Tag: Landing Pages

12 subscription marketing offers you can test with your existing email subscriber list
Think selling magazines is hard? Look at Netflix. They’ve been able to get customers to pay $9+ per month as a membership website. Meanwhile, magazines have a hard time getting people to subscribe for $10 for a whole year. Netflix is also currently worth

39 ways to increase your Internet audience, revenue, and profits through new multiplatform membership programs
We currently operate more than a dozen membership marketing systems in partnership with some of the country’s leading content brands including Prime Publishing, Yankee Publishing, and Cabot Heritage Corporation. The tips and advice provided in this article are drawn from our direct experience around

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

Mequoda and WPR partner with a performance-based revenue-share relationship to grow subscription business
As one of the world’s most authoritative sources on world politics and international relations, World Politics Review (WPR) has been successful at penetrating the corporate, government and educational markets. Now, they are partnering with Mequoda Systems to aggressively grow their individual subscriber business.
Publisher Hampton Stephens

Follow these landing page guidelines for your vanity URLs so that people can both remember you and find you organically

You know the importance of landing pages, but it’s completely possible that you don’t know how important your vanity URLs are. Vanity URLs that are too long, don’t make sense, or are hard to read can actually turn someone away, rather than attracting them to your site.

The most popular places to use a vanity URL are:

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.

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.

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.

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?

Audience development personnel have a very specific, and incredibly important job within an organization.

Finding the right audience development staff can mean the difference between thousands of email subscribers and tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue.

The best audience development job description I’ve ever seen comes from one of our clients.

Our most-read subscription website publishing posts of last year show a continued interest in building profitable subscription websites and improving their speed and ranking.
Last year, publishers focused on increasing profitability through apps and subscription website publishing. As publishers continue to search for digital content success through subscriptions, we think the chosen top ten most-read posts

A Rapid Conversion Landing Page (a.k.a. “name squeeze” page) is essential to building a database of free email newsletter subscribers. It, along with other landing pages on a website, act as the team that builds an email list. However, the RCLP is extra special in that its main purpose in life is to drive a ton of traffic from search in order to build your email list.

How do your digital magazine features stack up to users’ expectations?
Contrary to what you’ve probably been thinking, the ultimate digital magazine is built in a browser, not an app. That’s why web magazines are skyrocketing to success, because users are quickly figuring out that they’d rather use a web magazine than an app magazine.

Users are

Most website copywriting tips will fall short of their potential if word choice isn’t a top priority for your copy.

Words are more than just symbols on a page that provide information. They communicate thoughts and ideas. They speak to the human psyche. They evoke emotions. But they don’t do any of these things very well

Most publishers are only using one or two of these email call to action ideas for building an email list to sell more magazines

Did you know that by pairing unproductive employees with productive employees, you can actually improve productivity overall?

Cornerstone OnDemand conducted a study of more than 2,000 tech company employees with a dataset of

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

Digital magazine marketing will give you an afterlife

There are times in business when we feel like we’ve created something great, and we don’t understand why it’s not selling.

Back in 1967, a successful New York ballerina by the name of Marta Becket stumbled upon an old social hall in Death Valley Junction, California, population: 6. After

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Our most-read subscription website publishing posts of last year show an interest in building profitable subscription websites and improving the usability and site speed of existing websites.
In 2016, toward the end of the year it was made abundantly clear to publishers they would need to focus on more simple site design with faster loading times.

Search engine optimization is kind of a game, right? It’s an important game – a necessary one for any publisher – but mostly it’s just us trying to play by the rules while Google giggles and changes those rules whenever they like.

At Mequoda, we stress the importance of a freemium strategy. Freemiums are free downloadable products that sit on SEO’d pages that publishers give away in order to build their email lists. The freemiums are available to download on these SEO’d landing pages, which we call rapid conversion landing pages, or RCLPs for short. You’ve seen them around here, here, and here.

What to look for in lead management software, from Haven Nexus to Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot and others

Make money by giving content away.

That statement sounds odd to many people in publishing and downright heretical to anyone in the subscription business, but there is no denying that it can work. More than one publisher has developed this

Call it what you want, but here at Mequoda we’ve assigned the title Rapid Conversion Landing Page to a landing page that collects an email address and offers a free product (freemium) in exchange. You’ve seen them around here, here, and here.

If you’ve read our blog before, attended one of our Intensives, or a Summit, you know we typically cut the syllables in half by affectionately calling it the RCLP most of the time.

A recent Digiday story on publishers’ new approach to site redesign reveals that in place of the customary massive overhauls every few years, magazines are now outfitting their portals with infrastructure enabling periodic tweaks and tune-ups rather than part-and-parcel transformations. The realization that redesigns are capable of doing more harm than good has fueled this change in thinking.

The publishers making news when it comes to monetizing digital content include Quartz, Fortean Times, and Dennis
Is there anything more important than monetizing digital content for magazines looking to embrace multiplatform publishing strategy? The answer is an obvious no, but the less obvious answer is to the follow-up question “How do you get there?”

The answer

Write an online magazine editor job description like a product description for a Swiss Army knife

Can you remember life before the internet, when a personal computer was another name for a hand-held calculator? When publishing was a process that required a printing press?

If you’re old enough to remember hot type, the pica stick, and manual

Mequoda has been testing video landing pages for the past few years with great success. In fact, our Intensive attendees have told us repeatedly that our video is what convinced them to sign up. A few years ago I read a study by EyeView that said businesses who tested video on the homepages and landing pages saw a conversion rate increase up to 86%. These results were based on multiple iterations of video and placement, but 86% is no small feat.

While using Google AdWords looks easy, it takes knowledge and hard work to be good at it. But there’s a big payoff. If you follow the advice below and correct just one of the following AdWords mistakes, you may find that your response and revenue double or even triples – overnight.

A magazine sales letter full of content and detail works best for selling premium information products online. No matter how hard we try to make winners out of short sales letters (after all, they’re much less work!) we still see A/B split after A/B split show that longer magazine sales letters work best.

Social publishing, or preparing and posting content to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others, is no longer just an option up for discussion. Today, when it comes to distributing your good work and deploying it as a tool in audience development, a social media strategy is an absolute necessity.

The challenge is perfecting that strategy as much as possible. Especially in a business where the ground seems to shift every other week. But one way to stay ahead of the curve is to pay attention to the digital publishers doing it right, the ones who unite great content, great timing, and great discipline, to produce a whole other source of traffic and revenue.

But don’t fall prey to just slapping some articles up on Facebook Instant or Apple News. This just won’t cut it. Publishing social media successfully requires dedicated resources, including staff. But it will be worth it!

So you’ve launched your subscription website. You’ve determined the right price, and how you want to offer your subscription to customers, and you’re ready to think about ways to entice, persuade and convince them, whether it’s copy on a landing page, or an outbound email. Few subscribers ever make a decision to buy from you based solely on your price or offer!

Magazine marketing thrives in the new world of PPC and organic search
What’s the one thing that magazine publishers have in abundance, more than any other business on the planet?

Content.

And who’s the paramour of content? Google.

Think about it – all of the companies out there struggling with SEO and frantically hiring content farms overseas, and, bless

It’s no secret that Mequoda is the leading strategy-centric content management system provider for magazine and newsletter publishers looking to lock in on a multi-platform system. If it is news to you, then, hey, nice to meet you!

Publishers sometimes forget that they, themselves, are retailers; publishers sell subscriptions, memberships, books, ancillary products, events, etc. It’s smart for a publisher to think like a retailer: Get people into your store, where they can become your customers. And when they become your customers, get them to come back for more. The “store,” of course, is your website, your portal.

The first thing you need to have to create great landing pages is a basic understanding of the seven types of landing pages used by Internet marketing professionals. With that in mind, we think your odds of increasing landing page conversion rates will definitely improve.

Mequoda reveals the best SEO software publishers can use to extend the life of all their articles — more effortlessly.

My publisher friend is a fervent believer in creating A/B splits for his landing pages, focusing specifically on the titles of his paid handbooks. The graphic design of each cover is identical in color, typeface and size. His sales letter landing pages use the exact same persuasive editorial copy except for the title of the book.

Are you acting as the general contractor of your content management system when it’s supposed to be managing itself?

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.

How video email marketing can drastically increase your CTR
One main advantage of multi-platform publishing is recycling content into videos.
Think about it: what entices a website viewer more than a video sample of exclusive, paid-for conferences? These events are the single biggest revenue channel for many publishers, where extra care is put into providing ticket purchasers

Since the future of your articles in SEO-land is now so dependent on social media, it’s more important than ever to enable your readers with easy-to-use like and share buttons. The “like” button comes in a few shapes and forms, but if you have any interest in getting people to follow you on Facebook and share your articles, there are several important places where installing it is a pretty great idea.

Use this list to optimize every new and old article or blog on your site in order to attract the most search engine traffic.

Giving the reader enough information to make a decision in your favor

Landing pages are fickle. You can change the color of a button and it can increase conversion rates by 30% or more. You can change the headline on your landing page and get a similar response.

One thing that we’ve found in our testing, however, is that any landing page needs to provide some kind of story. This doesn’t always need to be an elaborate novel-length story but it needs to do all of these things:

Mobile content strategy is wide open these days, as publishers strive to make the right moves toward monetizing a burgeoning medium and avoid blowing a golden opportunity. But mastering mobile is tough. Audience behavior, app technology, and ad kinks to be ironed out can complicate strategy, but digital magazines and other brands must stay the course when it comes to producing quality content and tailoring it for mobile devices. MediaPost covers mobile content strategy in a few recent articles, including one on LinkedIn’s new direction with Pulse. Let’s start there today!

Generation Y, the millennials, were born in a hugely broad span of time for a “generation,” which is between 1977 and 2001.

Depending on the pundits you read, those years may be slightly closer together. What defines a millennial is their access to technology for most of their lives. At Mequoda we consider Digital Natives those who were born with technology present for their whole lives, as men and women who had personal computers for as long as they can remember.

This, again, is a much smaller span of time than the huge 1977 – 2001 generation, but the general princliple of a millennial is that they’re not new to technology, they all have email addresses, know how to use the Internet, and technology has been present for more than half their lives.

Reader engagement is a key metric important to all publishers. Time spent, pages per visit and return visits are all numbers that every online publisher should hold near and dear.

The problem with the information overload of the internet is that website readers get lazy. When they come in from search engines, they often click, find what they’re looking for and head off in another direction.

However, if you give them better reasons to click, they’re more likely to keep digging.

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.

As a niche publisher, there are likely two ways you think about web advertising. For some of you, advertising is a primary way you generate revenue, by selling ad space in your own magazines, portals and email newsletters. For others, buying web advertising in other people’s media is part of your audience development strategy. And for many of you, you think of web advertising for both reasons – to generate revenue for your business and to buy ads in media channels that you don’t own to drive traffic to your publishing properties.

No matter how many website awards there are out there, no one website could ever win the battle for best website design of all, because there are so many factors that come into play.

For example, some might think they have the best website design because their website is “pretty,” with loads of white space and great fonts. But if it’s not also search-optimized for someone to find it, then who cares? Another example is a site that’s completely search-optimized, even user-friendly – but there’s not a single call to action to be found. What’s the point?

People concern themselves with the external factors (link-building, social media, etc.) of SEO, but those are nothing without website architecture that’s built to pass link juice through the website’s pipeline. Did you know that there are ways to build a website for great SEO that go beyond inbound links and even the words on your website?

A properly optimized site has a chain of command that would look very similar to your business model if you put them side by side.

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.