Subscription Website Publishing posts focus on how to build and operate a premium subscription website, including how to best align and repurpose your content, increase subscription orders, and best practices for subscription website architecture.
Twenty years ago, “above the fold” only referred to the upper half portion of a newspaper. Now, above the fold can be applied to many things, especially a website or web magazine, and the first screen of content a user will see when they go to your website.
We’ve discussed how savvy publishers are combining their legacy magazine subscriptions with magazine libraries to create magazine memberships online. Now we’ll we take a look at how publishers can use contrast pricing and the principles of economic behaviorism to maximize revenue and retention rates. Specifically, we’ll show you the strategies that resulted in revenue increases from 50% to 130%
Did you know that a sunflower is not just one flower, but more than a thousand small flowers, all stuck together on one head and a single stalk? Even what seems like the petals of a sunflower are considered individual ray flowers.
You might consider a publisher’s website the same way. You see TIME.com and think,
Few things fascinate subscription website publishers more than the relationship between cost and revenue for the various operational centers inside their business. We have long known for instance, that editorial or product costs are typically 8 to 12% of revenue for a niche media business. The number can run higher for very small operations and
In the summer of 2014, our longtime publishing partner Prime Publishing launched a revolutionary website magazine, I Like Crochet.
Upon launch, I Like Crochet magazine was delivered digitally, both as a website edition, complete with page-by-page navigation and a linear, magazine reading experience, and as an Apple app edition. I Like Crochet was Prime Publishing’s first
At 1pm ET today, we’ll be sharing what we know to be The Most Profitable Membership Website Model. This 90-minute Zoom presentation will provide a condensed summary of the key strategies that magazine and newsletter publishers are using to build a sustainable future for their brands and businesses. During this FREE webinar, you will:
Learn
Does your business feel GREAT right now? Just like the world, our economy, and unemployment rates, most things don’t feel great. That’s something most of us can agree on.
That said, we’ve witnessed a number of publishers thriving, increasing subscriptions and doing even better than their pre-pandemic numbers. We pay close attention to things like that,
I know that right now, times are tough. And in moments like this, you may wish you had a solid recurring revenue stream in place that could help carry you through a tough 2020.
Trust me, we’ve all been there. I’ve been working with publishers since the early 2000s, and it seems just when you’re ready
This year has been historic, and not in the good kind of way. What have you been plotting and planning during these last few months, that will help you grow a more sustainable business for the future?
If you’re not sure, and were hoping we’d just show you a model that works, I hope you’ll join
After several months of planning and development, Financial Freedom Magazine and its parent membership organization Financial Freedom Federation are open for business, launched in May 2020—in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, economic uncertainty, and widespread national social unrest—at FinancialFreedomFederation.com.
Salem-Mass.-based Financial Freedom Federation (FFF) was founded to help anybody who wants the peace-of-mind to live
We noted a couple of weeks ago that the folks at Yankee magazine had passed the 25,000 mark on their new all-access membership program. This program features their amazing digital media library with more than 1,500 articles, 7,500+ photos, and perhaps most importantly, more than 25 carefully curated collections. We think their NewEngland.com website can
It may go down in history that despite a global pandemic forcing spending cuts and historical unemployment rates, that some U.S. publishers with digital subscriptions have started generating their best months ever.
Over the last month, we’ve been covering what publishers are doing to stay afloat with digital subscription sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the
You’re familiar with the growth and prominence of the membership economy—you can see it daily as you interact with Amazon, Netflix, Blue Apron, or even your local gym. And luckily, publishers can learn a lot from other businesses that have “paved the way” to condition consumers to buy memberships.
This is no fad, it’s a bona-fide
Yankee magazine is best known in New England for its spot-on travel advice and restaurant recommendations. Subscribers enjoy guides to the cutest coastal towns, drives for foliage, the best places to grab lobster rolls, and even how to make the best apple pies. If you’re a New Englander, or someone who loves New England, you
As the global pandemic churns on and we’re all getting used to working from makeshift offices, homeschooling, and abundant video conferencing, we thought we’d dedicate today’s post to shining a light on some of the savvy publishers with whom we partner. The digital offerings their online business models afford them are taking on a new
It’s not news to you that we are living in uncertain times, and it’s not exclusive to a region, like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. It is being felt globally by everyone. You, your organization, your employees, your partners, and your customers are all living through a new normal that affects our health,
Over the past three years we’ve had the privilege of launching digital media marketing programs for more than 100 premium subscription products looking to increase their subscription revenue. Many of these premium subscription products were built by our engineering team and others were built by independent developers where we simply provide marketing services.
For the purposes
There is simply no substitute in subscription marketing for a great product that delights customers by engaging them repeatedly with topical content that enlightens and entertains. The best new premium subscription website business model we’ve seen does all of that and more. A well constructed digital media library and companion marketing program can rapidly build
Membership marketing isn’t a new game, but selling all-access memberships to digital libraries and archives certainly is. Heck, most publishers haven’t even taken the step to digitize their archives yet.
Fortunately, we develop these libraries for our publishing partners, and over the last few years, we’ve been managing every aspect of using email to market these
You may have heard the term Minimum Information Unit (MIU) if you run a subscription website with a digital library. If not, let’s recap the MIU concept, then we’ll get to the good stuff including the publishers who are making a profit capitalizing on their MIU.
Your MIU is your smallest piece of content that tells
Back in 2007, we selected WordPress as the foundation for what has become one of the publishing industry’s most robust membership publishing platforms—Haven WordPress, the ultimate customer experience management system for publishers.
Haven WordPress, with more than 40 installations, now incorporates more than 150 plug-ins and third-party interfaces that support the specific needs of magazine, newsletter,
You’ve likely heard us talk about Six Sigma email marketing campaign management so much that you think we invented it. While we certainly did not invent Six Sigma, we have learned how to successfully adapt the methodology toward direct response email marketing.
Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach for the continuous improvement of any product,
Everyone seems to claim to be an online publisher these days. But for us real publishing professionals, having the right tools—the right CMS—to publish your content easily, affordably, and so that your content is optimized for SEO and customer engagement, using all the latest best practices, is absolutely essential.
In fact, having an inferior CMS—or not
If you sell magazines, you’re finely tuned into your niche competitors. You see them leveraging their digital archives, you see them trying new email marketing tools, and you see them building deeper elements within their archives that seem like good ideas, but you probably ask — is it working for them? Is their work making
One hundred years from now, people will find it amazingly odd that magazines were once marketed as throwaway products. We already know now that a digital media library, which includes the current issue, back issues, and curated collections of topical content, is seen as more valuable by a majority of consumers than the next 12
When you think of the best email marketing service, you might be thinking of an email service provider like WhatCounts, Constant Contact, or MailChimp, but the system you use is irrelevant without a team or agency behind it that knows how to use it. At Mequoda, we, and most of our publishing partners, use WhatCounts
Ed Coburn of Cabot Heritage Corporation Bestowed with Digital Publishing Honor
Established in 2006 to honor individuals and organizations who advance the art and science of digital publishing, the Mequoda Digital Publishing Hall of Fame has inducted a new member for 2019—Ed Coburn, President of Cabot Heritage Corporation that produces the digital publishing enterprise Cabot Wealth
Let Us Come to You! The Mequoda Marketing Secrets Workshop is Going on the Road
You don’t need me to tell you about all the challenges facing magazine publishers today—and, as you know, it didn’t just start yesterday.
Marketing. Circulation. Advertising. Production. Postage. Fulfillment. Customer Service. Revenue. Accounting. Websites. Technology. Hiring. Training. Retention (customers and staff). And
A publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best multiplatform membership website models are built.
I was speaking with a colleague recently who had crossed over from the magazine industry to newspaper publishing and back, about consumer marketing trends. We noted that it will be interesting to see how lessons learned from the newspaper industry move into the magazine industry over time. Daily newspapers are both financially larger than the average magazine
Your membership website is made up of a variety of parts. To accomplish the goals of increasing your audience, revenues, and profits, all of those parts need to talk to one another. The nucleus of this system is your CMS, or content management system.
This is not unlike any team, where you have specialists and a
Premium newsletters and advisory services represent the pinnacle of subscription marketing, often commanding annual membership or subscription fees that are much higher than magazines.
When choosing CMS development services for your organization, consider how much retrofitting will be involved to get your premium membership website running and how much familiarity you have with third-party fulfillment systems.
Periodical publishers and other membership-based organizations do not run the same kind of business as most others do on the web, so why do so many
The most effective blow-in cards of the 21st century aren’t made of cardstock, they’re digital. And since offering a sample of your magazine is less effort for the user when it’s done online, you have more opportunities.
In this week’s Freebie Friday spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains why using monthly pricing to
Mequoda and WPR partner with a performance-based revenue-share relationship to grow subscription business
As one of the world’s most authoritative sources on world politics and international relations, World Politics Review (WPR) has been successful at penetrating the corporate, government and educational markets. Now, they are partnering with Mequoda Systems to aggressively grow their individual subscriber business.
Publisher Hampton Stephens
Some of the most successful publishers let their users generate more than 99 percent of their content. The publishers that can do this become masters at building communities that draw users to both read and post.
Out of the nine subscription website business models, the community subscription website archetype is the only one where the publisher
As it’s always been, Google’s main focus publicly is the ads you buy via Adwords. And, as always, Mequoda knows that the exact same concepts apply to free organic search campaigns.
If you read our white papers and posts, or you’ve attended a Mequoda Intensive, you already know how much value we place on organic search.
“Frugality includes all the other virtues.” – Cicero
Old Cicero certainly knew what he was talking about. That’s why I wanted to remind you that your chance to exercise frugality in attending the Mequoda Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive ends next week.
Maybe you noted our Early Bird deadline of April 18 and told yourself
Mequoda Systems empowers multiplatform publishers to grow audience, revenue, and profits by integrating web, email, and fulfillment systems into a seamless Customer Experience Management System (CXMS). Mequoda clients routinely double, even triple, their profits in five years or less by using our proprietary software platform, Haven CXMS
Back in 2014, we partnered with Prime Publishing to launch America’s first web magazine. Since then we’ve launched more than a dozen and have learned a lot. Prime’s web magazine, I Like Crochet, is a linear, finite edition of a magazine. Readers progress through the magazine the same as they would an app or print
An Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) code is the way that businesses track sales from their origination point (like a tweet, email or a brochure) down the funnel to their conversion page. Every audience development campaign is packed with UTM codes to see which campaigns perform best. In Google Analytics, these codes can be tracked under
If your goal is generate paid subscriptions and revenue for a premium magazine business with a robust subscription website, keep following along.
In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains how other publishers have used Haven CXMS to do just that.
If you want to know why your website is, or is not performing, start conducting usability studies. A/B tests are great for content, but when it comes to seeing how users engage with your website, online heatmap tracking tools can make all the difference.
The keys to magazine website design are function and familiarity, not bells and whistles.
I’m always surprised by how many publishers want to reinvent the wheel when they launch a new magazine website design. If they have the budget, they’ll try to do it when they create magazine apps as well.
But the secret to great design
If your goal is to generate advertising and sponsorship revenue from a free newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.
Our most-read subscription website publishing posts of last year show a continued interest in building profitable subscription websites and improving their speed and ranking.
Last year, publishers focused on increasing profitability through apps and subscription website publishing. As publishers continue to search for digital content success through subscriptions, we think the chosen top ten most-read posts
Magazine publishers have been giving away their content for decades in an effort to attract new subscribers. In online publishing, ad-driven subscription websites have an additional incentive: Increasing the eyeballs that see their sponsors’ ads.
Publications like Mother Earth News put all their magazine content on their subscription website. They believe it hasn’t hurt their circulation,
When you charge a fee to access the content within a subscription website, the site needs to provide specific and immediate benefits to your subscribers. Are you doing that?
We recently wrote about why magazine clubs are on the rise.
A magazine club is reminiscent of the book club model where you pay one price and gain access to a bundle. For example, you pay one price for a print and digital subscription to a magazine where you also get access to an extensive archive
For every publisher who dreams of creating a subscription website, choosing the right subscription management software can be a daunting task
When we set out to launch the I Like Crochet digital magazine website (the first of its kind) and tablet edition, we knew we wanted to build a state-of-the-art publication management system. We needed subscription
