Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Increasing Time on Site With the Community Content Business Model

The community content business model can bring in users and keep them on your site
When developing your strategic plans for CAROTME (content, audience, revenue, organization, technology, measurement, and economics), it’s not uncommon for publishers to forget that you have to start with identifying and establishing a primary content business model(s) to monetize.

We have identified 12

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Creating Traffic With the Calendar Content Business Model

The calendar content business model can provide a useful, linkable resource that keeps visitors coming back
It’s necessary to know the most ideal business model(s) for publishers, to be able to develop your strategic plans for CAROTME (content, audience, revenue, organization, technology, measurement, and economics). Not considering the content business model is a major mistake some

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Understanding the Freebie Content Business Model

The freebie content business model is one website we build for all of our Mequoda Gold Members

Choosing your content focus is a business-critical decision, as the focus you choose pretty much dictates your chances of success with multiplatform publishing and subscription websites. However, more serious than the focus on content is the business model itself.

It

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Don’t Build a Subscription Website Until You Identify Your MIU

Before any Mequoda client will build a subscription website, they first identify the most fundamental content their users will digest
At Mequoda, we talk a lot about your minimum information unit, and that’s because you should never build a subscription website without identifying what yours is, and how many you have.

A minimum information unit, or MIU,

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Website Architecture vs. Web Design – Which Comes First?

Website architecture refers to the funnel that leads your customers from a page, to a point of interest, like a “buy now” button, or an email subscription form. It refers to the function of your website and its webpages. It does not refer to the colors on your website or your CSS stylesheet, but the

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

How to Prioritize Building New Website Business Models

Before building out new website business models, inventory your existing content assets

Author and efficiency expert Stephen Covey writes about how difficult it is to reach goals that you don’t have. “Begin with the end in mind” is our personal mantra for every Mequoda System we start.

Publishing websites for magazines and newsletters are like Swiss Army

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

How to Perform a Quick Mobile Website Analysis

If more than 50% of your traffic comes from mobile, it’s time for a mobile website analysis to see if you’re looking as sleek as you think you are
In an interview, Hearst Head of Corporate Tech Allen Duan said, “We’ve removed the differentiation between the mobile and desktop experience. Fifty percent to 70% [of Hearst’s audience] are

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

A Website Architecture Map From Search to Sale of a Subscription

A visual website architecture map to show how we get from attraction to monetization
When we talk about our signature ACEM methodology (Attract, Capture, Engage, and Monetize) it’s easy to stop at Capture… or we’ll get to Engage and often pause there for a while, as there’s a critical acknowledgement that the process of attracting, capturing,

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Subscription Marketing: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

As long as you’re selling to humans, you can’t go wrong with classic strategies. The more I read and write about the future of magazines and subscription marketing, the more I realize that the Internet continues to create a sea change for the magazine industry. When I learned the trade, I was learning what the

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Revenue Benefits of a Subscription-Based Business That’s Run Efficiently

The successful user-driven startups of today are the ones who offer subscription-based services. As a magazine or newsletter publisher, you know a subscription-based business takes the revenue of one product and multiplies it over the course of months, or even years.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Best Subscription Business Models Are Based on Your Minimum Information Unit

As we always say, a publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best subscription business models are built. Any online publisher who doesn’t bother to understand and identify his MIU cannot choose the appropriate subscription website archetype, and, in turn, will be simply guessing at how to be a publishing success.

Why

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

What to Consider Before Setting up a Subscription Website

Setting up a subscription website could be a costly test if you don’t think about these three things first
The answers are not always obvious, even to a seasoned print or electronic publisher. Setting up a subscription website from scratch is very different from running an existing enterprise. Our understanding of website publishing is rooted in

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Website Affordance and Usability Tips To Make Users Feel Smart

Want to know a great way to confuse, distract and drive away new users? Design a website like a print ad. Go ahead, throw underlines under things that aren’t hyperlinks. Overdesign your button graphics so nobody knows that they’re clickable. While you’re at it, make it as hard as possible for someone to figure out

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

10 Reasons to Launch a Responsive Newsletter Website

A responsive newsletter website brings accessibility to the table

Totally unrelated to publishing, you may have heard that Patagonia recently ditched their app. If you open it, it will tell you that the app will no longer be updated, and they should head to their responsive website instead. “Thanks for supporting the Patagonia iPhone app. Now

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

5 Places to Test Video Landing Page Templates

Mequoda has been testing video landing pages for the past few years with great success. In fact, our Intensive attendees have told us repeatedly that our video is what convinced them to sign up. A few years ago I read a study by EyeView that said businesses who tested video on the homepages and landing

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

How to Prime an Online Magazine Business Model to Perfection

The sacred elements of any best-practice online magazine business model
Literary perfectionist Gustav Flaubert once said “our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.” He was right on the money here and not just in his never-ending quest to find “le mot juste” (“the right word”) in a sentence. Finding the perfect word, he

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

When Existing Direct Marketing Systems for Publishers Aren’t Enough

Improving direct marketing results is a constant source of discussion for publishers. They are always tracking, evaluating, and testing different offers for their products in order to optimize their results, even moreso now that it can be done online through digital direct marketing systems.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

5 Potent Ways to Curtail Subscriber Churn

The subscription model has a lot of perks and one of them is that subscriber churn rate is much lower than any other product you can offer. Customers don’t usually come to your website and buy a single issue, or a book every single month for years on end. Yet they auto-renew regularly.

Psychology suggests there’s

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Recurring Subscription Billing Benefits and Considerations

When a customer agrees to have a specific charge card billed a certain amount for a pre-determined (or sometimes open-ended) period of time, that’s recurring billing. It’s sometimes called recurring payment or subscription billing. Bank accounts and debit cards can also be billed recurrently. Common time frames are monthly and quarterly.

Subscribers like recurring billing for

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Top Subscription Billing Software Solutions for Publishers

Subscription billing software allows publishers to manage their customer subscriptions and revenue by storing payment data and processing charges on a recurring basis. Of course, subscriptions have been an important economic model for publishers for a long time and good digital publishers continue to take advantage of the benefits.

Most publishers understand that merchant accounts and

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Choosing the Best Content Management System for Digital Publishers

Your content management system is, simply stated, the system used to manage the content on your web site … but it’s so much more than just that. Choosing a CMS is one of the most important decisions publishers make today.

When it comes to choosing the best CMS for your digital publishing business, you can find

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Best Job Board System for Publishers

Publishers, especially in the B2B space, have always helped their audience by providing career development advice, and by promoting opportunities in need of qualified professionals. Often, publications will provide expert career advice, or interviews with industry leaders specifically about how to get a better job, or get the skills that can lead to advancement.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Choosing the Best Taxonomy Manager for Publishers

Most legacy publishers have years and years of content that sits on their website and can still be extremely useful for their audience. In addition, they create new content all the time, and that only gets added to the goldmine of content they are already managing.

But how do users find the exact piece of content

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Mastering Subscription Marketing Language with a Story

So you’ve launched your subscription website. You’ve determined the right price, and how you want to offer your subscription to customers, and you’re ready to think about ways to entice, persuade and convince them, whether it’s copy on a landing page, or an outbound email. Few subscribers ever make a decision to buy from you

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Best Classified Ad System for Publishers

What to look for in a classified ad system, from Haven Nexus, to yClas, Classipress and ClassifiedEngine
Classified ads have a long tradition of providing service to readers. For newspapers, classifieds were a major source of revenue until online sales services, such as Craigslist, and all the online job search services, such as Monster, took over the space they

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Best Community Management System for Publishers

What to look for in community management systems from Haven Thread, to Simple:Press to Kunena
Forums really leverage some of the best things about the Internet. Sometimes called message boards, forums allow users from all over the world to communicate together on shared interests on one platform. People offer advice, ask questions and users from the

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

10 Types of Landing Pages and Knowing When to Use Them

The first thing you need to have to create great landing pages is a basic understanding of the seven types of landing pages used by Internet marketing professionals. With that in mind, we think your odds of increasing landing page conversion rates will definitely improve.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

FTC Guidance on Native Advertising Provides Clear Boundaries for Publishers

FTC provides sponsored content labeling guidelines in ‘Native Advertising: A Guide for Business’
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidance on native advertising for publishers, released late last year, greatly helps publishers by defining the boundaries of what is acceptable in their eyes.

Why is the FTC involved? In general, under the FTC Act, an act or practice

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Test Your Landing Page Copywriting Expertise by Taking this Copywriting Test Now

My publisher friend is a fervent believer in creating A/B splits for his landing pages, focusing specifically on the titles of his paid handbooks. The graphic design of each cover is identical in color, typeface and size. His sales letter landing pages use the exact same persuasive editorial copy except for the title of the

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

3 Subscription Website Publishing Predictions for 2016

Consumers will respond to memberships over subscriptions and publishers will thrive with more integrated publishing systems
The one thing you can count on as a magazine publisher is that there will always be subscribers. Except that in 2016, they’d prefer you stop calling them that, because they’d prefer to be members who subscribe to your magazine.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

10 Top Subscription Website Publishing Posts of 2015

Our most-read subscription website publishing posts of 2015 reveal a desire for better understanding of building, publishing and pricing subscription websites
This year in our Subscription Website Publishing articles we’ve tackled everything from choosing profitable subscription models, to choosing the best colors and fonts for your redesign, and pricing your subscription websites appropriately. However, there are a

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

5 Signs of Bad Website Design & How to Fix

Websites are not magazines (most of the time). However, magazine content can be the basis of a successful periodical website that follows the basic rules of periodical website design and content management.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Great Examples of Newsletter Subscription Website Sales Pages

Each of these newsletter subscription websites illustrate how to collect and convert website visitors into paid digital subscribers
If you sell a print newsletter, considering a newsletter subscription website is a business-critical decision. Consumers expect to access their periodical subscriptions digitally, and they’re willing to pay more for access when it includes back issues they don’t

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

How Subscription Websites Bring in Publishing Revenue with Little Spend

For print magazines and newsletters, subscription websites offer a plethora of ways to gain publishing revenue with little upfront cost
Legacy publications should be ultra focused on how to create dynamic sources of publishing revenue online. Most print publications already have a digital edition available, but it’s time to take an extra hard look at developing

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Google Visibility Math: Organic SEO Metrics that Matter

Almost a decade ago, a close colleague told me that it was impossible to figure out how much search traffic a website could or should be receiving from Google and other search engines. He was wrong.

Let me explain how to calculate the amount of traffic Google and other search engines could be sending your way.

Categories
Multiplatform Publishing Strategy Subscription Website Publishing

The Library Website Business Model

Discover how ConsumerReports.org and Lynda.com are utilizing the reference subscription website model

A reference subscription website archetype allows paid subscribers continued access to a library of content that is updated constantly with new information.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Three Ways to Block Ad Blockers

Hide in plain sight and make your advertising messaging look like regular content to block ad blockers
Ad-blocking software has been around almost as long as people have had personal computers in their homes, so they’ve always existed at the same time that you’ve been depending on ad sales. But only last month did publishers begin

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

What Is a Subscription Website?

Subscription website business models have evolved exponentially in just a few years
Once upon a time, there were a few different versions of subscription websites that Mequoda defined. We wrote about them, analyzed them, and built them for our clients.

Over time, we watched new versions of subscription websites come into being. So we revised our naming

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

8 Elements of a Proper Website Traffic Report

Do you know what to monitor in your website traffic report?
We’re constantly reading and writing about how to drive website traffic, but how often do we discuss the website traffic report that all of us should be pouring over to see whether or not our hard work is going anywhere?

Anyone who has installed monitoring and

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

How Can I Find My Top Keywords Using Website Analytics?

Using website analytics to determine your top keywords and then what to do with them
When developing a new subscription website, it’s crucial to know which keywords to develop your site around.

When a client comes to us, one of the first questions they ask is, “What are my top keywords?” What they’re usually talking about are

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The 8 Characteristics of a Subscription Website

Each subscription website business model we write about has a distinct combination of characteristics
When Mequoda writes about subscription website business models, we always include a chart that outlines eight different characteristics of the different models. As far as we know, we’re the only ones writing at length about publishers’ website architecture, much less going into

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Why Subscription Website Business Models Are Ideal for Every Publisher

A magazine or newsletter subscription site paired with a portal subscription website leads to publishing success
If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you’re quite familiar with the Mequoda Method for multiplatform publishing success. You may even understand the acronym that sums it up: ACEM, which stands for:

Attract new visitors to your site organically.
Convert those

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

6 Ideas For Where To Put The Facebook Like Button on Your Website

Since the future of your articles in SEO-land is now so dependent on social media, it’s more important than ever to enable your readers with easy-to-use like and share buttons. The “like” button comes in a few shapes and forms, but if you have any interest in getting people to follow you on Facebook

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Mequoda Classroom Website Business Model

The classroom website is one of 10 website business models that Mequoda currently supports. There are six premium (paid) archetypes, including the classroom model, and four affinity (free) archetypes.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Webify Your Subscription Website While Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome

Designing a good website isn’t easy.

Many interconnecting elements have to be correctly executed to achieve profitability. Even when your website is created, how can you know if it wouldn’t benefit from a tweak here or there?

One good indicator is how many repeat visitors you generate.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

Get More Subscribers: Top 8 Reasons Why Visitors Resist Subscribing to Your Website

Do new visitors to your site subscribe, or do they take one quick look, then click back to where they came from? Here are the top 10 reasons your visitors may not be converting to subscribers.

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

8 Subscription Website Homepage Ideas for Audience Engagement

These subscription website homepage ideas will help you provide a better user experience through website design

Mequoda has long quantified its own best subscription website homepage ideas, which we put into action with all of our clients. Having recently launched two brand-new websites and re-launched a third, this is an excellent opportunity to show you how

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

The Mequoda Community Subscription Website Business Model

Some of the most successful publishers let their users generate more than 99 percent of their content. The publishers who can do this become masters at building communities that draw users to both read and post.

Out of the 16 website business models that Mequoda currently monitors, the community subscription website archetype is the only one

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

How Web Maintenance Will Improve the Results of Your Publishing System

Over the past few months, we’ve been strongly encouraging our clients upgrade their Haven Nexus Systems.

Haven Nexus CXMS is a state-of-the-art SaaS tool built, owned and maintained by Mequoda to enable all the functionality that multiplatform publishing businesses need to be successful and profitable. Our operating environment includes a state-of-the-art LAMP data center and is

Categories
Subscription Website Publishing

What Great Website Design Actually Means and How to Measure it

Have you started the venture on your next great website design? Maybe your original design was pretty great when you launched, but it’s been a few years now and it’s not so great. What exactly is the definition of great, anyway? Is it a good color pallette? A fancy design? Does it shuffle content more

Exit mobile version