platforms offer the viewer an inverted user experience on the dimensions of fidelity and convenience.
In other words, the
Because an amazing amount of work goes into producing each new issue of your digital magazine, promoting each issue should leverage the unique content included in that issue. We can spend hours researching and discussing the merits of the cover story topic and how it should be presented. Your digital magazine cover story thus becomes a nexus for promoting each new issue through all of the native online
Portals are seen most often because not only are they a profitable model on their own, they’re also intended to build and feed an audience for affiliated premium subscription websites. They are specifically designed for SEO, email marketing, list building, lead generation and building engagement and loyalty. It’s a Mequoda best practice to build a
We’re all about the mighty freemium around here. Create content and give it away for free so that people know how good your premium content is – and they’ll buy it later, or subscribe. And they do. But do you know how to create a freemium that does the job?
We’re in for the long haul
A magazine membership includes two primary components; a magazine subscription and a magazine archive, or library.
Magazine subscriptions, of course, are quite familiar to you if you are a magazine publishing company— they are the future issues of the magazine. Unlike most businesses, magazines have traditionally sold products that don’t yet exist. The consumer agrees
Are you a content aggregator? If you source content from other sites, and then turn it into new material to riff off of, then you are. There are dirty rotten scoundrel ways to do it, of course, but most highly respected publishers do content aggregation the right way.
What is content aggregation?
Many successful publishers, especially news
Words are more than just symbols on a page that provide information. They communicate thoughts and ideas. They speak to the human psyche. They evoke emotions. But they don’t do any of these things very well if they aren’t chosen carefully. Before you try out any other subscription website copywriting tips, it’s a good idea
How do you usually promote a magazine? Subscription and newsstand sales are the keys to driving advertiser interest in print magazines, but how does that change in the digital world?
Blow-in cards. Social Media. Direct mail and email renewal series. Subscription agents. The list goes on for all the ways publishers promote print magazines.
Now what are
The latest publishing trend isn’t just about magazine publishing in general. It’s a digital publishing trend: Launching digital-only magazines without legacy print publications behind them.
Mequoda has a client who is doing just that. Prime Publishing is a company that began with free websites but no print publications whatsoever. Now the company is launching digital-only magazines
It’s been reported that the average email users spends at average of 51 seconds on each email newsletter they read. If this average pertains to your market, you need to develop a way to maximize your email’s ability to connect with your audience.
Most of the subscription business model facts you usually hear likely pertain to percentages and numbers that don’t apply to you and instead reflect someone else’s business. But the ten facts below give you permission to take a step toward progress in subscription marketing and try things from a new angle.
1. You can increase revenue per order
We started this year with the launch of Food Gardening Network, a digital magazine publishing system that is built to follow all of our best practices, conduct additional testing, and most importantly—deliver high-quality gardening advice and recipes. It’s a hub for food gardeners of all skill levels, for creating and maintaining a food garden at
Multiplatform publishing is the cornerstone of what we do at Mequoda. If you can create one content product, you can create many content products. If you’ve been following along with us through this blog, or through our daily newsletter then you have a general foundation for building a multiplatform publishing business.
Back in the 1990s, many publishers distributed their controlled-circulation or free magazine as a download from their website or something they would send out as an attachment to an email. The PDF format made these new magazines easy to read on any device as long as the user had access to a PDF reader that
Are you looking for a proven email marketing template that is proven to grow your subscription business? How about seven?
If that sounds like you, then you’re invited to join us on October 13 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, The 7 Email Marketing Templates You Need to Succeed. At Mequoda, we have developed, designed,
The revival of premium digital newsletters has unsurprisingly begun. Some of us have been expecting it for a while. We can see this re-emergence as major brands vie for position among the masses of existing publishers. For instance, Twitter recently acquired Revue, a newsletter publishing company similar to Substack, which we’ve written about before. As
Little-known fact: If you send out an equal number of (1) content-rich email newsletters and (2) straight product spotlight promotions versus sending only promotions, email engagement improves. In fact, the length of time you’ll retain an active email name will almost double.
Again: The active lifetime of an email name almost doubles when you email an equal number
Words matter. Imagery matters, too. But, the purpose of imagery in direct marketing is not to please or entertain—the purpose of graphics in direct marketing is to get your audience to read the accompanying words!
The art of crafting compelling words for email is known as email copywriting—it’s really an art and a science. Artful in
Have you ever thought about digital magazine history? Magazines were originally invented in the 15th century, shortly after the invention of the Gutenberg press. Magazines were different from books because they featured different authors arranged around a single topic or some other central theme and were periodic, published at a regular weekly, monthly, or quarterly
Mequoda’s Haven WordPress system is a digital publishing and marketing system for subscription websites that will ultimately be one of many successful digital publishing business models deployed online that are or will be the successors to print magazine publishing. That said, it’s always fun to explore the content frameworks and user journey for someone who
Earlier this year, I read with something between amusement and dismay a recent piece about how the Wall Street Journal, one of my favorite news sources, is trying to do a better job addressing newspaper SEO (search engine optimization).
In an article from Business Insider, Steven Perlberg explains how WSJ is asking staffers to focus more on
I continue to read with interest how free email newsletters are the hot new thing. A recent Digiday article shared that The New York Times, who has 15 million email subscribers “debuted a deck of 18 new and existing subscriber-only newsletters to readers” this month. Additionally, Quartz, who has 1.3 million newsletter subscribers and 11
I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on October 13 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, The 7 Email Marketing Templates You Need to Succeed. This is your only chance to get these templates for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in Mequoda Pro for $49/mo.
As someone who’s looked at your website every day for a long time, you probably have no business reviewing your own website. There are probably things in the back of your mind that you’ve kept a mental checklist of – items that need to be optimized, altered and updated. Have you been writing these things
Do you want to know the secret to email marketing success? We have developed 7 email templates that will take your campaign from boring and bland, to jaw-droppingly engaging with the highest conversion rates we’ve seen. They’re so simple, but they’ll make a huge difference for your business. These templates can be applied in any
If you’re one of the hundreds of magazine publishers who are still giving away your magazine content, it’s probably time to stop and think about using that content to sell premium membership website subscriptions.
The evolution from print magazine publishing to digital magazine publishing has been accelerated by the pandemic. The trend has been in motion
If you want to build a magazine audience, the foundational principles of Buddhism teach you that life is suffering, and that to live a better life, you must learn how to be content with that. No sugar-coating, just “yes, you’re right, life is hard, now let’s get on with it, shall we?” By starting with the
Some of your customers will want one of your products, and others will want more. But how many will buy the first and never return, and how can you generate continuous revenue through subscription products from those target consumers?
We’ve written in the past about how The American Ceramic Society is converting single video buyers into all-access
There are dozens of multi-media platforms we can distribute content on, but audio conferences and webinars have been the key to success for some publishers
If you’re looking for new ways to increase online revenues and profits, consider learning from three publishers who we consider to be doing a great job building their multiplatform media empires, The American Ceramic Society, Countryside, and The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Using these three ancillary media platforms, they are able to
We currently operate more than a dozen digital magazine publishing systems in partnership with some of the country’s leading content brands including Prime Publishing, Yankee Publishing, and Cabot Heritage Corporation. The tips and advice provided in this article are drawn from our direct experience around building and growing successful premium magazine and all-access digital magazine
When you go responsive, it makes you focus on your top one to three primary goals. I can’t tell you what your goals are, but I can tell you how to make them clear in your next daily email newsletter design.
For a long time, the best email newsletters had a sidebar. We and all our
Do you know what your freemium conversion rate is? Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list is one of the most important items on a publisher’s to-do list (or at least it should be.)
At Mequoda, we’ve been singing this song long
A few weeks ago, I read an article from Peter Houston at What’s New in Publishing that said email is the ‘Comeback King’ of digital publishing. That’s a far cry from a famous statement back in 2009 from the Wall Street Journal, that email newsletters were officially dead. Boy, that didn’t age well, did it?
Do you know how to get people to open email? In a presentation called The Science of Email Marketing that we attended a while back, analytics nerd Dan Zarella said bluntly, “I would rather have an email subscriber than a Twitter follower.” We’d like to think it’s because email subscribers respond better to promotions, but according to
Online Publishing 101: Creating and selling blockbuster digital white papers, special reports and handbooks is a core skill for many successful online publishing companies. With low production costs, no inventory and higher price points, these digital downloads are a key product strategy.
Choosing the right business model and supporting infrastructure for any business is a key strategy for business success, especially in website publishing.
Gas stations, supermarkets and bookstores are all retail businesses. They all resell products, yet the specifics of their business models and their physical infrastructures are very different. Optimizing those specifics will support higher revenue,
If you want to convert more website visitors into new members for your membership website, or any type of subscription website, write compelling copy. Use emotional copywriting to twist their heartstrings (eharmony.com) or tap into all the ways your product will benefit the new member (ladders.com).
Below are some wise tips from our Executive Content Director
It’s a good time to be a publisher. Brands have launched their own brand magazines, and many publishers have gone digital-only. In our minds, there’s not a competition between print and digital, more like an obvious need to create an online magazine from your legacy brand if you haven’t already.
Online magazines are available through a
Twitter isn’t just about the here and now. In social media, you could post the same article ten times a day, but your traffic would only be driving traffic to that one page. That’s why it’s always a smart idea to recycle your articles on Twitter using our 12x12x12 method, so that blog posts from
Slow loading web pages can mean turning customers away from your landing pages and ultimately from buying yor products.
One of the most profitable subscription website business models is a magazine subscription website.
It’s not because it’s cheaper to build, or brings in substantially more revenue than other business models, it’s more profitable because once your platform is up and running, you can recycle content you’ve already paid for, and create a content bundle that’s
Publishers are embracing digital magazines because users are. And it’s true for B2C and B2B, as well as pure paid subscription, controlled circulation, or both. These publishers are taking advantage of digital editions to provide the features users want and can’t get from print – video, curated collections, audio, interactive tools, social sharing, and more.
When a magazine goes digital and becomes an app, or a web magazine, it becomes alive. And that’s scary for some publishers. Suddenly, ads become more valuable to advertisers because they can be clicked. Content becomes more rich because it can also be hyperlinked to references and authors on the web. Live content can be
Recently a publisher came to us interested in our email marketing services, in which we develop, test, manage, monitor, and react to a series of email marketing campaigns developed using the Six Sigma method.
They told us that copywriter after copywriter had failed to convert free email subscribers into paying subscribers. They asked us to take
The best email subject lines provoke open rates and persuade subscribers to read your email newsletters
There are dozens of methods, tricks and tips for writing great headlines. Unfortunately, this isn’t direct mail, and we have spam filters to adhere to, and character counts to abide by when it comes to writing great email subject lines.
Do you feel like working at home over the last year has made you want to gather more than ever? We miss attending events and meeting new people who love working in this industry as much as we do. Normally, this time of year we’d be meeting in Boston with our publishing partners for a
