America is getting older. The immediate post World War II generation—Baby Boomers—are approaching retirement age. Smart companies are creating and marketing products to this affluent group. Her subscription website helps show them how.
Category: Subscription Website Publishing
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.
David and Jill Stowell took their experience as special education teachers and created a training and coaching program for others in educational private practice. In this exclusive Mequoda interview, they explain how they also created a membership website around their special expertise.
In this exclusive Mequoda interview, this former advertising executive, nee journalist, tells us how he draws on a lifetime of experience in marketing to create an online community for independent videographers and others in the video production business.
Sam Knoll knows his way around the business world. He has had a number of successful careers including in manufacturing, mail order, and retail. His latest enterprise is an online newsletter devoted to health and dietary supplements.
Reg Hardy brings a background as a print journalist, editor and publisher to his paid subscription online newsletter and uses his Palm Pilot to create volumes of content for four websites. In this exclusive Mequoda interview, he reveals how he gets it all done and reminds us of the importance of customer service.
Interview with Dan McCormick, publisher of a subscription website for photographers. A Canadian with a diversified business background, Dan McCormick has taken his love for photography and turned it into a popular membership website for both amateurs and professionals.
Interview with Peter Hapgood, whose membership website capitalizes on his years of professional experience in the public employee retirement industry. In this exclusive Mequoda interview, Peter Hapgood explains how he and his business partner, Thomas R. Lussier, took nearly 50 years of combined professional experience in the public employee retirement industry and launched PublicPensionsOnline.
Interview with Chris Parkin, co-publisher of an online newsletter for innkeepers and others in the hospitality industry. He began as an apprentice in the Savoy in London, and 36 years later has his own country inn—plus a subscription website directed to helping others run a successful bed and breakfast.
Interview with LeaRae Keyes, RN, publisher of a membership website designed to help nurse entrepreneurs develop and expand their businesses.
The Nurse Entrepreneur Network exists to help nurses who are or want to be entrepreneurs succeed. Its founder, LeaRae Keyes, has more than 25 years of experience coaching people to make life-style changes, alleviate their caregiving
Interview with Stanley Roberts, a television videographer whose membership website publishes restaurant and lodging reviews.
When we first reported on We8There.com last month, we were in envy of this website and its business model, so we decided to ask its publisher for more details. His answers are candid, informative and entertaining.
Membership websites benefit by adding social networking
Your discussion forum could be the most valued feature of your membership site. But if many members only lurk around, reading the posts but reluctant to make their own contributions, you could have a problem. Here are some ideas for stimulating more activity.
Brevity is the soul of wit, according to the Bard. And all the more so online. So, of course, someone created rules for you to follow when writing for the web. Okay, so maybe they are more like guidelines than hard and fast laws of cyber language. That said, here is what you want to
In this scenario, inspired by Frank Kern, you send up a trial balloon and let your potential subscribers tell you what they want, if anything, from your proposed information product.
Internet publishing, like traditional print publishing, can be risky business. A very high percentage of new publications go under within a year of launching. Here are 12 mistakes that can lead to the early demise of your site.
Recurring billing has been around almost as long as credit cards. You probably take advantage of some type of recurring billing to make utility, Internet hosting service, cable, or insurance payments.
Bristol, RI – November 17, 2004 – With the holidays fast approaching, IMR’s Usability Expert Roxanne O’Connell thought it would be suitable and enjoyable to navigate cooking websites. She was determined to find out how a publication could manage to charge money for something that is abundantly offered for free on the Internet.
What should you consider when starting a subscription-driven or membership website?
The answers are not always obvious, even to a seasoned print or electronic publisher. Starting a new website is very different from running an existing property. Over the past 10 years, my partners and I have worked on over 100 successful website startups, as well
Net sales for the entire United States publishing industry are estimated to have increased by 4.6 percent from 2002 to 2003 to a grand total of $23.4 billion, according to figures released last March (2004) by the Association of American Publishers.
A lot of member sites are set up to accept payments via credit card only. While this is convenient for you, the publisher, you could be losing sales if it is inconvenient for your prospective member.
Subscription site success is heavily dependent on email. Subscription publishers use email to keep members informed about timely information, new site content, and upcoming events.
There’s only one problem: the email must go through—but often doesn’t!
For a newspaper with only a third of the circulation of The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does an excellent job of keeping their website easily searchable and user-friendly. The New York Times’ nytimes.com and The Washington Post’s washingtonpost.com tied for a close second, while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s philly.com came in last place.
Website design tips – 8 ways to keep visitors around for more than 10 seconds
Most people can look at a website and within seconds come away with an impression of whether it’s clean, professional and worth their time, or whether it looks like it’s run by a 12-year-old out of his mother’s basement.
Before the Internet and the world wide web provided us with easy access to a plethora of information resources without charge, print newsletters were the dominant medium for publishing specialized subject matter.
Consumer magazine websites are as diverse in content and execution as the magazines they represent. Some offer robust content and interactive functionality that begin to take advantage of the promise of online publishing, while some… do not.
The key to success as an online information marketer is feeding a starving crowd.
A starving crowd is any group of people who share an enthusiasm for a topic and are passionate enough about it to spend their money to learn more. They’re “starving” for more information.
This creates an opportunity for you, the information provider.
Jim Laube publishes one of the most successful special niche membership websites on the Internet at RestaurantOwner.com. There are a lot of reasons for his success, including that he is an authority on his topic and a very savvy marketer.
We’ve all experienced online publishers who are guilty of arrogance. When they make too many of these mistakes, they don’t last very long in the member website business.
These pithy statements about the psychology of buying and selling did not originate with me. Most were gleaned over the years from my various teachers—from their books, seminars and audiotapes.
In his seminal analysis of the psychology of mass movements, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer reminds us of how eager many people are to be led, to join a cause—any cause.
You need not spend a lot of money to market your subscription website, but you will need to follow these steps if you hope to have critical and financial success.
Or put another way, does sloppiness in spelling diminish the credibility and effectiveness of a subscription site and reflect poorly on the website publisher? My thoughts, and a tool I use religiously.
Making your online newsletter easier to read is a matter of both writing style and formatting technique. Here are some helpful hints.
Most new visitors to any site get there as a result of a search engine search. What are the secrets to getting maximum visibility and top ranking?
Beware the 302 server redirect, which can either cause search engine traffic to your website to disappear or redirect the traffic you deserve to another website.
Senior citizens are the only minority group that everyone is trying to get into! They generally have some money, so many smart marketers are trying to sell something to them. That includes savvy information product developers.
Magazine publishers, book publishers and membership website publishers are re-inventing the revenue models for cross-selling information.
A recent article in Community, the quarterly newsletter of Barnes & Noble Booksellers, explains how a simple “get-to-know-you” meeting between the editors of Good Housekeeping and the magazine’s new book publishing partner, Sterling, led to a great book idea.
Like immutable laws of nature, some rules are ironclad. Follow these directives and you can expect to succeed. Ignore even one of them and your business and personal achievements will be significantly diminished.
Your (U.S.) tax dollars at work: A government report on research-based web design and usability provides guidelines for organizing and designing your membership website with the subscriber in mind