Tag: premium content

How to excel at subscription marketing with a web library by writing compelling copy
In the past, we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing.
We shared a story about one of our publishing partners who launched a high-frequency Six Sigma email

How these innovative publishers built web magazine libraries that are comprehensive, user-friendly and make an easy up-sell from print.
A web magazine library is an archive of your content going back many years, likely since the beginning. When done right, you can upsell a substantial number of would-be magazine subscribers to this higher-end, and higher priced product that requires

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.

“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 publishing partners—who publish on multiple platforms, run several premium membership websites, and have helped define our pricing best practices—will see a drop in paid memberships when they stop testing. I told this to a premium content partner who went from having some of the highest conversion rates of our partners to having our worst performing rates, and we believed the culprit was a lack of membership offer testing with new offers, like a 30-day free trial.

Since most magazine publishers are competing for these dollars and losing the battle, the need for revenue from subscriptions increases every day.

At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After all, if they show up on your website, they’re bound to subscribe to your magazine, right?

Wrong.

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.

These days, when people talk about newsletter best practices, they’re usually referring to free email newsletters, used as a marketing tool to drive inbound traffic to websites. But because some of us are old-time journalists here at Mequoda, we also think fondly of paid newsletters, a classic journalistic form that survives today in the digital era.

In subscription marketing, the type of magazine content you sell, matters. However, the strategies you use to sell it, work across niches and industries.
In our last bi-annual Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study, we discovered that out of all the paid types of magazine content available online, adults in the US pay for news, most. If you’re in

The best way to bring people back to your web magazine is through curated special collections. Here’s how one publisher is doing it well.
When walking in to a massive library or bookstore, it’s hard to decide what to look at without becoming instantly overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The same goes for an online web

Join Us at Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop, the publishing industry’s must-attend event of the year!
So, where do I start to explain our Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop?

First, I should tell you up front what isn’t a secret—having a metered paywall at your website. Yes, thanks to many news-oriented publishers, metered paywalls have become commonplace

One of the biggest moving targets in Mequoda best practices is the metered paywall.

The biggest question we get is, how much free content is enough? And you have to be careful when you’re a special interest publisher comparing your own paywall model to the New York Times or the Financial Times who have historically given away a lot of free content. Why? Because they publish a lot more content than you. But even the New York Times recently scaled back from giving away ten articles, to giving away five articles, and their reasoning was to increase subscriptions.

In theory, it should be very easy to use basic subscription marketing principles and write a direct mail campaign for content that already exists, rather than content that does not. But we find that copywriters don’t typically love to work that way.

How to transform your magazine subscription business into a magazine membership business with one new product, and three new types of recycled content.
A magazine membership includes two components; a magazine subscription and a magazine library.
Magazine subscriptions, of course, are quite familiar to you if you are a magazine publishing company— they are the future

Headlines have been brimming lately with news publishers like The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired taking back their profits with paywalls and paid content. The New York Times made 60% of last year’s revenue from subscription sales, The Guardian’s 800,000 subscribers are now accounting for more revenue than advertisers, and Wired has followed their lead by instituting a new $20 annual subscription. It’s clear that publishers are no longer afraid to charge for content, and subscription revenue goals are at the forefront. And I think there are three reasons for it.

Would you like to triple the response to your current email promotions and sales pages? Because that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen when publishers stop promoting their magazines and start promoting their web library.

When walking in to a massive library or bookstore, it’s hard to decide what to look at without becoming instantly overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The same goes for an online web library for your magazine or newsletter, and if you aren’t effectively capturing subscribers’ attention regularly, renewal rates can slip. Reminding them of what they have access to on a regular basis can increase engagement, especially if you curate the content for them.

When most people think of digital magazines, they narrow their focus on digital magazine apps that can be found in a digital newsstand or app store, but data shows that apps aren’t where users want to digest premium magazine content.

Multiplatform publishers are always looking for new ways to increase online revenues and profits. If you’re currently seeking new platforms and opportunities, consider these three ancillary media platforms for generating consistent additional income:

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When you go shopping for a new car, you’re generally limited to the inventory on the lot. You might want gullwing doors like a Delorean or a new Tesla, but you can’t get them on an Audi. You can choose your color and wait a few weeks for your vehicle to arrive from another dealership, but you can’t get racing stripes without a custom paint job somewhere else. It’s not that different when buying proprietary software for your website and content management system, so why do so many publishers still head in that direction?

In 2017, all major publishers and most independents have a website portal. What 95% don’t have is a web magazine. But those who do are flourishing.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains why he thinks the web edition is the best edition.

Premium newsletters and advisory services represent the pinnacle of subscription marketing, often commanding annual membership or subscription fees that are much higher than magazines.

In the words of David Ogilvy, “a good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself.” When selling a web magazine, one of the best ways to do so is by giving away enough content that it sells itself, but not so much that visitors don’t convert into subscribers.

The most significant

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 are built like web pages, so they can be displayed on any mobile or desktop device, and users are as familiar with the interface as

Five steps to increase your email capture rate starting today
Converting website visitors into email subscribers is a key metric driver of your membership website. At Mequoda, 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.

Testing website

You hear us talk about the Mequoda Method, and how we’ve developed it by watching the world’s most successful publishers transition from print to the digital world, but there’s so much more to it. Watch our webcast hosted by myself and our team, called What is the Mequoda Method? to find out.

In the summer of 2014, we launched what we believe to be the first-ever web magazine, I like Crochet. I Like Crochet was Prime Publishing’s first foray into premium content, aimed at readers looking for a higher level of access to unique and exclusive patterns and advice. The web magazine provided this access through fully

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

You would have to be living under a rock in 2018 to have not noticed that premium membership programs for publishers are all the rage. After flirting with all forms of digital advertising, magazine, newsletter and website publishers have concluded that consumers will pay for premium content.

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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

I woke up this morning thinking about all the great ways we’ve discovered to sell subscriptions on the Internet. Yes, these are the things that I dream about. The idea that while I’m deeply asleep, the systems we manage are busily selling subscriptions to magazines and newsletters and premium memberships that include all sorts of benefits to customers who are awake and spending money while I’m sound asleep makes me a happy guy.

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.

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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.

Do you think a 24/7 online encyclopedia of information is a product people might subscribe to? Would they be willing to pay more for a subscription to your magazine if it included access to all your archived content? The latter is usually the reason why publishers decide to create a digital archive of their back issues,

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

More multiplatform publishers are seeing firsthand the value of subscription products and paywalls, which is why many new ones are launched. Today we’re looking at some of these paywall and subscription app launches, and the reasons these digital publishers are turning their attention to them.

How lucky are we, as publishers, to live in the age of content marketing and search engines. While other marketers struggle to become adept at content creation, it’s already in our DNA.

Just add search engine optimization skills, great website architecture and a genuinely content-driven email publishing program, and publishers can literally make millions on the Internet.

Three media platforms are generating increased revenue and profits for these three publishers
If you’re looking for new ways to increase online revenues and profits, consider learning from three publishers who we consider to be doing a great job building their multiplatform media empires, The American Ceramic Society, Countryside, and Country Living. Using these three ancillary

The most successful subscription websites recognize the demographics that use their site the most. This way appropriate content targeting and marketing efforts can be made with alignment. Today we’re looking at subscription publishers that are targeting younger demographics, and the kinds of responses they are receiving.

If your goal is to generate advertising and sponsorship revenue from a free newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

If you’ve ever joined a club, purchased a membership, or even became part of a team, you understand the benefits of mutual collaboration and teamwork. This year, our goal at Mequoda was to help our Gold Members run and grow their subscription marketing and publishing businesses even more by creating a publishing network of like-minded publishers.

Mequoda Systems empowers multiplatform publishers to grow audience, revenue, and profits by integrating web, email, and fulfillment systems into a seamless Customer Experience Management System (CXMS). Mequoda clients routinely double, even triple, their profits in five years or less by using our proprietary software platform, Haven CXMS™—the only customer experience management system created by publishers

Google’s relationship with content publishers has the opportunity to become stronger with the search giant’s introduction of Subscribe with Google.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is what we call the process of optimizing your content and your business, for social media.

Typically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes first. This is the process of creating content that has been optimized for some set of keywords that our target audience is looking for.

If your goal is generate paid subscriptions and revenue for a premium magazine business with a robust subscription website, keep following along.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains how other publishers have used Haven CXMS to do just that.

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.