Tag: Search Engine Optimization

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

Mequoda is a term to describe a method for designing and managing successful subscription marketing systems. Short for “media quote daily,” Mequoda is an approach to building these systems based on four core principles—ACEM in Mequoda-talk. Every publisher can leverage its principles for growth in all areas of business.

This week we’re focusing on engagement, in How Can Engagement (E) Be Improved? The ‘E’ in the Mequoda Method’s ACEM, is really about retention, and the idea that if you’re a subscription-based publisher, that the link with relationship with your customer is key.

ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.

In the last three to five years we stumbled upon a process we now call blockbuster management. Our blockbuster management program acknowledges that any given website over time might have thousands of posts, but the remarkable thing is a relatively small number will ultimately be capable of driving 80% of the traffic.

ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.

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.

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

Discover the carefully guarded source of the world’s most effective email subject lines that most professional copywriters don’t like to share

Turn basic headlines into social media gold by experimenting with these proven copywriting formulas for clickable social media headlines
Everything I’ve read as an observer of the social media and publishing communities tells me that most marketers don’t get a click rate on a Tweet of more than one percent, and in fact most marketers get

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.

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.

One thing we’ve noticed about the most successful publishers we know is that they have three major things in common. And it has nothing to do with being a household name, a ton of charisma or a rampant following on social media.

Adam Smith, the father of economics, believed that economic progress was most possible by the division of labor into specialist groups. That an organization could be hugely more efficient by breaking down production processes into many small tasks, performed by specialists.

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.

Aggregating great content is just as valuable as creating great content

Content aggregation is often given a bad name, because it’s often done incorrectly.

The best content aggregators approach the process as the valuable art form that it is. Content aggregators recognize the web is all about content aggregation, and their work allows users to reach new depths on the subject matter they care about.

We first wrote about content aggregation in 2011. At that time, he had been researching best practices for content aggregation and strategies content aggregators should avoid.

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.

Magazine publishers have been giving away their content for decades in an effort to attract new subscribers. In online publishing, ad-driven subscription websites have an additional incentive: Increasing the eyeballs that see their sponsors’ ads.

Publications like Mother Earth News put all their magazine content on their subscription website. They believe it hasn’t hurt their circulation, and at the same time, says General Manager Bill Uhler, it helps them cast a wider SEO net.

Consider the rise of talent shows on TV like America’s Got Talent and American Idol. When it comes down to it, they’re simply performing good old-fashioned market research. Why sign an unknown singer to a record label, or sign a new act to a Vegas casino, when you can see how the world responds to them first? The same method applies to content. Developing data-driven content ideas can be the difference between a homepage full of stimulating ideas, and a page full of templated headlines on the same topic.

This year, our winner was Countryside Network, who launched their Mequoda System in February 2016. Countryside was founded in 1969 and today includes four farming-related magazines (Backyard Poultry, Countryside, Dairy Goat Journal and Sheep!) and a portal at CountrysideNetwork.com that spans all four niches.

Over the last five to seven years, a big gripe of many publishers is that they want to get more comments on their digital articles, but they’re getting fewer than ever before. Getting more comments might seem like a vanity metric, but we see comments as important indicators in search engine optimization. The more comments a post has, the higher it tends to rank. Because of this, we take the number of comments on a post to heart. And that big fat 0 staring at us never feels good.

Search Engine Land releases report on worthy SEO factors; Google reminds us of rules for putting links in large-scale audience development campaigns; Publisher fades in Google results after blocking Google users
It’s recommended to stay current with best-practice SEO if you want to rank organically in Google. Today we share news stories that look at these factors,

f there were just three things you could do today to increase your audience, revenue, and profits, what would they be?

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda shares a strategy for each.

Get more page one rankings in Google by being a better keyword density checker for your business

Our SEO process has several layers that starts with keyword research and ends with article marketing and an accompanying white paper. Somewhere in the middle of this process we take what we see as a great keyword and drop it into the article or landing page that we’re writing.

Before hiring subscription website publishing experts, take this advice straight to the bank.

If you’re looking to grow the most beautiful rose garden on the block, would you prefer to go to your local gardening center and rifle through the rose section to see what’s brightest, or would you head straight to specialty rose nursery, with employed experts in growing roses?

So then why is it that so often we hear of publishers who hire web development companies that have no experience developing subscription websites for publishers? A magazine or newsletter website requires an expertise in search engine optimization, conversion architecture, subscription management, and content management, in addition to an array of other specialties.

If you’re running or managing a publishing company, your time is often spent figuring out how to build a bigger audience, boost revenues, and increase your profitability on those numbers.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains seven ways to tackle the audience portion, which will lead to increasing your magazine

There are 201,000 people searching for the term “apple pie recipes” every month, but that doesn’t mean you should break out the measuring cups and write about it, if your magazine is for car enthusiasts. But if you’re a magazine for diabetics, you could certainly write about “diabetic apple pie recipes” of which there are 140 people searching for the term every month. But why would you write to an audience of 140 when you could possibly collect the eyes of over two-hundred thousand?

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

Choosing good keywords and using them correctly is more than a strategy, it’s a lifeline for your investment in content and can keep traffic flowing indefinitely.

When you’re in the business of content, search engine optimization isn’t just a hip thing to do, it’s a necessity. Think about how much time your team spends every day

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

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

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.

How we’re adjusting our keyword optimization best practices to accommodate changes in the Google algorithm and Keyword Planner
It had been awhile since Google played around with its search algorithms, so we all knew we were due for a change. Sure enough, this summer the search engine giant launched what we believe to be “Phase 1”

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These audience development models create marketing-qualified leads through freemiums that build larger, more monetizable email lists

“Audience development” is one of those terms that many people instinctively understand, but usually underestimate. Although media professionals have worked with the term for years, most have not bothered to define all the things that go on when executing an

The classified content business model is the modern day equivalent of what used to appear in the back of many newspapers and B2B magazines
Listings for products, services, and jobs are the backbone of the classified content business model. They are, as we are fond of saying, a great way to take lots of small checks

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.

The directory content business model is a three-fer
The directory content business has some pretty unique benefits. If executed correctly, this model can be a win-win-win for any ambitious publisher. Not many content business models can say that.

Not only is a directory a revenue stream, it can also be an engagement device on your website –

Because we quantify everything, Mequoda has identified nine (coincidentally) deadly subscription website mistakes that are commonly made when publishers build their online presence.

If your audience development strategy doesn’t incorporate search, you’re not thinking of the long term
When you are a Mequoda publisher, the goal of audience development is to get people on your email list. You will use that list to eventually sell them a product or monetize them through a sponsored message. The strategies we use

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

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

Improving direct marketing results is a constant source of discussion for publishers. They are always tracking, evaluating, and testing different offers for their products in order to optimize their results, even moreso now that it can be done online through digital direct marketing systems.

In recent news from the world of publisher analytics, we see Google share the top factors for search, the IAB’s latest pronouncement on ad viewability, the efficacy of data monetization, and more

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

How to leverage multi-channel marketing both internally and also to sell out your advertising packages

The human race doesn’t all live in one house, or all work at one business. We don’t drink our coffee the same way, and we all definitely do not save our pennies for the same exact vacation.

When a mother and daughter

What to look for in a classified ad system, from Haven Nexus, to yClas, Classipress and ClassifiedEngine
Classified ads have a long tradition of providing service to readers. For newspapers, classifieds were a major source of revenue until online sales services, such as Craigslist, and all the online job search services, such as Monster, took over the space they

Pick your favorite online publishing platform, and there’s probably news; plus, when does a digital paywall become pay as you go?
The idea of the perfect online publishing platform continues to emerge as a major consideration for digital publishers looking to add on to revenue streams, as elusive as that perfect online publishing platform is. Is

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.

How creating, publishing, and promoting these three types of content daily will tackle all your social and SEO goals

Typically we find that content falls into three buckets: news, evergreen, and blockbuster. Most Mequoda publishers publish this type of content every single day because all three serve different purposes.

News content keeps your readers up to date