Tag: Marketing Director

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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.

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In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, welcomes Pat McKeough from TSI Wealth Network as our newest Mequoda Master in the Hall of Fame.

Multiplatform publishers can generate revenue from users, from sponsors, or both. Consumer-focused portals that are sponsorship-based ask users to pay – not with money, but with time and information. They spend time viewing web pages and signing up for email feeds, thus creating advertising inventory that can be used to sell the publisher’s products (internal advertising) and/or sold to third-party sponsors (external advertising) on a CPM, CPC, CPA, or SEA basis.

Time Inc. adds to its subscription website offering; SNEWS and Smore launch new sites
A brand can enhance its value through its subscription website offering, in addition to the overall design of its website. Today we’re looking at three websites with new content and designs to share.

We begin today with Time Inc., which has upped its

Ask yourself these seven questions before starting your journey towards digital magazine transformation
I’m going to go ahead and assume if you’re reading this, you have a print publication who is asking for siblings. You’re at the magazine store and it’s eying the “big brother” t-shirts and wondering when it’s getting playmates.

Below you’ll find a comprehensive

Subscription marketing is entering a new golden age. The trouble is, with so many new sources, niche publishers like you can’t always keep up on their own.

Legacy sources like direct mail and brick and mortar newsstands continue to decline, but no one is ready to declare them dead yet. And all these exciting new Internet

Creating a magazine layout that includes interactivity is one more key toward selling more digital magazine subscriptions
It’s true that users prefer familiarity in digital magazines. As soon as you begin creating digital magazine apps that require an instruction manual to learn, many users tend to get frustrated. That’s why we think when designing a reflowed

A Global Digital Commercial Team is launched by Hearst; Multiplatform publishers Discovery Communications and Active Interest Media names high-rank employees
As a new year gets underway, some multiplatform publishers are tackling major initiatives early on.

We’re seeing this play out at a number of publishing brands, including Hearst, Discovery Communications, and Active Interest Media.

The first story is

Mequoda Method for the win

This is a cautionary tale about online publishing strategies … a parable, if you will. It involves no actual Biblical references, and no real-life publishers were harmed in the writing of this post.

But like religion, there are many varieties of online publishing strategies. And the point of this parable is that

Before any Mequoda client will build a subscription website, they first identify the most fundamental content their users will digest
At Mequoda, we talk a lot about your minimum information unit, and that’s because you should never build a subscription website without identifying what yours is, and how many you have.

A minimum information unit, or MIU,

Mequoda wants no publisher to be left behind
I can talk until I’m blue in the face about how well the Mequoda Method works in helping legacy print magazine publishers make the business-critical transition to the digital age.

That doesn’t mean anyone should take my word for it.

When you attend our Digital Magazine Publishing Workshop, you’ll learn

This certified Mequoda Master will step into Ed Coburn’s shoes
We’ve come a very long way since 2013.

Back in the day, Mequoda was a modest 15-person organization, with one lead consultant – that would be me – and a single team working with that consultant. Today, in 2016, we’ve tripled in size, with 40-plus team members,

What if you want to learn a little more about your magazine competition? You can’t just go up to them and ask. I mean, maybe you’ll bump into their marketing director at a conference (::cough:: this happens all the time at our Digital Publishing & Marketing Intensive ::cough::) but in most cases when you’re comparing your publication to a competitor, you’re in the dark.

Work in the dark no more. Estimating your magazine competition’s online revenue is easier than you think and requires only four easy-to-find figures.

Multiplatform publishing is the key to publishing success, and audience development is the job that gets you there

Sixteen years later, I can still remember the day a large publishing company, who’d been negotiating with my marketing services firm to revive a struggling magazine it owned, decided to cut its losses and shut the magazine down

The good, the bad, and the ugly (but mostly good) wrapped up in a semi-formal LinkedIn ads review
Advertising your business on social media, particularly one like LinkedIn, is a tricky process. What inspired me to dig into LinkedIn ads, is that so many of our clients are now surfing the social media ad game, and

Let’s start the week with personnel moves both major and minor, per Folio:, plus a look at how digital ad revenue did in 2014 according to the IAB.

Don’t overlook this powerful revenue stream

When magazine publishers get together to talk about their advertising revenues, the common complaint is that even though they’re counting on online advertising to replace declining print ad pages, they’re “trading print dollars for digital dimes.”

Worse, they say, they now have to trade those digital dimes for mobile pennies.

Certainly print

In order to succeed online, publishers need to have staff that understand the digital evolution. When operated with precision and passion, a Mequoda System can turn any special-interest content-driven publication into a successful multiplatform publishing empire.

Competition for those precious tablet advertising dollars – to replace declining print dollars – is heating up.

And here’s a secret: Niche publishers have a hidden advantage in competing for digital advertising.

Fire up your niche magazine digital magazine advertising strategies: You have a tightly-focused audience that advertisers want to reach and impress, and with often lower prices, they’re willing to dip their toes into the new technology with you.

The Online Marketing Director will lead the initiatives for the entire online marketing system. They will be primarily responsible for facilitating the implementation of the vision and values by maximizing the size of the website email lists, using SEO campaign development, registration process optimization, visitor conversion to registered members, partnerships, promotions, social media presence and list segmentation management.

With an online editor’s job description changing from print to digital, it’s important to understand the role for digital publishing success

In order to succeed online, publishers need to have staff that understand the digital evolution.

A significant portion of our consulting strategy relies on properly staffing an organization. If you choose the wrong staff members, or don’t properly teach your current staff about digital strategies, you are sure to fail online.

The resulting product may not reach the level of Law and Order meets Homicide, but two Hearst brands are planning a crossover episode of their own.

Field & Stream gets it right the second time
If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know that we’re big fans of Bonnier Corp. for its embrace of digital technology. You can read more about the digital edition of Popular Science here, and about Bonnier’s advances in tablet magazine advertising here.

Meanwhile, forward-thinking publishers like

When we first heard about Google’s new Play Newsstand for Android devices … we were underwhelmed.

“Ah,” we thought, “Google is about to prove once again that they may understand search, but they just don’t get premium content.”

“If they’re trying to take blog feeds and news feeds and tell us it’s a newspaper, oh no it’s not,” we said.

“The tablet respects books, newspapers and magazines as unique mediums. You can’t just disaggregate content and still call it a book, newspaper or magazine,” we said.

As you may have noticed, Mequoda is a firm believer in the power of email newsletters as a marketing channel – so much so that a Mequoda subscription website is built specifically to give away content and harvest email addresses, rather than sell magazine subscriptions.

National Geographic has merged all their content in a attempt to “increase publication frequency.” The move was sparked by the fact that Nat Geo has created stories across all platforms (print, digital, video) that it became quintessential to have everything under the same leadership.

Chris Johns has been named Executive Vice President and Editorial Group Director, while still remaining Editor in Chief – a role he’s had since 2005. In addition, Matt Mansfield will take over as the Executive Editor of Digital Content, Keith Jenkins as the Director of Photography and Mike Schmidt as the Multimedia Director.

I’m a big fan of planning.

And I believe that your website is a reflection of your entire business and business model.

A visitor to your website should quickly be able to understand your mission, your audience, the scope of your content, and even how you make money.

It always surprises me that people don’t start the process of building a profitable website by building a website plan. While the website planning process can seem complex, it really can be boiled down to answering a few simple questions:

Where there’s a search engine, copywriting must follow

Once upon a time at another company, far far away, the editorial director wandered over to the marketing department and asked me to rework the leads in the articles our highly-educated writers were producing. These articles were written about the business side of the biopharma and device industries, and could by their very nature be rather dry, which was unfortunate because the leads were used as teasers to sell individual articles online.

Three critical questions every website publisher must answer.

Who runs audience development for your organization? When a website publisher asks me to help them increase website traffic and build a loyal online audience, the first question I ask is, “Who runs audience development for your organization?” I get a wide variety of answers. At smaller independent publishers, the answer is often “I do.” At larger established publishers, the answer is often, “Our audience development director.” For those publishers with an answer, I’ve also been told it’s the editor, webmaster, chief marketing officer, marketing director, and almost every other job title inside the organization except the cat. As often as not, I get a blank stare. Perhaps that’s why they’re talking to me in the first place. We live in an age of multiplatform publishing where traditional legacy organizational structures simply don’t work. Innovation abounds, and for even successful website publishers, you’ll find many different answers to the above question. Nonetheless it’s a question that needs to be answered, and the answer needs to be compared with the best practices of successful website publishers.

Making new technology part of your everyday

Rachel Yeomans, marketing director of social media for Astek—and the person who helps us run our Wednesday noon (Eastern) Twitter Chats (today’s topic: SEO)—is a great study in “what’s happening now.” In one of her recent posts on the Astek blog, she went through her daily routine—and this was not your grandmother’s, or even father’s, or even older sister’s routine. But it is very much worth taking note:

Lessons Learned From UK Publishers Study

The recent UK Publishing Email Benchmarking Survey conducted by Adestra shows some interesting results, according to a post on InPublishing by Henry Hyder-Smith. He focused on the importance of acquiring new data and managing your existing data, and cited the example of Centaur Media, “who segmented the information they gathered at sign-up and delivered dynamically personalised emails to improve their results for their National Home Improvement Show. Emphasising that data is king, and when used creatively, it can have a massive impact on response – Centaur saw a 43% open rate and an impressive 34% clicked-through.”

Special Reports Highlight New SIPA Website

The new SIPA website houses a treasure trove of information on the industry. One of the best sections is the Resources where the Specialized Information Publishers Foundation Library sits. That’s where you’ll find the just-released Memorandum From Counsel, the Independent Publishers Legal Handbook, MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report and the Salary Survey (conducted by the University of Georgia).

Rachel Yeomans, Marketing Director, Social Media, Astek, Chicago

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
RACHEL: I graduated in Journalism with a concentration in magazines. When I graduated, the journalism industry was already somewhat difficult to enter into. I received a lead from a college friend about a temp agency that was looking for candidates to work for a construction reporting firm. Basically I cold called general contractors throughout the Northeast and Northwest areas and asked them what projects they were bidding on. I’d then input that information into the company’s system, of which people would purchase for construction job leads. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a job, and it “sort of” tapped into my interview skills from journalism school.

Thoughts on ROI for Social Media Efforts

I wrote the cover story for SIPA’s November Hotline newsletter on ROI for social media efforts. What should you expect and what parameters should you use? It’s a question that will continue into 2012 and beyond. How do we know we’re spending the right amount of time on places like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? We know from our own lives how addictive these sites can be.

Barbara Weckstein Kaplowitz, Big Huge Ideas, Potomac, Md.

What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?

Assistant to director of research and communications, Local and State Chamber of Commerce Division, Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. It was an exciting place to work. My window looked across Lafayette Park to the diplomatic entrance of the White House. There were always high-profile visitors like Anwar Sadat and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. I wrote a monthly newsletter for communications directors at local chambers of commerce, edited a quarterly magazine and compiled an annual statistical guide. One of my most useful resources was The Ragan Report. Years later I told Larry and Mark Ragan that this was my first brush with paid-circulation newsletters. I worked for two other trade associations and then in 1985 got a call from a consultant with UCG. She asked me to interview to become the company’s first full-time marketing director. I met with Bruce Levenson and Ed Peskowitz, started part-time, and after six months became full-time. Over the next 10 years, I moved from marketing director to group publisher and also managed the conference division and in-house telemarketers. I left UCG in 1995 and formed Big Huge Ideas.

There’s Gold in That Content! Manage it.

Many of us create content almost every day for our business or company—or association. But are we keeping track of that content in the best way possible? We know that repurposing is a vital art these days, but in order to do that, we should know where everything is, what subjects each piece of content covers, and perhaps even what people were mentioned.

In his new book, “How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit,” longtime SIPA member and prolific author Bob Bly takes on this subject—among many others—calling this “your content gold mine.” Writes Bly: “If content is gold on the Internet, your hard drive becomes the gold mine.” Here are eight tips from Bly for managing that gold mine to which I have added three more:

Bill Dugan, Vice President, StepByStepMarketing.com, Boston

What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
My first job out of college was director of communications and membership programs for a trade association representing businesses using two-way radio systems. I was also editor of the monthly newsletter and became interested in journalism and marketing and how the two can work together.

Successfully licensing products will generate growth for your online content-based business

In the Mequoda Daily yesterday, we discussed ways of generating revenue with content licensing opportunities and three goals for the process of content licensing.

In case you missed it, the three goals for content licensing mentioned in the article include building traffic, building your brand and building your revenue.

Order this 90-minute webinar, co-sponsored by Mequoda and SIPA, and learn the ins-and-outs of striking highly profitable content syndication deals.

Marketing to a Diverse Audience, Part 1

I wrote an article a few years ago about a newspaper in San Angelo, Texas, that scripted a series of house ads starring their very own employees. The series was called “Get Connected Every Day with the San Angelo Standard-Times” and was part of the paper’s “Passion Campaign” that let readers see a bit of themselves in the paper every day.

“It fit into this whole philosophy of improving our relationship with the community,” the marketing director said. “It was an important first step in the process.”

Whether on ‘Front Porch’ or in Your Own Backyard, Communities Are Rising Up

Micro-communities have received a lot of publicity lately.

Here is Robin Crumby, group managing director of Melcrum Publishing Ltd., describing micro-communities in an article in the June Hotline: “The creation of micro-communities is being widely heralded as a robust model for specialized information publishers. For a business like mine, Melcrum, this means creating small groups of like-minded customers who come together to benchmark, discuss their challenges and hear the latest research and trends. We use our established networks and in-depth industry knowledge to facilitate a conversation between peers that is highly valued by the customer.”

Justin Custoni of EpikOne explains why Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics work hand in hand

OptionsHouse has an exciting opportunity for an Online Marketing Director. We are a national online options and stock retail trading brokerage. Our company is aggressively expanding and looking for talented and experienced professionals to join us and be a part of our growing team. Position is a key driver in the planning, creation, and execution of online marketing programs leading to customer acquisition, education, and retention.

Today we bring a job posting from Cabot Heritage Corporation. Cabot is looking for an E-Commerce Marketing Director with a flair for the creative and excellent writing skills. Qualified candidate will have a minimum of 2 years Internet marketing experience and familiarity of direct response/subscription marketing is a plus.

I turned 50 this past December. We were about halfway thru the process of designing, testing, writing and coding Johns Hopkins Health Alerts and the 29 marketing websites that surround it form the Johns Hopkins Health Network. Stuart Jordan, who is COO for Johns Hopkins Health Alerts and its parent, University Health Publishing, gave me a copy of the 704 page Johns Hopkins Medical Guide to Health After 50 as a birthday gift—along with 50 lottery tickets. Over the past 23 years, Stuart and I have been friends, partners and cohorts in numerous endeavors. It was the first time Stuart and I had been able to work together on a major venture since the sale of Lighthouse in 1994. This alone made the Johns Hopkins Health Alerts project incredibly meaningful for me.