"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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Slow loading web pages can mean turning customers away from your landing pages and ultimately from buying yor products.
We would like to introduce you to the Haven Advanced Metered Paywall Manager. This plugin restricts access to paid publication content, but allows nonsubscribers to access a limited number of premium articles per month. The number of articles that can be viewed for free can be defined in the plugin settings up to a maximum
Any time your website drops in Google, it’s scary. But the one thing to know is that any drop in SEO traffic will be uniform. You won’t lose traffic in one zone of your website, it will be across the board. The ebb and flow of traffic is normal and not an algorithmic hit, it’s just the price
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.”
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
An Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) code is the way that businesses track sales from their origination point (like a tweet, email or a brochure) down the funnel to their conversion page. Every audience development campaign is packed with UTM codes to see which campaigns perform best. In Google Analytics, these codes can be tracked under the general “Traffic Sources” area just like any other source.
Publishers select a variety of audience development strategies depending on their market, the skills of their staff, and their content. Today we’re looking at news on referral traffic, pertaining to Google and Facebook, two major audience development partners.
Your email capture rate (ECR) is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your website captures each month, by the number of unique new visitors passing through your website in a 30 day period. Your goal is to capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include free incentives.
If you want to know why your website is, or is not performing, start conducting usability studies. A/B tests are great for content, but when it comes to seeing how users engage with your website, online heatmap tracking tools can make all the difference.
Your floater, also referred to as a pop-up is most likely the most effective conversion element on your website. For most publishers we know who have floaters, they see 60% of email captures come through this element. And for those who launch them, they see a 20-50% lift in email capture rates right away.
There are ways to control how Google reads your website with sitemap tools. While we assume most of our publishing friends are creating kosher content and abiding by the rules, if Google has considered you a black sheep in the past, you can reinvent yourself by cleaning up your sitemap. If you’ve been good, you can always improve how well your website is indexed, and often the updates are pretty easy!
When building email circulation, by most accounts, email capture rate is a proxy metric. You’d be mistaken to say that it’s an exact metric because when we talk about email capture rate, we’re usually talking about the number of people who came to your site from search and social and hit the email capture conversion architecture.
But in reality, that’s only about half of the people who sign up for your email list.
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Dozens of tested, proven techniques for increasing your digital media revenues.
This is not the event to attend if you want to learn the latest, hottest, coolest-sounding ideas. Instead, this is the event to attend if you want to learn proven strategies with reams of data behind them. Every single strategy you’ll learn at this event can increase your revenues
There’s a never-ending stream of new tools that pop up every day to help us become better web developers. We have a dashboard of tools we look to for ideas, assistance and even implementation, and it’s safe to assume that you probably do too.
Last year we discovered and shared a lot of web design tools that we use and want to pass on. In case you’re new here or missed a few, here are our favorites.
How to use A/B testing tools for creating subscription landing pages that turn more visitors into subscribers
How many times have you been in a meeting where you and your colleagues “think” or “feel” like a direction on a project is the way to go? Maybe it’s pricing for your subscription website, or maybe it’s the
How to promote a digital magazine online, offline, and everywhere in between
How do you usually promote a magazine? Afterall, subscription and newsstand sales are the keys to driving advertiser interest, so what are you doing to promote your print magazine?
Blow-in cards. Social Media. Newsstands. Direct mail and email renewal series. Subscription agents. The list goes on.
Now what
What to look for in a social media management system from Haven Nexus, to Hootsuite, SproutSocial and TweetDeck
As a publisher, you’re publishing multiple pieces of content every day. Most Mequoda publishers are publishing at least three per day. When it comes to managing the social that goes along with each post, we find that most
What to look for in an online shopping cart system, from Haven Nexus, to Shopify to WooCommerce
Ecommerce has become a core part of any multi-platform publishing business. Even publishers who are still selling print-only have developed online shopping experiences because the Internet has become the first place people search for new information products.
That one fact
How to listen to the data from your audience development efforts and move forward
The inability to see the forest for the trees means that the detail of leaves, pinecones and the immensity of trunks and height will deter you from seeing the blanket of green on a mountain, and the patterns that might enable to you find
Now that more than half of all Internet users block pop-ups and Google has banned them from use by PPC buyers, there are two more good reasons to drop this once effective website design technique and look for a better way to increase landing page conversion rates.
If you’ve ever been to one of our events, or you just got dropped on your head when you landed on one of our articles, you’ve probably seen the acronym OFIE here and there.
Around here, using OFIE it in a sentence (pronounced OH FEE) is as common as saying the words “website” or “conversion”. Say it with me, OHHHHH FEEEEEEEE. Or you could spell it out… oh, eff, aye, eee!
If your freemium conversion rate is less than 2, you can use these resources to create better, more compelling and more clickable freebies.
Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list is one of the most important items on a publisher’s to-do list
What to look for in web analytics tools, from Haven Nexus, to Google Analytics, Kiss Metrics, Social Bro and True Social Metrics
Data analytics are critical for the success of your multiplatform publishing business. Your website, email and social media efforts are all used to promote your content and make more money for your business. It’s
No publisher can hope to have a successful subscription based website without getting the marketing right. So if you have, or plan to launch, one of our three subscription website business models – a portal, magazine website or newsletter website – it’s worth studying the winning strategies used by savvy publishers, including, of course, our own clients.
Branding comes into play when choosing colors for your website. Most brands stick with their main colors. However, some businesses go through an entire rebranding when they launch or relaunch their websites, causing the “color” question to be taken into serious consideration.
If you’re redesigning your website, or simply enjoy the art of color, consider these popular website color schemes and the tools that helped develop them.
The book content business model can give you a variety of items to sell that can be sold digitally for a large profit
When developing strategic plans for CAROTME (content, audience, revenue, organization, technology, measurement, and economics), it’s not uncommon for publishers to overlook certain content business model(s) that they could be monetizing.
We have identified 12
If you’re publishing on social media – and if you’re not, contact us immediately for a free 30-minute conversation, things just got real! – you know that the goal posts keep getting moved, albeit in a (mostly) good way. Just when you think you have things figured out, somebody comes up with another networking and sharing concept that could add another layer to your content distribution strategy.
If more than 50% of your traffic comes from mobile, it’s time for a mobile website analysis to see if you’re looking as sleek as you think you are
In an interview, Hearst Head of Corporate Tech Allen Duan said, “We’ve removed the differentiation between the mobile and desktop experience. Fifty percent to 70% [of Hearst’s audience] are
If you’ve been reading here about the journey from legacy print publishing to digital magazine publishing, it may sound almost too confusing to contemplate
The journey involves everything from creating a magazine edition you may never even have heard of before – the web edition – to pricing to marketing on social media to upgrading print
For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.
Are your social posts converting fans and followers into buyers? You may never know until you start implementing social media tracking.
Whenever we publish a new article on Mequoda, we use our 12x12x12 social media method on Twitter. We write 12 unique Tweets, schedule them for 12 days, then once a month for 12 months.
This social
Our most-read subscription website publishing posts of 2015 reveal a desire for better understanding of building, publishing and pricing subscription websites
This year in our Subscription Website Publishing articles we’ve tackled everything from choosing profitable subscription models, to choosing the best colors and fonts for your redesign, and pricing your subscription websites appropriately. However, there are a
The promise of mobile magazine publishing is no mirage — it’s just not so easy to achieve in the midst of viewability, targeting, and tech issues. Monetizing mobile is the Holy Grail for digital magazines looking to expand and solidify their digital business.
But there are many questions. Mobile app or mobile web? Handle tech in house or hire vendors? Which cross-device analytics to focus on? Which software and code to use?
Publishing Executive covers at least a couple of those questions in recent articles. Let’s start the week by taking a look at the answers they came up with!
Save your social media team time and simplify their workflow with these three social media scheduling tools
Publishers practically invented content management systems, but one area we find publishers lacking in, is their social media management.
When we’re all sitting around at the lunch tables at our quarterly Intensive, we talk about our 12x12x12 social media strategy that’s
Almost a decade ago, a close colleague told me that it was impossible to figure out how much search traffic a website could or should be receiving from Google and other search engines. He was wrong.
Let me explain how to calculate the amount of traffic Google and other search engines could be sending your way.
How to jump start and run a successful SEO campaign
An SEO campaign starts with a keyword and evolves into a multi-media marketing program. When a marketer finds a keyword that he feels can dominate in search engines, the goal is to create a product that can utilize the title, to either sell or start collecting
A thorough look at what a complete Twitter Audit should tell you
In the past we answered the question, what is a Twitter audit and showed you the first 11-question part of a Twitter content audit.
Many companies think the number of followers they have equals their influence in the Twitter ecosystem, but that’s the furthest metric from
Do you know what to monitor in your website traffic report?
We’re constantly reading and writing about how to drive website traffic, but how often do we discuss the website traffic report that all of us should be pouring over to see whether or not our hard work is going anywhere?
Anyone who has installed monitoring and
Using website analytics to determine your top keywords and then what to do with them
When developing a new subscription website, it’s crucial to know which keywords to develop your site around.
When a client comes to us, one of the first questions they ask is, “What are my top keywords?” What they’re usually talking about are
Since 2006 we have held these fourteen guidelines as the most fundamental principles of the best website design.
Every website is unique to its own audience, so you can’t include things like the best colors to use, or anything that will tell you exactly how to design a site. What we’ve put together is a report card that can be applied to any website, of any age. Like I said, this report card has existed for almost a decade and when we update it (like we did today), all of the rules still apply.
There’s a lot to learn in Google Analytics, but unless you’re a business analyst or marketing manager, you probably don’t need to know all of them.
However, one set of metrics that every user of any capacity should know are your referring website analytics. Referring websites are those who are linking to you and sending you traffic. Referring traffic is comprised of visitors that find those links to your site and click on them.
The one thing publishers complain about when it comes to Twitter is that it doesn’t generate a ton of revenue for them.
And the one thing publishers forget to do on Twitter is promote their magazine. D’oh.
Dell is the company most famous for making money on Twitter and may be to blame for the expectations set for anyone looking to drive revenue through the social network. The legend of Dell, who joined in 2009, and by June they had made $3 million through their promotions on Twitter, and by December they had Tweeted their way to $6.5 million, made it to every news outlet.
But Dell sells hundred to thousand dollar electronics and you sell $10-$50 magazine subscriptions. Tomatos aren’t tomaaahhtoes.
Digital platform publishing is credited with having ushered in an ongoing golden age for media, and the latest industry developments are doing nothing to dispel this notion. Four recent articles from Advertising Age reveal how the current social media and mobile content push is shaping companies’ plans for the future.
Give your top blockbuster posts a spa day on a regular basis in order to keep them on page one in Google
Every month, if you’re great at SEO, the majority of your website traffic comes from search. That’s great because it means you can spend less on paid traffic, like PPC. It also means you
If you publishing any kind of periodical, then you’re no stranger to subscription websites. This year we published more than fifty new posts about subscription website publishing.
Sometimes it’s easy to guess the primary audience for some magazines. Other times it’s more surprising to see some of the statistics.
VentureBeat is expanding its editorial team which includes a new managing editor, reports Folio.
In addition to hiring Jennifer Tsao as the business and tech publisher’s new managing editor, the publication has added new staff writers after receiving $2.6 million in equity investment.
Use these 13 best website design tools when designing a website
The most important goal when designing a website is to figure out the main funnel that gets a visitor to complete a transaction. That transaction may be monetary (a sale) or not (a subscription to your email newsletter).
Effective website design is based on efficiency, clarity, and user-friendly elements that take the visitor through the funnel.
Check out these thirteen best website design tools that cover all of the above.
"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
