Tag: ad

At Mequoda, we have the privilege of marketing more than 200 premium subscription products including magazines, newsletters, and memberships that spark a myriad of ideas on how to create value.

It’s entirely possible that your publishing business is worth much more than you might think. 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.

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving,” said David Ogilvy, known as “The Father of Advertising” the “Original Mad Man”.

Even our best performing clients—who publish on multiple platforms, run several subscription websites, and have helped define our pricing best practices—will see a drop in subscription sales when they stop testing. I told this to a client recently who went from having some of the highest conversion rates of our clients to having our worst performing rates, and we believe the culprit is a lack of subscription offer testing with new offers, like a 30-day free trial.

Web magazine consumers like to read their magazines like they read their news – online.
Users are becoming more accustomed to viewing magazine content in the form of web magazines. Web editions can be displayed on any mobile or desktop device, so users are as familiar with the interface as they are with a web browser,

You may be sitting on three significant hidden assets that you can use to build your email marketing lists quickly
Do you realize that you might be sitting on a few opportunities to increase your email marketing lists? In the investments world, hidden assets are considered those that don’t show up on a balance sheet. Real

Facebook and Twitter were once major focuses of audience development strategies. Some digital publishers still receive favorable traffic from these social sources, but we’re also seeing other social networks and strategies gain popularity. Today we’re looking deeper into this news to see how it’s impacting publishers.

Your average email open rate can only get better (with these tips)
The thing about metrics and the KPIs you track is that everyone needs a baseline. So while you can compare yourself to the rest of the publishing industry, the best thing to compare yourself to is yourself.

With that said, the average email open rate

Publishers who are generating revenue through multiple platforms may include events on their list of products. If you’re in the B2B publishing niche, you may see your competitors throwing roundtable events and wonder, “what is a roundtable event?”

We’re seeing new developments from some multiplatform publishing giants, including Hearst and The Wall Street Journal, that involve a focus on content and digital experience.

Only five years after the advent of the tablet, strategies for successful digital magazine publishing are starting to sort themselves out and deliver measurable results. Of course at Mequoda, we’re all about documenting these things so digital publishers don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

Here are 10 things you must do if you want to join the ranks of millionaire publishers … a goal we think is worthy of all digital publishers today.

This week we’re focusing on engagement, in How Can Engagement (E) Be Improved? The ‘E’ in the Mequoda Method’s ACEM, is really about retention, and the idea that if you’re a subscription-based publisher, that the link with relationship with your customer is key.

If you’re a publisher who maintains multiple websites, making the correct choice of a subscription management system is one of the most important decisions you’ll make, because doing it over and over again cuts into your profits and resources. We’ve watched numerous multi-website publishers trap themselves into a path that was too expensive to upgrade easily and efficiently because of the way they expanded the system in a nonstandard manner.

How a new California automatic renewal law affects all subscription businesses with customers in the golden state, and how to prepare for Vermont’s double opt-in requirement.
A new California automatic renewal law—that went into effect 7/1/18—requires online sellers, doing business in California, to allow online cancellation of auto-renewing memberships, subscriptions, or any recurring purchases that were initiated online.
This

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.

We aim to be one of the best sources for magazine trends online, but we do it with a whole lot of help from our brothers and sisters in the industry.

Below we’ve compiled a list of the best portals, the best influencers, and the best reports on magazine trends available online. If you have more to add, please share your favorites with us in the comments.

Digital magazine publishers stay competitive and relevant to their audiences by presenting the best experiences possible. We watch constantly as experiments are made in the digital publishing industry to reach and connect with audiences. Today we’re reporting on the latest attempts at providing better user experiences.

Digital magazine publishing software is important; which option are you using?

Publishers have been trying digital magazine publishing software during the last few years in hopes of creating the best digital products for their audiences. And like everything else in digital magazine land, digital magazine software has evolved at light speed since we made our initial recommendations in January.

Here’s our latest (opinionated) look at the magazine software landscape.

One of the most important email marketing guidelines you’ll encounter is how to confirm subscribers to your email list, and there’s always time to change your mind.
When you think of email marketing guidelines, you probably think of headlines, subject lines, calls to action, and button colors. However, one of the most important decisions you make

The best audience development strategies meet an audience where they want to be met. Today we are looking at the expansion of some audience development strategies for content publishers at Ebner Publishing International, which publishes about 80 magazines, and is using content engineering to drive more traffic.

If you could, you’d hire a professional email subject line writer. You would, because you depend on your email list to sell magazine subscriptions or ads to advertisers, so smashing together 50-100 characters on the fly every day is a stinky approach to accomplishing those goals.

When you think of the top magazine companies, you probably imagine Time, Cosmopolitan, or Better Homes & Gardens. If you publish a magazine, try to instead think of the magazine media companies in your niche. Comparing a niche magazine to a general-interest publication will leave you empty-handed in the idea department.

Another major multiplatform publisher is in the process of making moves to unload some of its magazine titles. Today we look at Condé Nast, the company’s move to sell popular magazines, and its strategy going forward.

Once upon a time, online advertising had a shady reputation.

Luckily for publishers, that’s all in the past. The online advertising industry has improved its reputation, and consumers have become more accustomed to seeing these ads. Even the once-dreaded popup ad has become routine, especially when it’s carefully aligned with your content, which is a Mequoda Best Practice.

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.

Your website is made up of a variety of parts. To accomplish the goals of increasing your audience, revenues, and profits, all of those parts need to talk to one another. The nucleus of this system is your CMS, or content management system.

This is not unlike any team, where you have specialists and a project

When choosing CMS development services for your organization, consider how much retrofitting will be involved to get your subscription website running and how much familiarity you have with third-party fulfillment systems.
Periodical publishers and other subscription-based organizations do not run the same kind of business as most others do on the web, so why do so many

Advertising and website strategy evolves as publishers find the best channels, advertisements, and processes to follow. Today we’re looking at some new elements to online advertising.

Slow loading web pages can mean turning customers away from your landing pages and ultimately from buying yor products.

Online magazine design has taken a number of steps forward in recent years, starting with the launch of the first-ever web magazine in 2014 called I Like Crochet. An online magazine, also known as a web magazine, is a premium publication that is read through a magazine subscription website. In our definition, it is not the same as the homepage of a magazine, where content is freely distributed, unless that content is metered by a paywall.

We often see publishers move forward with a variety of media acquisitions in order to target a specific market or fill in parts of their business that they deemed as lacking. Today we are looking at news of some recent publishing and media company moves.

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.

What makes you open an email? Urgency? Benefit? Brevity? What we’ve found is that the most attention-grabbing subject lines rarely have a lot in common at first glance.

If you search around the web for the best performing subject lines, you’ll find ones like, “I was right – and that’s not good for you” and “We’re starting in 5 HOURS” from Sumo.com. You’ll also see “I have good news and bad news…” and “Let’s fix your offer together” from digitalmarketer.com. But what do these email subject lines have in common?

Google has been a major source of audience development and paid advertising for years. Today we are looking at some recent news from the search giant, that may be helpful to content publishers.

Email subject lines are just one part of the email delivery equation. Emails are delivered to inboxes based on subject lines, content, and reputation. In some cases, engagement is even applied to this filter.

In his bestseller, “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell stated that it takes 10,000 hours, or approximately ten years, so become an expert at something. That means there are very few digital product development experts out there in the universe, even in the publishing world. Let’s consider some of the digital products we interface with regularly today.

Content publishers with the most success meet their audiences where they want to be met, and do it through the most-opportune channels. Today we are looking at some ways additional revenue opportunities develop for publishers in a time when digital media is growing.

The web lets publishers create a wide variety of products more affordably than ever. That is good news, but it carries a downside: we aren’t experts in creating every digital product.

The term “white paper” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. When you hear white paper, you may think of a paid medical report. Or, you might think of a free marketing report. The tips that we’ll run through below can apply to either/or.

These subscription business model facts will help you take a new look at your current approach to subscription marketing.
Most of the subscription business model facts you usually hear likely pertain to percentages and numbers that don’t apply to you and instead reflect someone else’s business. But the ten facts below give you permission to take a step

Subscription and membership website launches are common these days as publishers tap into audiences, markets, and these renewable sources of revenue. Today we’re looking at content publishers entering this arena and optimizing their experience through expansion the use of tools.

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

I Like Crochet has improved upon their already best-practice web magazine with collections, clubs, and previews.
It’s genuinely thrilling to be in the publishing industry at this moment and time. Think about how one of the defining factors of millennials is that they have been alive to experience life with and without immediate access to the

Digital magazine publishers are putting more emphasis on digital audience growth, and doing it through a variety of methods including internal content, acquisitions, and third-party content partners.

Knowing how to start an online magazine requires first understanding the differences between an online magazine and the dozens of other publishing models available to you in the 21st century.

These differences range from the obvious – a comparison with print products, for instance, is pretty straightforward – to the more nuanced: say, discerning an online magazine from a digital magazine. What could possibly separate the two other than terminology?!

When is the last time you looked at your unsubscribe page? If you have a high unsubscribe rate and your answer isn’t “recently” then it’s time you reviewed what people see when they try to unsubscribe from your email newsletter.

As some publishers find themselves having a contentious relationship with Facebook, one of the social giant’s other properties is gaining popularity. Instagram has become a new favorite traffic driver for some publishers and today we’re looking at some of those finding value in this social network.

Discover the carefully guarded source of the world’s most effective email subject lines that most professional copywriters don’t like to share

The ten biggest take-aways about magazine media learned at IMAG
If you’re in the magazine industry, you’re probably familiar with the MPA’s annual IMAG conference. My colleague Kim Mateus and I attend this event every year and speak at it often. This year, we were surrounded by some of our favorite magazine publishers and clients, like

Multiplatform publishers expand their content offerings based on the markets, their audiences, and their capacity to deliver high-quality products of value. Today we’re looking at a variety of expansion within the industry.

There was a time when investors were shying away from publishing media because “journalism” is “expensive” and user-generated content is “cheap”.

But as the world changes tides and begins to preach the quality over quantity sermon, investors have begun to appreciate journalism again. It reaches specific audiences. Now, who else do we know who creates that kind of content? Why, it’s the niche publishers Mequoda has always served! Imagine!

Many publishers have taken to a website strategy that highlights the components of the digital landscape. When done properly, digital publishers are able to drive more traffic and develop larger audiences.