"We've used Mequoda's strategies and techniques to sell thousands of books, videos, and subscriptions."
- Charlie Spahr, Executive Director, The American Ceramic Society
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Create digital magazine teams using agile principles and progressive technology to build more collaborative processes
Magazine teams have historically all been in one building, maybe in New York City, or Washington, D.C. They might occupy more than 20 floors in the World Trade Center, like Condé Nast, or a more humble space, like many of the niche
Ernest Hemingway once said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
Perfection in editorial management is a fallacy. There will always be deadlines that are broken because a source responded at the last minute, and there will be typos that happen even with three sets of eyes on a document; even if your boss is Anna Wintour.
Your editorial guide to making work days a little shorter
So you’re the new editor of a daily online blog, takes with editorial and audience development responsibilities. You might be posting five to 20 or more new blogs per week. Since online editors are the new online marketers, you’re probably tasked with a few other things too, like writing landing pages, email newsletters and anything that requires great writing.
So how can one person manage all of this content? I can tell you from experience that it’s not easy, but these five simple steps should at least make your day a little less hectic.
We’re all familiar with the aphorism, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.” That’s what we do at Mequoda.
Ok, maybe we don’t have any fishing poles. And we’re not entirely comfortable with taking the fish off the hook, so we don’t show you how to do that either.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Early bird pricing for the Mequoda Summit East 2011 expires on July 31st
Register now for the Mequoda Summit East 2011 and receive the lowest price available
Dear Publishing Professional,
It is that time again to start considering your place at the Mequoda Summit East 2011. If you want to join an intimate group of knowledgeable online publishers so you can begin adopting best practices that have led to success.
Editorial guidelines and tips for the last-minute editor
Is it just me, or is a “case of the Mondays” an understatement when you’re an online editor with a daily frequency? It’s a little more like a “case of the oh crap what am I posting today”s when you don’t have an established editorial calendar. And it’s as easy to get behind as paying a credit card payment. Miss a month and you’ve got a lot of work to do to make it up for the next month. Miss a day in your editorial calendar and you could be putting yourself in rush mode for the next week or so.
As an editor who has admittedly tried my hand at working every single type of content planning schedule, I can tell you which editorial schedules I’ve seen crash and burn in front of my eyes and for other editors I’ve talked to:
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Streamline your audience development process with these must-have editorial management tools
When you’re writing content that you know like the back of your hand, being a daily online editor seems like a piece of cake. However, the truth is that as online editors, we pour our brains out into our blogs day after day. Having written over 150 blog posts already this year, I can look at a blog from four months ago and not even clearly recall writing it.
Content, especially when written on a daily basis, is not just a nice spread of words on a “page”. They are a combination of thoughts, opinion and research that are somehow organized into a comprehensive, linear story that we tell on our blogs.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Create email newsletters that rock, with these 15 email newsletter marketing articles and 4 free white papers
How many blogs do you read per day? I often find myself reading only the articles with the catchiest headlines that I see on Twitter or in my email inbox. I have an RSS feed too, so sometimes when I’m waiting for a plane, or say, in line for a hotdog, I’ll break out the RSS reader on my phone.
The point is that with my valuable spare time, I’m consuming, at most, 10 articles per day and I consider myself a stallion for even being able to digest that much.
At the Mequoda Daily, we post at least three articles per day, creating about 780 articles per year. That’s 30% of my yearly article consumption. And these aren’t news articles or quick-tip articles. Many of our articles are in-depth best-practice pieces that may have taken hours, weeks or years to take from concept to completion.
Free tools for bloggers that will make editorial management a multi-dimensional experience
As a professional editor and blogger, there are certain tools you use on a regular basis. Your blogging platform is instrumental, but you probably also use simple networks like Twitter and Facebook to share that content that you’re creating. Possibly, you’re taking it one step further and submitting it to bookmarking site.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), there’s still plenty more you can do. As editors we have more time than we know what to do with, right? Just kidding.
Your website is down… do you take a vacation or get a jump start on editorial management?
Protests in Egypt have caused the Egyptian Government to shut down all communications as of last Thursday. In an effort to keep people disconnected from one another in order to keep protesting at a minimum, they’ve literally done everything they can to make sure people have no internet or mobile access to one another.
It started with blockades against Twitter and Facebook and has since made everything go black. People from outside of Egypt can’t even access any .eg websites.
So imagine you’re in Egypt. You’re the Egyptian version of Brian Clark of Copyblogger, or the Kathleen Cubley of Knitting Daily. Your website has been shut off and you have no idea when its coming back.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Three quick tips for online editors who manage email marketing campaigns
As an online editor, your primary responsibility is to create reusable editorial content, recycling it in numerous media. Your core job is to reuse, recycle and repurpose premium information product content as free email newsletters and website posts. If you’re a Mequoda System editor, your main goal is to build the largest possible opt-in list of subscribers who will buy lots of premium information products from your organization.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
How does a Mequoda System Publisher reach the goal of 1,000 blog posts in a less than 16 months?
When writing editorial content for a Mequoda Online Publishing & Marketing System, you must keep in mind the upstream and downstream products. Every time a Mequoda System journalist write a special report, they must remember that the content will be disaggregated into numerous blog posts and email tips.
Mequoda Daily is a best practice example of how a Mequoda System Publisher creates editorial content to recycle, repurpose, and reuse.
Discover valuable insight from our Editorial Management Guidelines free report
Download your free digital copy of Editorial Management Guidelines for Online Publishers now
Customer loyalty is important in any business, throughout all industries. Loyal customers will continue to do business with you and will likely spread the word about your products or services.
Email marketing lists help to keep track of all of your loyal customers. They also allow you to reach out to these customers and keep them informed about what’s new and exciting about your business.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Simplify your editorial management strategy when you add a visual editorial calendar to your WordPress blog
There’s this new(ish) WordPress plugin out in the wilderness that has been getting some buzz lately and it’s called Editorial Calendar by Zack Grossbart.
The big bloggers like Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com and Chris Brogan of ChrisBrogan.com (amongst other sites) are singing its high praises, so we thought it deserved a shout-out.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Audience development and editorial management strategy: talk about everyone else
When you write a daily blog, it can be a strenuous exercise to come up with original ideas day after day. Luckily for editors, there really are plenty of external sources of content that we can pull from to come up with our own original content. Here are just three great places that will help you fill your quota:
Link Reviews
When you’re on Twitter, it’s common practice to re-tweet links and link to articles you find interesting. One trick we’ve found to be helpful with this is to write link reviews. In a link review, you’re writing 300 words about an article that you want to link to. This is especially helpful for Twitter because instead of sending someone to an external site, you can first send them to your site, and then pass them along to the next site. Hopefully they’ll sign up for you email newsletter in the process.
This free report from Mequoda Group discusses ways to properly engage in editorial management for online publishers
(Nationwide)—Successful online publishers include different types of emails into their editorial strategy. For instance, an editorial calendar created by a successful online publisher may dictate that an editorial email is sent five days each week, a promotional email sent twice per week and a week in review sent each week.
The days and times of these email campaigns should stay consistent from one week to the next. This way, audience members who rely on the content will be able to rest comfortably knowing that it is released at the same time each week.
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
A superb editorial management strategy is the key to a successful, organized online marketing and audience development system
We have a giant collection of best practices for online editors in our Editorial Management Guidelines for Online Publishers white paper, but while we were reviewing it this week, we thought it might be nice to bust out a few on the blog that we thought were particularly important.
1. Require double opt-in on your email newsletters.
Learn email newsletter best practices to enhance your editorial management strategy
(Nationwide)—Having an email subscriber list is imperative to the success of online publishers and Internet marketers. Due to this fact, the Mequoda Group has compiled a list of recommended general best practices for establishing and executing an effective email correspondence strategy.
To begin, research and define the needs of your online audience. It’s necessary to elaborate on your assumptions and determine what the audience is doing online. This affords the ability to then cater email newsletter content to them.
Next, alignment between the goals of the publishing business and goals of the email newsletter need to be recognized. It should be possible to clearly justify and defend the business purpose behind each email newsletter.
If you want questions about online publishing answered, download our FREE Editorial Management Guidelines for Online Publishers white paper.
Online publishing faces new challenges with the latest major Google update
If you’re older than 50 and can actually remember adult life before the personal computer, you may still be filled with a sense of awe and wonder about our new, “always on, always connected” digital world. I know I am.
And although I relentlessly research and report on the very latest technology and techniques that affect online publishing, content marketing and search engine optimization, I’m still as wide-eyed as a kid at a magic show.
For instance, have you ever wondered, as I have, whether Google could possibly be any faster? It wasn’t so long ago when we would do our keyword research, engage our best editorial management strategy, employ our finest SEO copywriting skills, and post a page of website content. Then we would sit back, and within a few weeks, that page would eventually and inevitably show up in the Google search engine results.
Free Report on repurposing content to help generate more revenue
Master your audience development editorial management skills when you download our new toolkit for online editors
Being a Mequoda System editor means following a regular, formal process that recasts the content of other media products.
As a Mequoda System Editor, or any online editor, you may have responsibility for developing content that is variously combined and disaggregated for four uses: emails, blog posts, free special reports and premium products.
Fundamentally, editors generate email
Now a free special report, Editorial Management Guidelines for Online Publishers, provides specific answers and recommendations that address your most pressing online publishing and content marketing questions.
Do you have an Internet Hub? How are you using it to expand your brand?
Mequoda’s Don Nicholas presented a rapid-fire version of our Making Money Online workshop and moderated a panel focused on one of the seven strategies: multiplatform editorial management.
Don was joined on the panel by David McKee of DRG, Phil Penny of Belvoir Media Group and Bryan Welch of Ogden Publications. The panelists talked about their multiplatform strategies, where their content originates from and how they view the Web as central to their strategy.
"We've used Mequoda's strategies and techniques to sell thousands of books, videos, and subscriptions."
- Charlie Spahr, Executive Director, The American Ceramic Society
"We have used the Mequoda Method to deliver a real-time online magazine that features individual issues and our amazing archive of premium content."
- Paul Belliveau, Vice President New Media and Production, Yankee Publishing
“We’ve used these techniques to boost sales of our higher-priced products, and dramatically increase our multiplatform subscription revenues.”
- Susan Laden, Publisher, Biblical Archaeology Society
"Adoption of the Mequoda Method has produced three benefits for us. First, we are seeing sustained growth in subscription revenue. Second, we monetized a content archive with two decades of news and information. Three, our new customers have immediate access to the content they seek."
- Robert Michel, Founder, The Dark Intelligence Group
"We have used the Mequoda Method to increase our revenue by more than 60% while completely eliminating direct mail from our marketing mix. Unsurprisingly, this has allowed us to dramatically increase profitability and our ability to fund our mission-driven programs."
- Gail Odeneal, Director of Marketing, Program on Negotiation Harvard Law School
"We have used the Mequoda Method to create two successful online magazines that generate subscription revenues that are completely independent of our advertising driven legacy business model."
- Stuart Hochwert, Founder and CEO, Prime Publishing
"We know there’s demand for individual subscriptions based on our limited marketing efforts, but we needed the resources of a top-tier marketing organization to effectively and aggressively scale our individual subscriptions business. Mequoda has the best business processes we’ve seen for getting the job done."
- Hampton Stephens, Publisher, World Politics Review
"Mequoda’s knowledge of the fundamental practices and technologies at the core of the media business is unsurpassed by any other group of consultants I know. If you’re in the media industry, Mequoda would be a valuable ally."
- Bryan Welch, Publisher
“The team I worked with at Interweave successfully transitioned a leading print enthusiast media business into the digital age. The folks at Mequoda were an important part of this team and the company’s most valued strategic advisor. We could not have done it without them.”
- Clay Hall, Former CEO, Interweave
"With more than 3.2 million monthly unique visitors, Mother Earth News has increased its revenues 39X over the past 10 years, using these strategies.”
- Bill Uhler, Publisher, Ogden Publications
