It’s really quite difficult to find fault with an organization that devotes its time and resources to helping people train and care for their dogs using natural techniques and products. Dogs are our best friends, right? And who isn’t in favor of natural techniques and products under just about any circumstances?
So it is with the
Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report® is a privately published newsletter dedicated to the discovery of peaceful vacation retreats for the sophisticated traveler. The publication claims 85 percent of its executive subscribers hold the title of CEO/President/Owner/Partner.
We are still in the dawn of the Internet age and Morningstar.com is one of the early lights in the crowded online investment information sky. A well-designed site with a Milky Way of investment tools, Morningstar.com earns a glowing A on the Mequoda Website Scorecard.
Cooking Club of America is an efficient, user friendly membership site. We found this site by typing “Cooking Club of America” into Google, and this is the first page that showed up in the organic listings.
While this page serves as the home page of this membership website, it also serves as a rapid conversion landing
Bottom Line Secrets: America’s best source of inside information is also a lesson on how to sell newsletters online.
Giving credit where it is due: a cornucopia of useful information for industry professionals and an exemplary business-to-business website.
At first blush, you would probably expect that a world class publication, with all its resources and media knowledge, would have a truly inspiring landing page. They are, after all, The Wall Street Journal.
BabyCenter LLC, is just what it sounds like. Much like the community center in the local church, this site helps anxious parents and parents-to-be find answers to everything they need. This well-designed, interactive website brings reliable advice to a consumer audience, along with peer-support for the most anxiety producing experience many of us will ever
Although similar, the content of Advertising Age and AdAge.com is not the same. AdAge.com does not contain the full editorial content of the print edition. Nor does the print edition contain all that is in the online edition each week. However, text-only articles from the print publication are available on AdAge.com approximately two weeks after
It’s a truism that income opportunities from trade books, i.e. books sold through channels like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, are very limited. To earn a fair and reasonable living, even if a book is successful in publishing terms, enterprising authors who desire more have to develop their own back-end revenue-generating opportunities that capitalize on
Providing news and information on how to comply with Federal laws and international banking regulations is the niche addressed by this subscription website
If you divide products into two categories—must-have and nice-to-have—newsletters fall decisively in the latter. No one needs newsletters. As Bill Bonner, founder of Agora Publishing, a large consumer newsletter publisher likes to point out, “Nobody wakes up, taps their significant other on the shoulder, and says, ‘Honey, we need to get some more newsletters today.”
“We don’t turn back our odometers.”
When I first logged on to the sales letter at SuperAffilateHandbook.com, I liked the clean design and the bright colors. However, I can’t say I feel the same about the brief, but very negative, intro copy the author offers at the top of the lette
Established print publications, especially trade publications, typically have a hard time letting go of their print roots and embracing all the new functionality and usability features that are required for a great content website. This is why we use a tool like the Mequoda Website Scorecard, to give us unbiased rules to sleuth out the
TheBookStandard.com describes itself as “the all-inclusive online destination for publishers, retailers, librarians, agents, authors, distributors, studio executives, screenwriters, publicists, book groups and more!” It’s an accurate description.
VNU Business Media, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Computing, and other trade titles, launched TheBookStandard.com, its first solely online publication, in January of 2005.
It’s no secret that we at the Mequoda Group are big fans of the Motley Fools. In our Motley Fool Media Network Case Study, we chronicled the company’s admirable history from its humble beginnings as an America Online discussion forum in 1994.
Since we’re now coming out of a long, snowbound New England winter with a few more pounds on the frame than we had in September, we thought we might take a look at the weight loss websites and see if there’s a site that exemplifies a Mequoda Website Network. There are several popular diet sites:
If the advent of the World Wide Web and the superabundance of information it puts within easy reach has done anything for me, it’s made me a much better consumer of medical services and a greater participant in my own healthcare.
I’ve had spinal meningitis, cancer, diabetes and attention deficit disorder. OK, not really. But I think I might qualify as a hypochondriac, along with a certain percent of the WebMD readership. (An issue that they write about, calling it “Cyberchondria”.) So, it was with joyful anticipation of all the new diseases I could self-diagnose, that
Depending on who’s counting, there are at least 160 paid-subscription financial newsletters published in North America. The most popular focus on stock recommendations, but there are others covering everything from options and futures to precious metals and mutual funds.
Insurance.com claims to be the largest online auto insurance agency in the United States. In a May of 2004 press release, it announced results of a survey showing that its customers have saved $600 or more a year on auto insurance. Through its marketing partnerships with AOL, MSN, Yahoo, eBay and Google, Insurance.com said it
With a final score of B, BLR.com is a site, or a “network” of sites, that is already far better than average, but could be truly outstanding if only they implemented a few simple changes. Creating an editorial hub alone would be enough to spiral more opportunities for traffic, revenues and happier users.
Waterfront Media has developed a series of profitable websites, one of which is Denise Austin’s fitness and health website, DeniseAustin.com.
The global consumer electronics company Samsung currently has a campaign running on Forbes.com which caught our eye at Mequoda. The animated rectangle advertisement on the top of the magazine’s homepage rotates through several products, each with its own landing page. We’ve selected the SyncMaster 710mp LCD product landing page for scrutiny. This review reveals how
When Editor Don Nicholas asked me to review BlueDolphin.com, I was a bit hesitant. After all, he served as the Company’s CEO from its inception until 2003, when he ventured off with other business plans… plans that led to our successful “parent” company, Mequoda Group, LLC.
Reviewing WSJ.com, the “largest paid subscription news site on the Web,” feels a little like the being the kid in the children’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story, the proud Emperor had fallen for a sly tailor’s flattery. He was sold imaginary fabric: fabric that was so soft you couldn’t feel it, so
Of all the dot-com companies that were launched in the 1990s, it can be argued that eBay.com is the most successful. Twenty-four percent of all e-commerce in the United States in 2004 took place on eBay.com, up from 16 percent in 2000, according to IDC, a global market intelligence and advisory firm in the information
The Morningstar® FundInvestor™ landing page, when measured against our Landing Page best practices model, is ineffective and dysfunctional. This review is of one page on the MorningStar.com website, a link from the site’s homepage to the landing page for one of its many print newsletters.
At first blush, Monster.com appears to be an unemployed person’s best bet… hundreds of thousands of jobs just a few keystrokes away. But let’s take a moment to run it through the merciless Mequoda Website Scorecard™ system and see how Monster.com stacks up. For this test, we’ll be visiting the job seekers’ section only.
A confession: I am not the target prospect for bluenile.com, an online marketer of jewelry, because I don’t like or wear jewelry (my wife is not a jewelry “nut” either, and I have two sons and one nephew, and no daughters or nieces). I’m going to try hard to make sure that doesn’t color my
At first glance, it looks like they are generating revenue primarily through Google’s AdSense program, as “Ads by Gooooooogle” are taking up a good portion of the homepage real estate.
Once I dive deeper into the site, I realize that they may also be making money through affiliate commissions by referring users to Hotwire.com to book
The Richebächer Letter, published by Agora Financial, uses one of the more bare-knuckled attempts at turning fear into threat that we’ve seen to date. The copy on their sales letter landing page effectively takes the threat of losing one’s money and turns it into print subscription sales.
The first criteria is to analyze how quickly and clearly the site’s intention is communicated to first-time visitors. The BookReporter.com banner is immediately followed by a clear and unambiguous tagline: “Where readers and writers click.”
There are two things in life that make us feel successful and powerful, or weak and ineffectual: sex and money. Today, we’re talking about money.
The very thought of going to a bank for a loan has often been enough to make us feel small and powerless. It is asking for help. It requires disclosing intimate,
The Accounts Payable Network serves its members very well. There is an enormous amount of content here, creating an invaluable resource. It’s hard to imagine an AP professional not wanting to join this member site or objecting to its $695 initial one-year membership fee.
A Harvard Business School (HBS) education doesn’t come cheap. But if you are willing to do a bit of detective work, and forgo the actual “sheepskin” of a diploma, there are a few lessons you can learn from HBS—absolutely free. We spent the past few weeks wandering the pages of HarvardBusinessOnline.org to see what the
Winespectator.com is a great example of a successful Mequoda Membership Website Publishing Model™. The website, while similar to the print magazine, offers more functionality and added features than their print counterpart. Wine ratings and tasting notes on the website are sortable by score, price and vintage and there is web-exclusive content and commentary. A website
eDiets Doesn’t Feed You Enough Reasons to Join Their Program. I had mixed feelings when Don Nicholas asked me to take a look at eDiets.com as my first website review for the Mequoda Library.
The reason is my weight. You know those height/weight charts you see in the doctor’s office? Well, according to that chart,
Ragan.com is Strictly Business. Few organizations have done more to improve the quality of corporate communications than Chicago’s Ragan Communications. And, I suspect, few firms have done as much to maintain the morale of corporate communicators than Ragan Communications.
The folks at Red 7 Media understand that readers consume information in a variety of ways—in print, online, and in person. “Therefore,” says Editor and Publisher Tony Silber, “it’s our job to come up with a variety of marketing techniques that will work for our advertisers.”
Seth Godin, Father of Permission Marketing and Internet Pioneer, Delivers a Dysfunctional Website
Why is it that some of the best, most commonsensical and trusted marketers don’t practice what they preach? Or put more politely, why do they sometimes act counter-intuitively to what are generally agreed to be “best marketing practices”? Why don’t they walk their
ClickZ is a Formidable Online Resource for Internet Marketers—It Publishes Internet Marketing War Stories, Told in the First Person, from the People in the Trenches of the Internet Marketing and Advertising Industry
Online job advertising represents a steadily increasing share of the job recruitment industry, with a rate of revenue growth in 2004 that far exceeded that of traditional print classifieds. In October 2004, Reed Business Information (RBI) launched its own branded job recruitment site, called VarietyCareers, and expects to make a significant impact on this burgeoning
Some 16.5 million Americans—or 7.5 percent of all adults in the United States—are yoga practitioners, and another 25 million people expect to try yoga within the next 12 months, according to the results of a second annual “Yoga in America” study recently conducted by Yoga Journal. And most yoga is practiced at home. To make
