Tag: tablet

How often do you read something digitally? If you’re reading this, then you’ve done it at least once today. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t your first time.

Why would you give away content for free, in order to make money? Sounds crazy, but that’s how the smartest publishers we know have grown at an exponential speed.
Selling magazine subscriptions is part of a four step process that begins with giving away free content.
By giving away free content, like eBooks, you can build new

If your goal is to generate revenue and engagement for a business trade magazine or for paid subscriptions to a premium B2B newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

In digital marketing, you might have been told “free” is a dirty word. In subject lines, it could get you blacklisted (it won’t) or in social media, it’s over-used (free is still better than paid). However, giving away something for free is one of the best ways to start a relationship, and when it comes to selling products, this strategy has proven to be a huge asset to the marketing mix especially when the free product is assigned a value.

I was speaking with a colleague the other day who had crossed over from the magazine industry to newspaper publishing and back about consumer marketing trends. We noted that it will be interesting to see how lessons learned from the newspaper industry move into the magazine industry over time. Daily newspapers are both financially larger

As preferences for digital magazine consumption go digital, here’s a list of all the ways you can improve your multiplatform editions.
Last week we published this year’s 2018 Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study. We’ve been running this study since 2014 to analyze digital magazine adoption, and have come across new interesting findings each year:

In 2014, 20% of respondents

As tech industry observers like to note, the world of apps is wild and wacky. There are almost two million apps in the Apple and Google app stores. If you pick up or click to pretty much any tech publication these days, you’re guaranteed to see at least one app review, to help bewildered consumers navigate this crowded field.

Of course when you read those articles, you’re getting a lot of personal opinion, and in tech land, much of that turns out to be excitement over flashy technology – no surprise there. So what kind of apps do people want, really? For magazine publishers, the answers are fairly simple.

Whenever we work with a new client, there are four words they become familiar with very quickly.

In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains how these four words will change how you approach your business, and how you can learn more about them when you download our new FREE report, How to Increase Audience, Revenue and Profits with Multiplatform Publishing.

Any time your website drops in Google, it’s scary. But the one thing to know is that any drop in SEO traffic will be uniform. You won’t lose traffic in one zone of your website, it will be across the board. The ebb and flow of traffic is normal and not an algorithmic hit, it’s just the price

Creating an abundance of value within your subscription products is the key to subscription marketing and transforming your publishing business in the digital age
From time to time, it’s a good idea to sit down and think about the value proposition you provide prospective buyers in your subscription marketing efforts. When you are running a Six Sigma

Some of the most successful publishers let their users generate more than 99 percent of their content. The publishers that can do this become masters at building communities that draw users to both read and post.

Out of the nine subscription website business models, the community subscription website archetype is the only one where the publisher relies on its community to create the content. There are six premium (paid) archetypes, and three affinity (free) archetypes. This is one of the three free ones.

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. Portals are not meant to be read from front to back, and are in no way linear. Users may begin on an article they found through search and hyperlink their way across the site in a matter of seconds. There is no true table of contents, although there is arrangement in the form of categories, topic pages and related articles.

So what is a digital magazine? It’s a bit of a hybrid.

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

The essential core characteristics of a magazine are those that define the user experience.

In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains how the attributes that define a magazine are not necessarily better or worse than those that define other media — movies, books, etc. They are simply different in terms of the user experience.

A publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best subscription business models are built. Any online publisher who doesn’t bother to understand and identify their MIU will fumble trying to build a successful subscription website.

In this week’s Freebie Friday spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains why using monthly pricing to accommodate a user’s desire to sample, is just one key to selling more subscriptions. From there you can download How to Use Contrast Pricing to Increase Subscription Revenue to learn more about pricing your print and digital magazine subscriptions.

While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.

Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities.

The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is near zero. The cost of delivering digital issues via the Apple, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble digital newsstands is based on remit and the cost of delivering a digital issue paid to your digital publishing software provider (Mag+, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, etc.).

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.

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.”

It’s amazing to look back to just a year or so ago, when digital magazines were still something of a novelty. Today, it’s a given that print publishers will soon create a digital version of their product if they haven’t already.

If you think that your website should be the main driver of your revenue, think again. Email subscribers are responsible for between 60 and 80% of all digital revenue generation, while passing website visitors and social followers make up the balance.

Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t turn into buyers. They simply remain …

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.

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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.

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

Your magazine SEO efforts will determine how much traffic arrives and eventually converts into subscribers – what are you doing to find and plug any holes in your website?
Google is the business we all love to hate. If you run a big website, one of your jobs is magazine SEO for your website. There will

B2B subscription sales are beyond the age of phone sales and the most successful subscription marketers we know are selling them online through effective pricing and copywriting strategies
Arthur C. Clark, a futurist, writer, inventor and philosopher said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that’s exactly how some publishers look at us when we

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.

The most effective blow-in cards of the 21st century aren’t made of cardstock, they’re digital. And since offering a sample of your magazine is less effort for the user when it’s done online, you have more opportunities.

In this week’s Freebie Friday spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains why using monthly pricing to accommodate a user’s desire to sample, is just one key to selling more subscriptions. From there you can download How to Use Contrast Pricing to Increase Subscription Revenue to learn more about pricing your print and digital magazine subscriptions.

If you struggle with determining paywall pricing and strategy, you’re not alone.
Recently, Hearst has been working on a more flexible paywall pricing and strategy, and the industry is abuzz. Max Willens at Digiday describes it as “a paywall whose permeability changes depending on who’s visiting and what they’re reading.”
“The new paywall replaces a system where editors

How to use web editions, collections and libraries to double your revenue

Are you still selling your magazine on one platform? Sure, print magazines smell good and even look good on a coffee table, but the most successful subscription publishers we know are leveraging more than paper to increase profits.

What are they doing exactly? They’re adding

Last week I was emailing back and forth with my friend and colleague Jack Edmonston, who often sends interesting news my way with some thoughts to pontificate on. This time it was an article from Politico by Jack Schaefer called, “Do Readers Own the New York Times?” Although the article is about newspaper and not magazine subscribers, it’s an interesting concept to think about for our industry, too.

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.

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?!

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

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.

Our top-read digital magazine publishing posts of last year showcase ways you can start a digital magazine from scratch and how to ensure it’s success
We’ve studied digital magazine publishing efforts and found what works. These reader-favorite posts from the past year help publishers approach the business with confidence. There is advice on starting your magazine

When you charge a fee to access the content within a subscription website, the site needs to provide specific and immediate benefits to your subscribers. Are you doing that?

Don’t scoff—we truly believe that web magazines can be the ultimate platform for periodical content for most magazine publishing brands. The problem is that, as we’ve covered in prior weeks, most web magazines aren’t living up to their potential. We are very close to destroying magazines as a medium by the way our industry is transporting them to the web.

Digital magazine publishing is and continues to be the current and next frontier, with unlimited revenue stream options coming from creative use and integration of text, images, video, social content, native advertising and so much more.

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, when he asked me “what exactly is magazine media?” See, in the niche magazine publishing business, you’ll find that many of your colleagues are niche industry experts, but as this client reminded me, not all are inherently from the magazine business.

We recently wrote about why magazine clubs are on the rise.

A magazine club is reminiscent of the book club model where you pay one price and gain access to a bundle. For example, you pay one price for a print and digital subscription to a magazine where you also get access to an extensive archive organized by both issue and article indexed by topic. Or you subscribe to a video club, and you get access to an archive of videos, or in the case of a cooking magazine, a recipe club where you get access to a bundle of premium recipes.

For every publisher who dreams of creating a subscription website, choosing the right subscription management software can be a daunting task

When we set out to launch the I Like Crochet digital magazine website (the first of its kind) and tablet edition, we knew we wanted to build a state-of-the-art publication management system. We needed subscription

The magazine industry has lost their way.

It’s been a long time since the dawn of digital publishing and publishers bringing their content online, but at this point we hoped that the industry would catch on and be rigorously testing their digital products.

Unfortunately so much has stayed the same, and while many magazine publishers seem to be working towards putting together web magazines, most have failed, as we’ve explained in recent posts documenting our journey through more than 300 magazine websites and what they think are web magazines.

Now that so many publishers are issuing digital editions, it’s time to take a look around and quantify some best practices that we’ve noted in researching apps and digital magazines.

First, let’s do some definitions. Terminology is changing daily, as it always does with new technology and new products, but for now we should at least attempt to clarify a few things. Some of these definitions come from outside Mequoda, but others are our own preferred definitions that serve to clarify some of the confusion in the industry right now. Your mileage may vary!

A multi-platform website enables a publisher to create dynamic content on multiple platforms. Some of these platforms might be online streaming through a membership library of training videos, or it could be a web magazine—formatted for, and read on the web.

But multi-platform website doesn’t just refer to the number of ways you recycle content across text, video, graphics and other mediums. It also means your website is responsive and will show visitors these different types of media, no matter what device they use: desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, phablet, whatever you’ve got. More thoughts on responsive design.

If your goal is to generate subscriptions and advertiser and sponsorship revenue from a free or controlled-circulation magazine with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

How would you like to increase your subscription revenues by almost 60%?

It can be done, and it’s not magic. All you need are a paid subscription website, a couple of other great products to sell and one secret: Decoy pricing.

More and more publishers are discovering this secret. And it’s not a new concept. You might know of it as the “contrast effect.”

When you think of a Smart TV, you think of one that’s connected to YouTube and Netflix and HBOGo all in one interface. If a TV can be so smart, why are so many websites, so dumb?

Our Mequoda Haven CXMS, is a “smart website” that is fully integrated. It knows when someone is a registered user and/or a paid subscriber. And something different will happen if you’re logged in, and if you’re not, and based on what you’ve purchased, it will try to sell you different products or upsell you. A smart website should only message you with ads that are based on data in your profile, and this is fundamental to maximizing advertising inventory.

When a magazine goes digital and becomes an app, or a web magazine, it becomes alive. And that’s scary for some publishers. Suddenly, ads become more valuable to advertisers because they can be clicked. Content becomes more rich because it can also be hyperlinked to references and authors on the web. Live content can be embedded with video in magazines so the editorial content doesn’t stop at the final publish date.

And if you’re not ready for that kind of transition or development project, then your magazine has suddenly become ancient.

It used to be that sharing vertical video branded you an amateur, but not anymore. Startups are specializing in it, publishers are pushing it out, and consumers are, well, consuming it, according to TheMediaBriefing.com.

Page views are a precious thing, and you should try not to waste them.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains the goals of a “smart website” and why having one built by publishing veterans can help you avoid waste and chaos.