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Publishers Driving Website Traffic Through Social Are Making Changes

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Driving website traffic happens beyond Facebook in the world of social; Meredith launches brand for Facebook and hubs; Google outlines Flexible Sampling for publishers 

Driving website traffic is always on the mind of audience development managers. We’re seeing publishers acting in accordance with this notion, as they dive deeper into a variety of locations, including Facebook, but also beyond Facebook.

Today we begin with a look at the shift away from Facebook as publishers try alternative social networks. Digiday reports, “Facebook is still a big source of referral traffic for publishers overall. But it has declined as a referral source relative to Google and left publishers frustrated with lagging monetization opportunities in key areas like video. Meanwhile, other platforms have stepped up, offering publishers more attention (Google and Apple News), financial rewards (Snapchat) and a growing audience and better user experience (Instagram).”

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The article continues with examples of publishers (CNN and HuffPost) trying other audience development strategies for driving website traffic. “CNN’s platform distribution team is de-emphasizing Facebook while increasing its focus on Apple News — Apple’s news aggregation app that’s baked into its mobile devices — and Snapchat, said Andrew Morse, evp at CNN, who oversees its digital editorial efforts.”

HuffPost was the biggest publisher on Facebook last year in total likes, comments and shares, by NewsWhip’s measurement. This year, it’s been making a big push to diversify beyond Facebook to Twitter and Instagram, where it sees a lot of room for growth, said Ethan Klapper, global social media editor for HuffPost. Along with that change in platform focus, he’s reassigning the social team to be subject-centric and audience-centric, rather than platform-centric.”

Our next story looks at Meredith’s new wellness brand and its strategy to focus deeply on Facebook and its social hubs. MediaPost reports, “Meredith Corp. is launching a wellness and health vertical called Strive, which will be distributed on Facebook and on hubs across five of its titles, including Martha Stewart, Shape, Better Homes & Gardens, Parents and Eating Well.”

The article continues with information on the publishing team and the vertical’s focus. “Strive has a team of about 10 dedicated to the new vertical. Jennifer Braunschweiger, editor-in-chief of Strive, will work in collaboration with the editors of Meredith’s titles to create unique content to fit each brand’s specific audience.”

Editorial will include stories on aging, food recipes and interviews. Braunschweiger said video will be a large component of Strive, and it will begin to roll out next month. She said Strive differs from other health and wellness brands because all of its editorial will be backed by research and peer-reviewed medical studies.”

Our last story looks at Google’s replacement of “first click free” with “flexible sampling, the new rules of the program, and how it can aid in driving website traffic for publishers. MediaPost reports, “Richard Gingras, vice president of News at Google, explains how the Mountain View, California company has been working with publishers, allowing each individual publication to determine the best number of free articles and pieces of content, if any, that each reader can access before they have to pay.”

The article continues with new updates to the service. “Along with the news, Google published a set of detailed best practices to help publishers implement flexible sampling and make it easier for readers to subscribe. The two types of sampling that Google advises publishers to use are known as metering — which provides readers with a quota of free articles to consume before encountering a paywall — and lead-in, which offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.”

Is driving website traffic on your mind too? Do you need help creating an effective audience development strategy? If so, set up a time to chat with us. We have extensive experience with helping publishers increase their website traffic numbers.

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Multiplatform Publisher Meredith Corporation Leads Digital Evolution

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Steve Lacy, Meredith’s executive chairman, has evolved the company over the years to become the biggest multiplatform publisher in the business, and that involves turning to a variety of partnerships to make up for a decrease in advertising revenue

An organization needs to meet its audience where it exists to survive as a multiplatform publisher, and changing with the times is what allows some publishers to stay relevant and profitable when many around are unable to do so.

Today we’re looking at an interview with Steve Lacy, Meredith Corporation’s executive chairman, and the process of its multiplatform publishing strategy development throughout the years.

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We begin with an introduction to Meredith Corporation’s assets. The NY Times reports, “For now, Meredith owns 40 magazines to go with its 17 television stations and 50 websites. The Time Inc. deal gave new life to Meredith’s digital and video operations, increasing the number of unique monthly visitors to its websites from 80 million to 170 million. And Meredith officials say the company will generate $700 million in annual digital advertising revenue.”

The article continues with a look at the company’s initial foray into multiplatform publishing. “In 1922, after serving as the secretary of agriculture under President Woodrow Wilson, Mr. Meredith introduced Fruit, Garden and Home, later renamed Better Homes and Gardens. After his death, the company went public, moved into the television business and expanded its magazine portfolio with titles including Country Home, Wood and Midwest Living. It has since added Family Circle, Parents, Shape, Allrecipes, Martha Stewart Living and Magnolia Journal, among other publications.”

As the years progressed and advertising revenue came to a place of decline, Meredith turned towards other initiatives to stay relevant as a multiplatform publisher. “To make up for the decline in print advertising that has afflicted the industry, Meredith has turned to other sources of revenue, including a retail partnership with Walmart and a Better Homes and Gardens real estate agency. But with a focus on evergreen subjects, it has proved better able to weather the downturn than media companies that chase after the latest news-break or trend.”

“More than 60 percent of Meredith’s $1.7 billion in revenue comes from its magazine business. The company has also been able to keep costs low in a way that executives at the New York-based Condé Nast and Hearst can only envy.”

Perhaps it’s the connection to the Heartland that is helping Meredith Corporation with the success it has found. Stephen Orr, editor in chief of Better Homes and Gardens, shares his opinion on the company’s culture. “The Midwestern aspect of it — the base of it and the headquarters of it being in Des Moines — I think does infuse the whole company with a kind of Midwestern practicality.”

Do you want to take a multiplatform publisher approach that meets your target audience through a variety of channels like the ones Meredith Corporation has utilized? If you’d like to discuss how we can help you increase your audience, revenue and profits, please reach out to schedule a no obligation chat with a member of our consulting team.

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8 Ways to Sell Digital Magazine Subscriptions

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How to sell digital magazines online as the demand for many platforms rises

dmw-money

It’s amazing to look back just 5 or so years ago, when digital magazines were still something of a novelty. Today, it’s a given that print publishers have some version of a digital edition of their magazine, either app or web.

There are also publishing entrepreneurs who have launched from scratch with print, digital and website simultaneously, and even established websites with no magazine at all are beginning to create their own magazines – multiplatform publishing run backward, so to speak.

But even as they’ve become part of the norm, everyone is still trying to figure out how to sell digital magazine apps and web magazines in this brave new world. Sometimes the newest and hottest ideas are just that – ideas. We’re focused on strategies that have actually been executed and demonstrated to work.

So here are 8 strategies we’ve compiled for selling digital magazine apps and web magazines, and as always, we welcome your ideas in the comments below.

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How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 1

Track device users: If you’re making even the smallest effort at online audience development, you’re getting a sizable number of unique visitors to your website. You should always identify those visitors who arrive on a mobile device, and deliver a floater with a digital subscription offer they can’t refuse. This will help you sell digital magazines in the future because you’ll have the benefit of data to guide your decisions.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 2

Keep the whole pie: At Mequoda, we always build a web magazine subscription website as a companion to our Gold Members’ magazines. Besides the obvious benefits of audience development, subscription websites are vital in selling digital magazines, because you can do so directly from your website.

If you also have an app, take the money yourself. Send them to Apple for fulfillment, and you don’t owe Apple a dime. Why? Because Apple’s primary interest is selling iPads, and as long as your subscription website isn’t a competitor retail site, the company is happy. Bonus: You get to gather the customer’s data, which Apple doesn’t willingly share and is a sore point for many publishers.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 3 

01-digital-magazine-publishing-software-is-important-which-option-are-you-usingLeverage your back issues: There’s gold in them thar archives! One of the product bundles offered by Scientific American includes print, digital and the incredible archive that SA fully digitized – a couple hundred thousand articles, dating back to the magazine’s first issue in August 1845 and including contributors such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison.

And while few publishers have an archive as old and rich as SA’s, most legacy publishers have older content that their subscribers would love to access. For instance, Mequoda Gold Member Biblical Archaeology Society has digitized back issues of its current magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, along with its retired titles. Bundling that archive with the digital magazine (and leveraging decoy pricing) consistently delivers more sales and revenue than the digital magazine or the library alone.

BAS, by the way, combines Best Practice 2 with Best Practice 3 for a profitable two-fer!

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 4

Practice Six Sigma subscription marketing: Launch a high-frequency Six Sigma email spotlight program focused on selling more magazine subscriptions. For one client, we increased the number of magazine spotlights from the standard 2-3X per week to 5X per week and introduced editorially-driven creative to alternate between offer-driven creative. We saw a 70% increase in their TOPX (total orders per 10K email subscribers) from this program.  

The email campaigns are planned and measured in 2-week cycles, where we identify the 5 best performing spotlights and the 5 worst performing spotlights in a given 2-week cycle. We keep the 5 winners and include them in the next 2-week email cycle, and we replace the 5 losers with brand new creative.

Meanwhile, we are also testing the offer. For example, for this particular client, we ran one offer for 4 weeks and we ran a different offer for the next 4 weeks. The reason we recommend doing offer testing sequentially is because of the multi-device nature in which our consumers engage with our content.

For example, they may be reading your emails on their phone, but prefer to visit your website on their computers to subscribe to your magazine. In this scenario, we’d want the consumer to be able to find the same offer on your website as they saw in email. This can present a challenge of course in measuring attribution, but we prefer this approach as it provides a cleaner read on the strength of a particular offer when it’s the only one being promoted across web, email and social. 

While this approach is a significant amount of work, requiring active coordination between editorial and marketing, on-the-spot analytics, great copywriting, and interaction with fulfillment to manage the offers, we have seen it work and strongly recommend all publishers try it. For more, read Six Sigma Subscription Marketing: 12 Offers That Boost Response Rates.

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How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 5

Start with a soft offer: Selling your magazine without a soft offer, like a free trial or a free incentive, is tough. We’ve seen hard offers work with low introductory prices, but at full price, selling these alone can be a hard way to make a living.

Hard offers typically deliver only 25% of the response that can be generated using soft offers, such as free trials and free issues.  We experience a higher response rate when we test trial offers that include incentives such as free special issues or other digital content available only to premium subscribers.

With introductory pricing, we recommend using two different prices for new subscribers and renewals. Another option we often recommend is step-up pricing, a strategy that has three prices: One for new subscribers, a slightly higher one for renewals, and an even higher price for those who have already renewed once.

Start thinking about new ways you can begin subscription offer testing and how you’re going to leverage your editorial team and their expertise to craft intriguing copy specific to what the consumer will find in the current or archived issue of the magazine you’re promoting. Start coordinating with your fulfillment team to create different offer types to include free trials and monthly price points billed quarterly or bi-monthly. 

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 6

Sample issue: As I’ve mentioned before, some publishers give away sample issues, or have a metered paywall to entice customers to buy a subscription. A case study noted that for Popular Science, when they tested a specifically-designed sample issue against a free trial, the sample issue, showing off the best of the digital edition, easily bested the free trial offer. (Don’t hesitate to run your own similar test, though. Free trials are classic marketing techniques for a reason!) 

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 7 

02-digital-magazine-publishing-software-is-important-which-option-are-you-usingLow-tech paper: There’s no excuse not to market to your existing print subscribers. Include a special offer for them when you have to send a renewal or billing notice anyway, and the cost is minimal.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 8

Promote them: This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s shocking to us how many publishers (and we’re talking big players) have elaborate websites hosting subscription pages to build print circulation … but their digital products go unmentioned. On the platform where they’re most likely to find their tech-savvy readers! Don’t hide your digital editions under a barrel!

What about you? Got any tips or tricks we should include in this list? Selling digital magazines is an area where we could all use new ideas, and one that’s changing daily.

This post was originally published in 2013 and is regularly updated.

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How to Choose the Best Subscription Pricing & Single-Copy Pricing Strategy for Your Subscription Websites

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Three subscription pricing strategies that work

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 for many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.

Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities when pricing publications online.

The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is near zero. The cost of delivering digital issues via digital newsstands and app stores 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.).

While the above is new, an Excel spreadsheet can help you map the right solution easily. The tougher decision is deciding how to position subscription versus single copy or limited access. It would be nice if there were a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. There’s not. Depending upon your brand, delivery channels, and publishing economics (user, sponsor, or some hybrid of the two), one of these three solutions might be best for you.

Traditional pricing

You’ll find that those who aren’t bundling products through Universal Pricing or Contrast Pricing will be best served by the guidelines below:

Be fair and balanced: If you want to neutralize price in the subscription versus single-copy decision-making process, use the fair and balanced approach. Assuming you’re selling either a monthly issue or monthly access or both, set your price ratio at four-to-one. For a mass-market consumer brand, it might ideally be $19.97 per year or $4.97 per month (issue).

Encourage sampling: Consumers generally don’t like commitment. When considering the purchase of an information product with which they’re unfamiliar, they largely prefer to buy one. If you want to encourage this behavior and thus maximize your single copy or monthly access sales, price your annual subscription at $19.97 and price monthly access or single copies at $2.97. This pricing strategy still provides a powerful incentive to take the annual option, but will result in a much higher percentage of people that take the single copy or monthly access price. It’s worth noting there’s a huge difference in the long-term economics of selling monthly access to a subscription website for $2.97 on a recurring basis, than selling a single magazine or newsletter issue through a subscription application for $2.97 on a non-recurring basis.

Push the subscription: If your overall economics favor selling subscriptions, consider what many now call “no-brainer pricing,” which sets a ratio of about two-to-one. Assuming we’re still talking about a subscription priced at $19.97, this strategy would dictate a single copy or monthly access price of $9.97. Note: In all the above cases I am avoiding avalanche price barriers like $10 and $20. You should, too.

While many magazine and newsletter publishers have avoided building subscription websites and thus avoided the above decision matrix until now, the rapid growth of tablet computers and the sale of tablet-based app subscriptions is dragging them to include digital subscription marketing in their core long-term publishing strategy.

If you’re not bundling your services, follow the guidelines above.

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However, as publishers begin to include website access in their long-term publishing strategy, they’re beginning to discover other ways of bundling web access into print and digital packages. The first, Universal Pricing, bundles platforms at a discount, but the second, Contrast Pricing, we’re finding is more profitable and gets consumers to pick higher priced bundles.

Universal pricing

Universal Digital Access, as a policy, creates an environment where subscribers can safely sample different platforms without fear of being left behind. From the publishers point of view, a subscriber is a horrible thing to waste, and anyone who subscribes to content on any platform, in any edition, is given premium access to their subscription website.

Contrast pricing

While some mega-publishers still employ the universal pricing strategy, others have moved to our new favorite pricing model, contrast pricing – also known, less politely, as decoy pricing.

Contrast pricing takes advantage of the psychological phenomenon in which human beings, when asked to make a choice, tend to rely on the relative value of things compared and contrasted to other similar things. This theory has been beautifully illustrated in depth by Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, in his New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

It’s the same phenomenon, Ariely notes, that causes our headaches to persist when we take a cheap pain pill, but magically alleviates them when we take a much more expensive remedy. As long as we have something to contrast a purchase with, we’ll choose the one that seems most valuable by contrast.

Ariely most famously examined The Economist a few years back, before digital magazines, when it made this offer:

  • $59 – Subscription to the website
  • $125 – Subscription to the print edition
  • $125 – Subscription to the website and the print edition

The decoy price was the middle one: $125 for the print edition alone, when you could have the print edition and the website for the same price, was undesirable, and only served to establish the higher value of the last offer. That’s what I call maximizing your revenues!

Although we don’t have any numbers from The Economist to show how well it worked, Ariely ran a test by asking students to choose which offer they’d prefer. Unsurprisingly, the decoy worked beautifully, driving consumers to the highest priced offer:

  • $59 – Website only: 16%
  • $125 – Print edition only: 0%
  • $125 – Website and print edition: 84%

Next, he removed the decoy price that made the last offer seem to be the most attractive. The results changed dramatically:

  • $59 – Website only: 68%
  • $125 – Website and print edition: 32%

The lesson? Bundle that digital magazine with at least one other product, and make sure you have three or more offers to drive more buyers to the highest price point.

More subscription pricing data on the way

Every week I hear from a colleague or client who has new data about the best pricing and promotion strategies for their digital subscription websites and digital apps. In many cases, they hadn’t even considered how single copy or monthly access pricing should play into their overall marketing and pricing strategy. That’s changing quickly. As new data and case studies appear, you can count on us to cover them here, and in our upcoming live events.

In the meantime, read more about Six Sigma offer testing and our 12 best offers to test. If you need help developing a strategic marketing plan for your subscription publishing business, please schedule a call with our consulting team. 

This post was originally published in 2014 and has been updated regularly.

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Let’s Clarify: What Is a Digital Magazine?

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What is a digital magazine really? Is it clickable, scrollable, web-accessible, or all the above?

What Is a Digital Magazine? What are Digital Magazines?

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, and it’s not necessarily just an online magazine, although it could be!

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Digital magazines and their many mobile formats

The Alliance for Audited Media (formerly ABC) defines a digital edition as distribution of a magazine’s content via electronic means. The digital edition must maintain the same identity of the host publication by maintaining the same brand characteristics.
 Mequoda agrees with this definition.

When a magazine goes digital and becomes an app, 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 into a magazine 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.

Many publishers in this situation, hurrying to keep up, launch digital replica editions. These editions are simple digital mockups that subscribers can read and download onto their mobile devices, in many cases they are PDFs. In our last survey of digital magazine readers, this was the least desired format to read a digital magazine because their most desired feature is scrollable text, whereas most replica editions require readers to pinch and zoom in order to read the text.

The more desired digital magazine formats include a replica plus and reflow plus.

Digital magazine subscription websites

A digital magazine may also come in another shape and size: a web magazine library.

A web magazine library is sold as a subscription for a related print or digital magazine and provides access to issues of the magazine online, often in an HTML format. I Like Crochet is a magazine subscription website, and we recently wrote about six other impressive web magazine libraries we like, which includes TIME, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review. All require registration for full access to the site; all offer their magazine content online; and are organized by issue.

Many people refer to any website that carries a legacy magazine brand and magazine content as a web magazine library; however, if the content is not organized in a magazine format and issues cannot be viewed or downloaded, it doesn’t meet our basic criteria of being a best-practice web magazine library or subscription website.

As you may read in our description of the perfect digital magazine website, we think every publisher should offer their magazine in print, mobile, web, and library formats.

What is a digital magazine to you?

The combination of a magazine’s attributes make it desirable and “survivable” for some part of the reading population and that, paper or tablet, the essential attributes of a magazine will not change.

Consumers who love magazines are not going to let publishers change the characteristics of a magazine that have made the medium so successful over the years. However, there’s always room for improvement in format and accessibility.

When you think of the term “digital magazine,” what do you think of? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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How to Create “Special Collections” in a Web Library that Attract and Retain More Subscribers

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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 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.

One of the ways our clients are effectively engaging their web library subscribers, as well as attracting new subscribers is by creating “special collections” of curated content.

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One such client is the Biblical Archaeology Society. They publish the BAS Library, which includes over 7,000 articles from 40 years of Biblical Archaeology Review (1975 to present), 20 years of Bible Review (1985 to 2005 complete) and 8 years of Archaeology Odyssey (1998 to 2006 complete).

Within the BAS Library are their special collections where they showcase an archive of articles around their best premium content. In addition to engaging existing subscribers, these pages can be used as marketing tools with preview copy doubling as email promotions.

For example, they have a special collection called “Women in the Bible.” The introduction to this collection reads:

Although the Bible is largely a product of the male-dominated societies of ancient Israel and the first-century C.E. Roman world, some of its most fascinating, evocative and inspiring characters are women. BAS editors have compiled a special collection of articles from Bible Review on various women in the Bible, from Esther and Judith to Mary Magdalene, who helped shape Biblical history and the message of the scriptures.

web library BAS

Indeed, a savvy library curator may choose to focus not only on creating special collections around themes, but may also take advantage of the depth of their library content to create collections that focus on coverage that is no longer part of the current magazine.

Another collection in the BAS Library is called “The Historical Jesus” and it includes historical articles about Jesus, the man, dating back as far as 1989.

BAS has over forty special collections currently, and that list is growing. They have a collection specifically for Easter, for specific historical events, and ones for special authors, like Victor Hurowitz, a now deceased professor of Bible, archaeology and ancient Near Eastern studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. In commemoration of his illustrious career, Biblical Archaeology Society put together a collection of his most popular articles.

Other benefits of creating these special collections include:

  • An added benefit you can add to your sales page that details the number of curated collections you have
  • Improved usability for subscribers who are interested in specific topics
  • Increased engagement from existing subscribers who may feel overwhelmed by the volume of content to which they have access
  • Converting special collection pages into email promotions for potential and existing subscribers

How to create special collections:

  1. Start with a plan to create a minimum of 6-8 special collections before promoting that section of your library.
  2. Come up with 6-8 unique topics that you have five or more resource-rich articles about.
  3. Create your 6-8 special collections pages, which include an introduction to the topic, followed by a list of the library articles about that topic, ideally in order of publish date, unless it makes sense to organize differently.
  4. Create a new page/section in your web library, where you can introduce your special collections, and list them.
  5. Have a plan in mind to add a new collections to this page every month, at a minimum, until you’ve run out of topics.
  6. Use the content of these collections to create library preview emails to send to current subscribers giving them a reason to use their subscription, and to prospective subscribers giving them a reason to join. Rotate through these emails and recycle them, promoting the special collections regularly.

Subscription marketers must relearn and rethink how they promote content in the age of the Internet. Instead of promoting the next 12 issues, you can promote back issues, special collections and categories of content that can span decades. This provides many, many options for launching a diverse marketing program. This type of marketing program empowers a content marketing frequency that would be unthinkable if you were only promoting the next 12 issues.

As we’ve mentioned in past articles, for the more than 40 web libraries we manage, promoting past content often produces results that are double or triple the new order volume we see when promoting current or future issues. Once you see this reality, the foundation is quite simple given the depth of evergreen content that most special interest magazines and newsletters can access in their archives.

If you’d like to explore how we could double or triple your online magazine, newsletter and membership sales, please schedule a free consultation with a member of our marketing services team.

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World Politics Review Partners with Mequoda Systems to Grow Premium Subscription Business

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Mequoda and WPR partner with a performance-based revenue-share relationship to grow subscription business

As one of the world’s most authoritative sources on world politics and international relations, World Politics Review (WPR) has been successful at penetrating the corporate, government and educational markets. Now, they are partnering with Mequoda Systems to aggressively grow their individual subscriber business.

Publisher Hampton Stephens says, “We know there’s demand for individual subscriptions based on our limited marketing efforts, but we needed the resources of a top-tier marketing organization to effectively and aggressively scale our individual subscriptions business. Mequoda has the best business processes we’ve seen for getting the job done.”

The WPR website will remain largely unchanged as part of the transformation. The Mequoda Systems marketing and technology teams are using an array of third-party software platforms that include Unbounce and Chargify to manage sales letter landing pages, order pages and paid subscription entitlement.

“We felt their technology was in good shape and wanted to immediately focus on putting business processes in place that would lift revenue. Our technology team is working with their existing website developer to make the necessary modifications for deployment of a full scale Six Sigma email marketing program that will include content previews and hard-hitting sales letters written by our marketing team,” said Don Nicholas, Mequoda Systems CEO.

Stephens also notes that he was impressed by Mequoda’s preference for a performance-based revenue share relationship. “I think their preference for a compensation method that rewards success says a lot about their confidence in our product and their marketing abilities.”

Mequoda Systems publishes and markets 21 special-interest media websites working with 16 different content producers that include magazine publishers, newsletter publishers and membership organizations. If you’d like to learn more about working with Mequoda, schedule a time to chat with a member of our marketing services team.

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How to Curate Library Content to Engage and Retain Web Magazine Readers

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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.

One of the ways our clients are effectively engaging their web library subscribers, as well as attracting new subscribers, is by creating “special collections” of curated content.

One such client is the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS). They publish the BAS Library, which includes over 7,000 articles from 42 years of Biblical Archaeology Review (1975 to present), 20 years of Bible Review (1985 to 2005 complete) and 8 years of Archaeology Odyssey (1998 to 2006 complete).

Within the BAS Library are their special collections where they showcase an archive of articles around their best premium content. In addition to engaging existing subscribers, these pages can be used as marketing tools with preview copy doubling as email promotions.

For example, they have a special collection called “Women in the Bible.” The introduction to this collection reads:

Although the Bible is largely a product of the male-dominated societies of ancient Israel and the first-century C.E. Roman world, some of its most fascinating, evocative and inspiring characters are women. BAS editors have compiled a special collection of articles from Bible Review on various women in the Bible from Esther and Judith to Mary Magdalene, all of whom helped shape Biblical history and the message of the scriptures.

The BAS has over forty special collections currently, and that list is growing. It has collections specifically for Easter, for specific historical events, and for special authors like Victor Hurowitz, a now-deceased professor in the department of Bible, archaeology and ancient Near Eastern studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. In commemoration of his illustrious career, the BAS put together a collection of his most popular articles.

Other benefits of creating these special collections include the following:

  • An added benefit you can add to your sales page that details the number of curated collections you have
  • Improved usability for subscribers who are interested in specific topics
  • Increased engagement from existing subscribers who may feel overwhelmed by the volume of content to which they have access
  • Converting special collection pages into email promotions for potential and existing subscribers

Subscription marketers must relearn and rethink how they promote content in the age of the Internet. Instead of promoting the next 12 issues, you can promote back issues, special collections, and categories of content that can span decades. This provides many, many options for launching a diverse marketing program. Such a marketing program empowers a content-marketing frequency that would be unthinkable if you were only promoting the next 12 issues.

For the web libraries we manage, promoting past content often produces results that are double or triple the new order volume we see when promoting current or future issues. Once you recognize this reality, the foundation is quite simple given the depth of evergreen content that most special interest magazines and newsletters can access in their archives.

If you’d like to explore how we could double or triple your online magazine, newsletter, and membership sales, please schedule a free consultation with a member of our executive team.

The post How to Curate Library Content to Engage and Retain Web Magazine Readers appeared first on Mequoda Daily.


How to Start an Online Magazine With These Five Strategies

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Are you ready to learn how to start an online magazine for your new or legacy magazine brand? Try these tips!

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.

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?

As it turns out, plenty. And there’s one crucial contrast that we’ll focus on here:

An online magazine, also referred to as a web magazine, is an HTML-prepped periodical built using responsive design, making it easily readable on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone’s browser. It’s often accessed as a subscription or print + digital combo. It’s self-contained, consumed in larger chunks for longer periods of time, and ideally includes a trove of archival content.

An online magazine is just one type of digital magazine.

If you’re still reading this, you have probably concluded an online magazine model is better suited to your publication, and you’re looking for help on how to start an online magazine.

But if you’re still unsure as to whether your content fits the mold of an online magazine or a digital magazine app (or, for that matter, an electronic newsletter, et al.), here’s a good litmus test:

Will people subscribe to your online magazine based on the quantity and quality of your content?

More to the point, will they actually sit down to read it from front to back?

In other words, will it be “appointment” or “event” reading, as opposed to intermittent check-ins for news updates and headlines?

Did you answer “yes” to all three of those questions? If so, let’s explore how to make it happen.

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How to Start an Online Magazine: Step 1

First things first: Find your niche.

You’re going to have a tough time starting a national news magazine these days, considering there are scores of national news magazines already out there – some of which are struggling to adapt to the new publishing paradigm.

Instead, aim for a more specialized area of interest. A niche. A hobby. A historical subject. A region. What are you an expert in? Does it match up with a void in the marketplace – or, even if not, can you do it better than the few publications out there? Can you generate enough content to sustain interest? It’s never been a better time to be a niche publisher.

Check out our case study on Prime Publishing’s I Like Crochet. It doesn’t get any more niche – or inspiringly successful – than that!

How to Start an Online Magazine: Step 2

Decide how you’re going to monetize.

Yes, your revenue will likely depend largely on subscriptions, but you have a ton of options when it comes to magazine subscription website business models. And once you select your plan of attack, you have another decision to make: how to choose the best subscription pricing strategy.

Will you bundle products? Will you offer tiers and contrast pricing? Will you lock readers in or let them roam a bit?

And, of course, might you make a push for ads, as well?

How to Start an Online Magazine: Step 3

Build your infrastructure and plan out how your content will take shape.

How do you envision your online magazine? Do you have a design in mind? More importantly, are you ready to commit to a content management system (CMS) that will give life to your online magazine and help manage your editorial workflow?

Mequoda members use our Haven CMS, which integrates everything from audience development to e-commerce to subscription (and even event) management, along with the standard publishing software, of course.

If you have a lot of content – or plan to – you’ll need a strong foundation to support it.

How to Start an Online Magazine: Step 4

Use content you have, or start creating content.

Arguably your greatest asset in charting out a course for your online magazine is your capacity to host an online magazine library.

If you’ve been in the print business for a while, or even if you’ve been blogging or distributing newsletters, you must capitalize on that existing content and not let it go to waste.

Remember: If you’re a legacy publisher with existing content, you don’t have to start from scratch with an online magazine!

Update, reformat, standardize, and incorporate your evergreen articles and posts into an online magazine library.

Call a couple of colleagues or make a hire, because this step is going to take considerable elbow grease. The good news? It will end up generating significant revenue once all of that front-end work is done.

How to Start an Online Magazine: Step 5

Determine how you’re going to develop an audience.

Yes, this means marketing starts now. The most successful new online magazines are those that are using the platform to serve an audience that they are already reaching through some other medium.

How do you do this? Again, you have a lot of options: email and freemiums are a must in attracting visitors you can convert into subscribers. So, too, is social media. Finding a good press release service is key, as well.

Do you now have a better grasp of how to start an online magazine? Are you a legacy publisher simply looking to reach into the digital realm? If so, reach out and schedule a call with a member of our marketing services team and learn how we can increase your online audience, revenue, and profits.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2015 and has been updated.

The post How to Start an Online Magazine With These Five Strategies appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

How to Create Multi-Platform Content Quickly and Cheaply

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When we talk about multi-platform 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 publisher worth their salt – whether print or digital – has 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.

Learn the secrets behind today's most rapidly growing niche publishers. Download a FREE copy of How to Develop a Multiplatform Magazine Business Plan, and discover how large your magazine business could become and how much of an investment will be required to build your business to maturity.

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Content can be published and distributed on many platforms – a Portal, an online directory, free white papers, paid handbooks, print magazines, podcasts, digital magazines (including a web edition and app editions), live events, digital events, membership libraries, and more. If you’re wondering “Shouldn’t email and social be on this list?” – that’s a good question – we consider email and social to be marketing platforms, not publishing platforms, even though we are huge advocates of using those channels to deliver high-quality content and not just promotional messaging. This helps keep subscribers and followers engaged. If you’re also wondering “Shouldn’t mobile be on this list?,” that’s another good question – no, we consider mobile a device type instead of a publishing platform archetype. You can view any type of multi-platform content on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Publishers everywhere are creating multi-platform content. Ed tech is hot, and it fits nicely into a multi-platform content approach, enabling as it does online archives, subscriptions, events, and video.

It’s not difficult to take a cursory look around the industry and find digital publishers who try to fit square pegs into round holes instead of sticking to what works for their hard-won audiences.

Slate’s Slate Plus is a membership predicated on premium content. This model is gaining in popularity among digital magazine subscriptions. The product certainly holds its own when it comes to digital magazine subscriptions. For $35/year, Slate Plus membership gets you (on top of the magazine’s standard offerings): ad-free podcasts, less ads on the site overall, members-only articles and newsletters, early-access to high-profile content, and other advantages. At the beginning of the pandemic, they launched a metered paywall as a way to funnel more people into their membership.

Podcasts have come in and out of vogue over the years, currently on an upswing. “Podcast creators, increasingly publishers like SlateFiveThirtyEightand Vanity Fair, struggle to reach new listeners because podcasts can be difficult to discover online, often isolated from the constant stream due to the limited shareability and SEO traction of audio. This makes it challenging for podcast creators to grow their audience beyond their most loyal followers,” Ellen Harvey writes on PubExec.com.

Video, on the other hand, is hot, especially brands who are leveraging YouTube’s massive network. Vogue has gotten a lot of traction with their “73 questions” series, where they interview celebrities, asking 73 questions while they walk through each room of the celebrities’ home. They have a number of different “columns” like this that are wildly popular.
Bon Appétit has also invested much into video, which you can find on YouTube and also on their website. They too have a number of different reoccurring columns, which they refer to as seasons.

And while live events may not be the highest revenue source of last year or this one, digital events are booming. Most publishers we know are making more profit, with more attendees than ever, by moving their events online.

So, how does this content get created? Does the premium content get recycled? We assume so in many cases. That’d be the smart thing to do, even if they’re just recycling it much later to non-paid members, or using it as sample content to gain more subscribers.

But even these modern examples of multi-platform publishing are not exactly what we’re talking about when it comes to creating multi-platform content on the cheap.

Taking one product and making it many products

Want to go cheap? You can go cheap. And you can produce a lot of content and profit that way.

You don’t even need a whole new content department, just some savvy editors. Magazine publishers who recycle content strategically are building giant multiplatform publishing businesses by recycling content like so:

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There are, of course, many different versions of this cycle depending on what you’re publishing, but the premise is the same: Take one thing and turn it into many things.

Create the most accurate content by compiling first-person knowledge from reputable sources and making it available to your audience through various platforms.

  1. Start with a magazine article.
  2. You can then use that content to create other products. At this point, you simply ask one of your designers to add the article as a chapter to the latest handbook you’re developing.
  3. And while they’re at it, they can turn it into a downloadable e-book. No need for other content.
  4. From there, you can break it into three portal posts.

But the best part comes after:

  1. Each of those portal posts promote the free ebook.
  2. And that free ebook promotes the handbook.
  3. And that handbook promotes your magazine.

There could also be podcasts, videos, or special edition magazine apps that come out of this transformation.

The circle of content life – isn’t it beautiful?

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If you want to get stealthy, online events are the best high-fidelity user experience, with the highest price point. You can turn research, stories and photos from your articles into slides in a powerpoint deck. And then turn around and use your speaker decks and transcripts to create articles for your site.

Most publishers will be most comfortable producing downloadable media, like books, special reports, or video pieces. Or, if you’re like The New Yorker, you ask the article writers to record their pieces and offer them as an audio subscription.

How do you recycle content? What’s your strategy? Let’s chat in the comments.

The post How to Create Multi-Platform Content Quickly and Cheaply appeared first on Mequoda Daily.





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