Tag: Press+

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.

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.

Knowing how to start an online magazine requires first understanding the differences between an online magazine and the dozens of other publishing models available to you in the 21st century.

These differences range from the obvious – a comparison with print products, for instance, is pretty straightforward – to the more nuanced: say, discerning an online magazine from a digital magazine. What could possibly separate the two other than terminology?!

What do you think are the essential elements of the perfect digital magazine?

If you think back to Gutenberg and the printing press, magazines are still being produced the same way now as they were then. We have a long way to go. The technology necessary to fully utilize the Internet as a principal marketing and distribution platform is available

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

Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Compare that with other media, where the articles are arranged with taxonomies and hyperlinks, and are not linear.

Hyperlinking is not linear. Any medium that enables or encourages the reader to bounce around among hundreds or thousands of articles is not a linear medium. What’s more, humans desire closure, which magazines provide. A reader can say “I have read the April issue of Vanity Fair. I finished it on Sunday.”

Today we’re looking at three multiplatform publishers that have taken to the strategy of recycling and repurposing content to build larger audiences.

Should you be trying to acquire linkless mentions?
You may have heard the phrase “linkless mentions” rolling around in social media and your email inbox over the last year or so. The concept is explained exactly as it sounds: a linkless mention, also called linkless attribution or an implied link, is the mention of your brand

You make decisions every day, but how often do you roll back to the basics, and the foundation of your business, by considering how resources are spent on production and distribution?

Video has been a tool for audience development and a medium for premium content for years. However, the popularity of this medium continues to grow and new insights are discovered from it. Chatbots are a new tool being used by publishers to connect with audiences differently.

New offerings and products are often utilized by publishers working to increase numbers of digital subscribers. Today we’re looking at two publishing that have been placing added focus on their digital audience.

The millennial demographic is one publishers often wonder about. Considering millennials into an audience development plan is a great idea for publishers, and we’re now seeing some interesting evolutions in the way millennials are paying for news. Yes, you read that correctly. More millennials are subscribing to news, including print, more than we’ve seen before.

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.

12 ways to make an old magazine article new again through content recycling
The VP of The Taunton Press was quoted a few years ago as saying, “We can’t afford to pay for content if it’s going to be a one-time use.”

But yet twenty to thirty years ago that’s all content ever was: one time use. There

There’s a quote out there from Jonathan MacDonald I heard recently at an IMAG event that says, the rate of change you’re experiencing now represents the slowest rate of technological and societal change you are likely to experience in the rest of your life. So if you’re thinking that change in multiplatform publishing has been fast so far, you haven’t seen anything yet. It’s accelerating!

The MPA releases its Magazine Media Factbook 2017/18, sharing multiplatform publishing data you can use
You may be surprised by some of the data we have to share about multiplatform publishing. But we’re not as surprised because we’re so ingrained in the industry and we constantly see the ongoing growth for multiplatform publishers.

Today we’re looking at research from

MPP expanding American market; TNG acquires Ingram Periodicals; Digital publishing becoming a priority for Reader’s Digest
Digital publishing transforms in a variety of ways, from new technology in the digital age, to different management and ownership of media brands.

We begin today’s news with news of expansion for MPP. MediaPost reports, “UK-based tech company MPP Global has

Huffington Post’s website redesign digs towards tabloid roots; The Economist slowly redesigns its site; The Boston Globe sets to reinvent its newsroom
A website redesign can have a major impact on a publication, especially if the new site incorporates subscription options or enhanced audience development strategies.

We begin today with a website redesign from Huffington Post, which

A Mequoda Audience Development System is a physical, turn-key content management system that is customized to help publisher’s attract new visitors, convert them into email subscribers, engage them, and finally, monetize by converting those visitors into paying customers and subscribers.

To build every Mequoda Audience Development System (Mequoda System for short), we use the Mequoda Method — a collection of best practices that have been formed by watching the world’s most successful online publishers. We also document the results of every a/b and split test that our portfolio of clients are testing every day, and when we see consistent results over time with one methodology, we share it as a best practice with our clients.

The publisher websites with the greatest ability to drive traffic and build audiences utilize proven strategies and relevant technology. Today we take a look at some of these publishers and the changes they’ve made to their websites recently.

We’re not sure why most association magazine websites bury free and magazine content, but we’ll try to help them see the light.
If you’re an association website, do you spin off your magazine on its own, or do you keep your organization and the content you publish under the same roof? In other words, do you

Audience development is a major umbrella term online. There are a variety of ways online publishers develop audiences online, from content partnerships and social media to email and press releases. Today we’re taking a look at the use of digital video as an audience development tool, and media brands that are engaging with it.

We see many acquisitions in the media industry. Multiplatform publishers look for the best opportunities to evolve, expand, and reach their audiences where their audiences are. Today we look at some recent acquisitions in the media industry.

We begin with Hour Media Group’s recent acquisition of Emmis Magazines. Folio reports, “Emmis Communications is nearly out of the publishing business. The struggling media company sold Atlanta, Cincinnati, Orange Coast, and Los Angeles magazines to Hour Media Group LLC. The deal closed yesterday for $6.5 million.”

Niche publishers don’t need to fear domain extortion in the wake of brand domain availability

There’s a lot of evidence to show that the more constrained we are, the more creative we become. For example, Columbia University psychologist Patricia Stokes conducted a test on rodents, with a set who could only press a bar with their right

Time enhances user experience for golfers; Surfing folds for digital; Conde Nast launches new publisher website Healthyish
Enhancements to publisher websites come with new ideas for reaching and engaging audiences.

We’re seeing this with Time Inc., and MediaPost has the story. “The site of Time Inc.’s Golf magazine has relaunched with a cleaner, more modern look that loads

36 ways to build your Internet audience, revenue and profits while building your magazine circulation
There are five different ways to build a magazine audience. You can use free subscription offers, use efficient call to action placements, use time-tested brand-building techniques, email-building techniques and other types of traffic drivers.
Consider the offer
The offer is the most important

Magazine events bring in user and sponsor revenue, and many publishers have made a profitable business model out of them.

When we talk about multiplatform publishing, it’s easy to jump right into the obvious choices: the ones with words, like books and portals and ebooks. But some of the biggest publishers I know have incorporated live

Will Time Inc. save magazine publishing on newsstands through retailer innovation?
In an interview with Folio:, Time Inc’s Retail president Drew Wintemberg spoke about the future of magazines and the newsstand. In the interview, when asked about challenges in the new year, Wintemberg said, “From my perspective, it doesn’t seem that many publishers are investing to

Our top-read audience development posts of last year show an interest in subject lines and the power of email newsletters.
Despite the rise of social networks, most publishers we know still get the majority of their traffic from organic traffic and email. That’s why it’s no surprise that our most-read posts on the Mequoda Daily this

As the mobile publishing revolution has matured, I’ve been blogging about a lot of large, fancy digital magazines. Publications like New York, Forbes and The Atlantic have become leaders in what I consider the second phase of mobile publishing development – the technology is dependable, early jumpers are releasing their all-new versions upgraded from their 2010 efforts, and standards for what consumers are willing to pay for are establishing themselves.

When we talk about multiplatform publishing, some publishers think we’re talking about the difference between laptops, desktops and tablets. But those are simply the devices we deliver content through.

We’re talking about content repurposing, on many platforms.

Repurposing content is a core tenet of the Mequoda Method, but we can’t take credit for inventing the tactic. Rather, any publishers worth their salt – whether print or digital – have always run some variation on this theme. Why? Because it rewards your best work, saves you from excess work, gives you a ton of versatility, and will make you money while you sleep.

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.

Building relationships and high-quality content serve subscription websites like Scribd, The Telegraph, and Food52
Do you remember when subscription websites started using paywalls to add a new revenue stream to their publication? There was much debate about the process, including the rate to charge customers for access.

The question of price is still a hot topic by

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.

Publishing digital magazines is not a “set it and forget it” enterprise, and monitoring the latest trends is a must
Our mission in life is to help you with publishing digital magazines, and we’re good at it. Hopefully we make it look easy, but of course it’s not. The sands of this industry are shifting rapidly,

The community content business model can bring in users and keep them on your site
When developing your strategic plans for CAROTME (content, audience, revenue, organization, technology, measurement, and economics), it’s not uncommon for publishers to forget that you have to start with identifying and establishing a primary content business model(s) to monetize.

We have identified 12

Magazine covers can make or break sales on traditional and digital newsstands – are you leveraging current subscribers for input?

I subscribe to magazines and email newsletters of magazines for dozens of publishers. As part of our research, we are always keeping an eye on what’s going on with general interest publishers and niche publishers alike.

One

While it’s true we’ve made our reputation with digital publishers, remember that many of them started as print publishers, and we helped them make the transition by instilling multiplatform strategy and philosophy. Also keep in mind that some of us have a background in print magazines going way back, most notably our founder and chairman Don Nicholas himself.

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

While it might have blindsided some industry observers and rubbed some old-school publishers the wrong way, the recent news that the Associated Press is launching a native ads network shouldn’t come as all that big a surprise. While the ubiquitous press organization itself doesn’t depend directly on an advertising revenue model, its member newspapers certainly do, and as the International Business Times reports, their ranks are decreasing.

For a very long time PR was pretty straightforward, and for many publishers, highly automated. The guidelines for how to pitch a press release started with writing your press release, posting it to your site, posting it to your PR distribution channels of choice, and waiting to see what happened. For bigger publishers, there may have been a PR agency involved, who would put in the elbow grease to get your press release seen. The future of PR is that elbow grease.

For regional magazines and niche publishers, video monetization is even more of a priority
Video monetization represents one of the great opportunities of the next five years for digital publishers, but success isn’t going to come easily, as the industry is still wrapping its head around it. As with many aspects of business for media companies,

While there’s a lot to be excited and optimistic about, the online media industry is also full of pitfalls, mirages, and false leads that run into dead ends. We try to tell you about both ends of the divide!

The fundamentals of digital publishing include multiplatform strategy, subscription strategy, and advertising. But the proliferation of mobile video and audience data, while definitely serving their purpose, can sidetrack magazines.

TheMediaBriefing.com does a nice job of covering these realities and other online media industry news with some recent articles. Let’s take a look!

At Mequoda, we talk a lot about individual pieces of the Mequoda System in our Daily posts. But the Mequoda System, known in full as the Mequoda Multiplatform Media Management System, is complex, consisting of hundreds of moving parts, and reading about them at different times and in different places can’t give you a complete understanding of it.

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

Since the printing press was invented, the best way to deliver readable content was always on the page. Until the advent of the web, consumers hadn’t even considered other ways to digest content beyond books, magazines and newsletters printed in a linear, bounded fashion.

But then the web arrived on personal computers, and then it arrived on mobile phones, and then on smartphones, in email, and through tablet devices.

What do you focus on while attempting to hire a new employee? What tools do you have at your disposal for the process?

Most hiring managers would cite a resume as the main point of reference for hiring new employees. Resumes, however, can be quite misleading, and need to be fairly examined. According to CareerBuilder, fifty-eight percent of hiring managers said they’ve caught a lie on a resume, and the most common lies people tell on their resumes are…

What to look for in community management systems from Haven Thread, to Simple:Press to Kunena
Forums really leverage some of the best things about the Internet. Sometimes called message boards, forums allow users from all over the world to communicate together on shared interests on one platform. People offer advice, ask questions and users from the

Among all of the challenges facing digital publishers, international expansion is understandably on the back burner, but don’t sleep on the possible new revenue stream. Social media has shown that world markets can shrink and become more manageable, while audience development and engagement aren’t limited by boundaries.

MediaPost’s Publishers Daily touches on this trend in recent articles, both the positive signs for growth as well as some of the drawbacks.

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.