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Week In Review

Mequoda Weekly: April 1st, 2013 – April 5th, 2013

Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week

Let us transform your organization into a digital publishing powerhouse – as we have for dozens of your colleagues and competitors already. Join us for the Internet Marketing Intensive!

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Saving TIME Magazine: or, the Future of All of Us

On March 3, 1923, TIME magazine was born. It was what most publications were in that era: an aggregator, dedicated to rewriting the news from around the world in pithy, pointed nuggets. To their prospective financiers, founders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden boasted that the average reader could get through an entire issue in 30 minutes.

Fast forward almost exactly 90 years, and today’s TIME is no longer a mere aggregator, but the grandfather of the weekly news magazine, boasting a worldwide staff of journalists, award-winning, in-depth reporting and an august history.

But this is another turning point in TIME’s history. With parent company Time-Warner recently deciding to spin it off, along with its 20 magazine siblings, as a separate, publicly-traded company – and with print publications, especially news weeklies, already struggling to survive in an instant-media digital world – the future is frighteningly uncertain.

I wish I could whisper in TIME’s ear. Keep Reading

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SEO Copywriting for 2013: Keywords are Still Relevant

In the last six months, every SEO copywriting blog on the Internet has decided that SEO copywriting no longer means including keywords in your copy because it’s not natural and Google only rewards natural copywriting.

Oops, I just made the mistake of writing a completely natural sentence with the keyword phrase SEO copywriting in it twice. Will I go to Google jail?

You tell me. Is the phrase “every SEO copywriting blog … has decided that SEO copywriting no longer…” unnatural? Of course not. And yet if I took the advice of all the other SEO copywriting gurus out there, I’d rush back and change one of those phrases to search engine optimized copywriting or something even more awkward and unnatural. Keep Reading

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How Email Appending Can Make Your List Perform Better

Do you realize that a large percentage of your most loyal customers may only hear from you once a month?

It seems like when you have customers who are paying to hear from you every month, they might be pretty easy to sell to again. If you just had a better way of reaching them… an email address perhaps.

What, you mean you have more than one product to sell?

Oh that’s right, you’re a publisher.

As much as every publishing business hangs on its circulation numbers, most also have ancillary products too. Books, libraries, videos, events … you know the drill. They’re sold through email newsletters, e-commerce and sometimes a good old-fashioned phone call.

A common problem we encounter in the beginning with many of our Gold Members is a disconnect between their email lists and their magazine subscriber lists. In recent years we wouldn’t even think of collecting a magazine subscription without asking for an email address, but unfortunately anyone before that period may be a lost soul in our subscriber file with an empty email address field.

Here are a few good reasons why you should really want to connect those dots and gather emails addresses for all of your subscribers:

  • They’re already giving you money.

  • They already know who you are and trust you.

  • They’re more likely to buy additional products from you.

And what will you do once they’re on your email list?

  • Send them promotions for related books and other products.

  • Contact them when their subscription lapses.

  • Offer them exclusive content just for subscribers that adds value to their subscription. Keep Reading

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The Top 20 Topics in Search & How to Use Them for Good

Don thought it would be fun to write a post that “explains our methodology for quantifying an uber market.”

Do you know what that means? To quantify an uber market?

Thankfully I know enough to write this post, but I’m fairly sure that 99% of you out there don’t. And that the remaining 1% is probably exclusive to Mequoda employees and our Board of Directors.

See, that’s the thing we like about search engine optimization. The ability to find out what people are looking for.

There are zero people searching for “quantifying an uber market” (except those of you who just feverishly looked for a definition). So, while we’ll let Don get away with it, just like we admire his ability to write entire emails in acronyms, we certainly wouldn’t title a blog that way!

And we wouldn’t title a website category that way, either, which is the point I’m really getting at. Keep Reading

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If you have only a nominal understanding of digital publishing, or none at all, you must attend the Internet Marketing Intensive.

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By Amanda MacArthur

Research Director & Managing Editor

Amanda is responsible for all the articles you read on the Mequoda Daily portal and every email newsletter delivered to your inbox from us. She is also our in-house social media expert and would love to chat with you over on @Mequoda. She has worked with Mequoda for almost a decade, helping to evolve the Mequoda Method through research, testing and developing new best practices in digital publishing, editorial strategy, email marketing and audience development. Amanda is a co-author of our four digital publishing handbooks.

Co-authored handbooks:

Contact Amanda:

Contact Amanda via email at amanda (at) mequoda (dot) com, @amaaanda, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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