Tag: ad

In 1926, a long-form print ad for the U.S. School of Music was written by John Caples, and the headline read, “They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano, But When I Started to Play!” It’s been noted as one of the most perfect headlines ever written.

More multiplatform publishers are seeing firsthand the value of subscription products and paywalls, which is why many new ones are launched. Today we’re looking at some of these paywall and subscription app launches, and the reasons these digital publishers are turning their attention to them.

So you want to know, how do online magazines generate revenue? The answer is clear: they go multiplatform.
If you’ve considered starting an online magazine, or are a legacy print magazine considering going digital, you’ve asked this question: How do online magazines generate revenue? And the answer is that the successful ones use a multiplatform approach.

ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.

Creating an abundance of value within your subscription products is the key to subscription marketing and transforming your publishing business in the digital age
From time to time, it’s a good idea to sit down and think about the value proposition you provide prospective buyers in your subscription marketing efforts. When you are running a Six Sigma

News from subscription website publishers are focusing on enhancements of subscription offerings and tools, with the intention of turning more casual audience members into paying supporters.

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 relies on its community to create the content. There are six premium (paid) archetypes, and three affinity (free) archetypes. This is one of the three free ones.

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. It’s the core of the Mequoda Method, and while anyone can buy ads, that kind of marketing just isn’t as high on our priority list as organic search is.

I woke up this morning thinking about all the great ways we’ve discovered to sell subscriptions on the Internet. Yes, these are the things that I dream about. The idea that while I’m deeply asleep, the systems we manage are busily selling subscriptions to magazines and newsletters and premium memberships that include all sorts of benefits to customers who are awake and spending money while I’m sound asleep makes me a happy guy.

Great content can be hard to find. That’s why Google is using its search engine and video platform to target high-quality content from a variety of digital publications. Today we’re looking at news of Google’s most-recent moves to attract publisher content, and we look at the benefits that licensing has had for digital publishers.

Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Portals are not meant to be read from front to back, and are in no way linear. Users may begin on an article they found through search and hyperlink their way across the site in a matter of seconds. There is no true table of contents, although there is arrangement in the form of categories, topic pages and related articles.

So what is a digital magazine? It’s a bit of a hybrid.

How to write Spotlight emails that win your Six Sigma subscription marketing testing efforts
In the past we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing. We have shared the success that one of our Gold Members has experienced after launching a high-frequency

Precision is an important part to successful audience development. Today’s news looks at some attributes that impacts this, including recent changes that can impact the strategies being used by digital publishers.

If you’re an experienced direct response copywriter, you know that “you” is generally considered to be the most powerful single word, ranking right up there with free, new and save.

As direct marketing legend Herschell Gordon Lewis says in The Art of Writing Copy, “Unless the reader regards himself as the target of your message, benefit can’t exist. Benefit demands a ‘We/You’ relationship.”

Three media platforms are generating increased revenue and profits for these three publishers
If you’re looking for new ways to increase online revenues and profits, consider learning from three publishers who we consider to be doing a great job building their multiplatform media empires, The American Ceramic Society, Countryside, and Country Living. Using these three ancillary

Digital publications need to take advantage of various opportunities that come around, particularly if growth and evolution is the goal. These opportunities typically involve new technology and strategies, new content, and new employees that can bring under-represented skills to the organization.

Back in 2006 I read an article comparing the fidelity and convenience of watching a movie on an iPod, a home theater, or in a state-of-the-art movie theater. The author cleverly pointed out that the three media platforms offer the viewer an inverted user experience on the dimensions of fidelity and convenience.

In other words, the users will experience high convenience and low fidelity on the iPod, or what now would be an iPad; moderate convenience and moderate fidelity with the home theater; and low convenience and high fidelity at the cinema. And for some people, it’s just about preference.

In the words of David Ogilvy, “a good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself.” And when selling a web magazine, one of the best ways to do so, is by giving away enough content that it basically sells itself, but not so much that visitors don’t convert into subscribers.

Subscription website publishers are honing their subscription offerings to generate greater revenue and utilize the subscriber data file that they already have. This process is not new, but some of the directions that major publishers are taking is new for these organizations, and the focus of today’s news stories.

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, oh that’s TIME’s website. But in fact, it’s a subscription marketing system. The site isn’t built just to give away free content, it’s built to collect new subscribers and generate revenue. Its web magazine alone, time.com/magazine, is just one petal of the sunflower that is attracting and converting new magazine subscribers, both free (email) and paid (digital and print).

How these innovative publishers built web magazine libraries that are comprehensive, user-friendly and make an easy up-sell from print.
A web magazine library is an archive of your content going back many years, likely since the beginning. When done right, you can upsell a substantial number of would-be magazine subscribers to this higher-end, and higher priced product that requires

Digital publishers are constantly working to find the best methods and channels for creating and distributing their content. Today we are looking at some of the strategies these publishers are using to get more engagement and bigger audiences.

As you know, having an online portal for your information is essential for growth. Using the web to publish and distribute content and not just serve as an extension of your brand is critical. But this is a new beast, and to be prepared, you must plan. This holds true even if your business has survived the last 50 to 100 years.

How the top magazine publishers in social media are leveraging three major platforms for magazine social marketing
According to the MPA’s Magazine Media Factbook, 91% of U.S. adults read magazine media, but where do they read it? Right now we’re working on our 2018 Digital Magazine Reader Survey, and social media is the second most used

New and evolved technologies can be an audience development manager’s dream if it leads to bigger audiences.

Where are your audience development strengths and weaknesses? Today’s news focuses on pertinent information for audience development managers, including actions that some major publishers are taking now.

The true audience development definition requires maximum outreach while retaining results for future sales

Just like “inbound marketing” was the buzzword of the online marketing industry last year, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity. HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing”, which basically means bringing customers to you.

Last week we asked what is audience development? Just like “inbound marketing” has been a buzzword over the past few years, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity.

HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing,” which basically means bringing customers to you that are already in your niche, rather than sending out direct mail and going to trade shows, of which the methods are expensive and have a lower return on your investment.

The ability to efficiently and effectively search for desired content while visiting a website is functionality that most users expect. Most sites offer some type of internal search feature, as a user-experience benefit and for ease of navigation.

What changes in multiplatform publishing will lead to the biggest future successes? We’re seeing more actions from publishers with both short-term and long-term goals in mind.

Some helpful hints on generating revenue through online advertising

What comes to mind when you think about revenue models on the Internet? Is it a relatively new model that was designed specifically for the Internet? Or do you think of traditional business models that have transformed from the physical world to the digital world?

That may have been a trick question, but if you answered “both”, you are correct. The Internet offers an array of revenue models, which in turn have their own subsets of revenue-generating models. If this sounds complex now, just keep in mind that this all means revenue can be generated in many ways. As you read on the intricacies should become more understandable.

Coming up with the right subscription website business model(s) is usually the biggest stumbling block for those wanting to get into this business.

Choosing your content focus is a business-critical decision, as the focus you choose pretty much dictates your chances of success with a subscription website. However, more serious than the focus on content for

The most successful subscription websites recognize the demographics that use their site the most. This way appropriate content targeting and marketing efforts can be made with alignment. Today we’re looking at subscription publishers that are targeting younger demographics, and the kinds of responses they are receiving.

While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.

Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities.

The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is near zero. The cost of delivering digital issues via the Apple, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble digital newsstands is based on remit and the cost of delivering a digital issue paid to your digital publishing software provider (Mag+, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, etc.).

Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Compare that with other media, where the articles are arranged with taxonomies and hyperlinks, and are not linear.

Hyperlinking is not linear. Any medium that enables or encourages the reader to bounce around among hundreds or thousands of articles is not a linear medium. What’s more, humans desire closure, which magazines provide. A reader can say “I have read the April issue of Vanity Fair. I finished it on Sunday.”

Digital publishing has evolved to new heights with the help of partnerships and acquisitions that lead to new offerings, opportunities, and audience exposure.

It’s amazing to look back to just a year or so ago, when digital magazines were still something of a novelty. Today, it’s a given that print publishers will soon create a digital version of their product if they haven’t already.

Adam Smith, the father of economics, believed that economic progress was most possible by the division of labor into specialist groups. That an organization could be hugely more efficient by breaking down production processes into many small tasks, performed by specialists.

Audience development through social media and search have been constantly evolving, which includes the increase or decrease in popularity for a variety of platforms. Today we’re visiting news stories that consider the relevance of social platforms for building audiences, and the areas of search engines that are leading publishers to more aligned traffic and, in some cases, paid subscriptions.

It’s been reported that the average email users spends at average of 51 seconds on each email newsletter they read. If this average pertains to your market, you need to develop a way to maximize your email’s ability to connect with your audience.

It’s entirely possible that your publishing business is worth much more than you might think. In fact you might be trapped thinking about your company like a print publisher, and because of that, your assets are being under-leveraged. Let me suggest three easy steps to unlocking that value.

Today we’re looking at three multiplatform publishers that have taken to the strategy of recycling and repurposing content to build larger audiences.

How would you like to expand your product line with something that’s based on content you already have, increases your credibility in your niche, offers your customers immediate gratification, and will sell in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands … or even millions?

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 lower for very large operations.

We’re seeing another growth in subscription website interest as Facebook makes it harder for publishers to reach their audiences and manage relationships.

A couple of years ago, Don outlined the attributes of a premium content subscription: not a website itself, but the thing that customers buy – the content subscription.

In updating this post (as we often do with our website content – a Mequoda best practice), we decided to give you an actual example of the perfect premium content subscription, and we settled on CooksIllustrated.com, the companion website to Cook’s Illustrated magazine from America’s Test Kitchen.

Deconstructing the phrase “premium content subscription” is a helpful exercise for getting this discussion onto the right track. Let’s take a look at each of the three words individually.

If you’ve ever joined a club, purchased a membership, or even became part of a team, you understand the benefits of mutual collaboration and teamwork. This year, our goal at Mequoda was to help our Gold Members run and grow their subscription marketing and publishing businesses even more by creating a publishing network of like-minded publishers.

The digital magazine landscape continues to grow as more brands turn focus toward digital magazines. Today we’re looking at Apple, which is taking efforts to engage with digital magazine content more, and Robb Report, which has launched a new digital magazine.

If you’re making plans for your own digital publication, it behooves you to also plan how to make money from it with strategic digital magazine marketing.

After all, buying a list and mailing a big direct mail package, in hopes of getting a bunch of people to subscribe as we all did in the old print days, is rather like trying to sell 21st-century tablets themselves at an old-fashioned general store where hardware, ladies’ hats and pickles all shared the same space, and the proprietor fetched everything on your list, then wrapped up your purchases in brown paper and twine.

Your magazine SEO efforts will determine how much traffic arrives and eventually converts into subscribers – what are you doing to find and plug any holes in your website?
Google is the business we all love to hate. If you run a big website, one of your jobs is magazine SEO for your website. There will

Google’s relationship with content publishers has the opportunity to become stronger with the search giant’s introduction of Subscribe with Google.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is what we call the process of optimizing your content and your business, for social media.

Typically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes first. This is the process of creating content that has been optimized for some set of keywords that our target audience is looking for.