Multiplatform publishing handbook by Condor Advertising Corp

Nicholas, Coburn, Van Doren, MacArthur

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY

60 Digital Publishing Secrets for Making Millions Online

Mequoda Team

Don Nicholas CEO & Lead Consultant

Active Interest Media Biblical Archaeology Society

Ed Coburn Chief Content Officer

Business & Legal Resources

Aimee Graeber Chief Technology Officer

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Laura Pittman Chief Operating Officer

Dagga Boy Enterprises

Kim Mateus Chief Business Development Officer Amanda MacArthur Research Director

Ebner Publishing International EH Publishing Farm Progress Companies Forester Media GiANT Impact

Norann Oleson Analytics Director

Natural Health Advisory Institute

Nancy Horan Systems Director

Magna Publications

Julie Ottomano Operations Manager

Metro Parent Publishing Group

Mary Van Doren Lead Copywriter

Oxford Media Group

Michael Phillips Senior Information Architect

Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School

Lowell Allen Senior Information Architect

Prime Publishing Psychotherapy Networker

Contributing Editors:

Remonsy Investment Network

Christopher Sturk Jane Zarem Peter A. Schaible Patrick Hughes Michelle L. Rodriguez Jeanne S. Jennings Roxanne O’Connell

Revolution Golf Sovereign Media The Successful Investor Vida y Salud Media Group

Report Authors: Don Nicholas Ed Coburn Mary Van Doren Amanda MacArthur Terms of Use All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, faxing, emailing, posting online or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the Publisher. All trademarks and brands referred to herein are the property of their respective owners. All references to Mequoda™ and the seven Mequoda Website Publishing Models™ are trademarks of the Mequoda Group, LLC. Legal Notices While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for error, omissions or contrary interpretations of the subject matter contained herein. The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, both referral and state and local, governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising and all other aspects of doing business in the United States or any other jurisdiction, is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader. The author and publisher assume no responsibility or liability whatsoever on the behalf of any purchaser or reader of these materials. Any perceived slights of specific people or organizations are unintentional. For More Free White Papers: http://www.MequodaFree.com

Contact Information Mequoda Group, LLC Customer Service (617) 217-2559 225 Franklin Street, 26th Floor Boston, MA 02110

Table of Contents UNDERSTANDING THE MEQUODA METHOD FOR MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING

THE MEQUODA MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING PYRAMID

DEVELOPING A MEQUODA PORTAL

THE MEQUODA PORTAL INDEX (MPI)

IDENTIFYING YOUR CONTENT ASSETS

THE NICHE MEDIA USER EXPERIENCE

BUILD YOUR OWN MULTIPLATFORM BRAND WHEEL

THE MEQUODA MULTIPLATFORM MEDIA MATRIX

SELLING MULTIPLATFORM SPONSORSHIPS

SELLING NATIVE ADVERTISING

HOW TO CREATE THE RIGHT MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING TEAM

ABOUT MEQUODA

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

Understanding the Mequoda Method for Multiplatform Publishing The Mequoda Method is a set of principles and best practices we use to build Mequoda Systems We recently started working with a publisher who came to us looking to sell more magazine subscriptions. When we started talking about the importance of building their email circulation, the publisher looked at us as if we hadn’t heard his question. After this conversation, it came to us that there are still lots of people out there who don’t understand what we do. If you’ve attended any of our events, or just read our blog regularly, you know we live and breathe the Mequoda Method. Mequoda didn’t invent this method. We’ve simply been watching the publishing industry for a very long time and have organized the successful strategies of publishers who developed it by instinct. We’ve turned these strategies into a finely-tuned system that we teach at our events and build for our publishing clients. We have more than 50 live websites using the Mequoda System that we monitor, and are aware of dozens more that use all or some of our best practices. We also run our own Mequoda System, even though we’re technically consultants. But despite the number of people who attend our events every year and read our blog regularly, it’s become clear that many people don’t know what the heck we’re talking about when we say “Mequoda Method” or “Mequoda System.” To be clear, a Mequoda System is a website build on the principles of the Method. We have many best practices for building a System based on this Method that change and evolve over time, but the main principles do not. In a Mequoda System, the structure of the websites we’ve built for our clients with great success and profitability include these four main principles:

• • • •

Attract Convert Engage Monetize

We see all four as discreet strategies that are completely interlocked.

Starting from the layer with the most visibility, we attract website visitors through search, then, a smaller number of those who we attract will convert into email subscribers. We will then engage those converted subscribers with great content in order to keep them happy, and finally, we monetize the relationship and turn those engaged email subscribers into buyers. This is the smallest number of people, however, fueled by the layers before it. •

Attract: We see SEO (great content + great keywords) as a primary driver of traffic. Some publishers opt to pay for traffic through PPC, but we believe that most publishers can build a steady stream of traffic through organic search by writing great original content and repurposing print content for the web in the form of keywordoptimized website portal posts and free reports.

•

Convert: With enough content on your portal, you can turn your steady flood of web visitors into email subscribers by giving away free reports or other freebies. To convert visitors into subscribers, the publisher only needs to implement appropriate conversion architecture on every page of their website. MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

•

Engage: All of your work attracting and converting website visitors into email subscribers is for nothing if you can’t keep your readers delighted and engaged by your content. Don’t skimp on your content. It’s the only thing that makes our fourth principle possible.

•

Monetize: Once someone is on your email list, whatever frequency your email schedule is, that’s how many times per week you have opportunities to sell them something. Without the first three principles, you only have one opportunity to sell them something, and those are the few moments from the time they arrive on your site until they leave. By adding attraction, conversion and engagement to your online strategy, you have hundreds of chances to get their attention by building a relationship with them through email.

All four of these strategies come with their own metrics. •

Your attraction metric can be defined by your Google visibility: How do you rank in the Google search engine? How many keywords are you targeting? How many of those keywords are you getting ranked on? How big is the keyword universe that you’re competing in?

•

Your conversion metric is defined by your capture / conversion rate: How well are you turning website visitors into email subscribers? How many people come to your website and leave only after they’ve given you their email address?

•

Your engagement metrics are your retention rates: How many of your email subscribers and social media followers are staying and engaging? Are your numbers going up or down?

•

Your monetization metric is your revenue per subscriber: How many orders are you getting from that email list you’ve been building? How many people click through your email and actually buy something?

The return is simple. • •

• •

Double you engagement and you’ll double your magazine circulation. Double your magazine circulation and you’ll double your revenue.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Mequoda System is, and always will be, a work in progress. The Internet is the biggest, fastest, beefiest, most extraordinary communications and marketing tool we have ever known—and it is relatively young. As the Internet matures—and these new media empires along with it—our System is reviewed, fine-tuned, tweaked, overhauled and/or extended, as required. We first published an introduction to the Mequoda System in 2006 and we’ve expanded and contracted the number of strategies, but these four principles (attract, convert, engage, monetize) have stayed fairly consistent throughout. Just as you need to constantly review and revaluate your media empire’s business model, we continually revisit the Mequoda Method and build Systems accordingly.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

The Mequoda Multiplatform Publishing Pyramid

The Mequoda Pyramid supports the notion that products have a natural hierarchy

Publishers implementing a vertically integrated strategy use outside media to acquire new customers, leveraging “free media” first. They use content to build a permission database. They create many products in many formats and recycle, reuse, and republish content. Finally, they are able to pull customers up the pyramid to maximize profit. When you hear the word “pyramid” in the world of business, your thoughts may go in a different direction, but at Mequoda, we’ve found a pyramid to be the best way to show how any publishing business makes money. Why have we chosen the pyramid as a graphic symbol? Like an upside-down funnel, you have your largest audience at the bottom, typically your non-paid users, and as you grow toward the top, you can see how your users eventually convert into paid users for products at higher price points. Each succeeding audience is a smaller group accessing the platform, while their investment of time and money goes up.

In this example, visitors come to the portal (your website), convert into email subscribers, are monetized by turning into magazine buyers, and then climb to the top revenueproducing activity – event buying. Ideally for any publishing website the largest percentage of your audience are visitors to your portal. These are the thousands or millions of website visitors who come in through search, social, and direct traffic. The next level of the pyramid is your email subscribers, because only a percentage of your visitors will convert into email subscribers, and an even smaller percentage will convert into paid magazine subscribers. Event attendees? Even fewer. Publishers have many different levels to their pyramids, but this is one example of a simple product pyramid for a publisher that offers a magazine and events as premium products. The fundamental truth of the Mequoda Method is that attracting portal visitors is relatively easy if you have a disciplined approach to creating strong SEO content, and we can afford to help them with free products like portal posts and email newsletters, because a percentage of them will eventually pay by subscribing to the magazine or attending an event. The Mequoda Group Pyramid At Mequoda, we’re not technically publishers, but we do practice everything we preach. And so although we don’t have a magazine we do have a pyramid. Let me explain. On the next page is our pyramid, which we call the “Cobbler’s Kids,” because like the cobbler who doesn’t have time to make shoes for his kids, we constantly face the challenge of implementing our best practices for ourselves. Flip to the next page to see the pyramid.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

The data in this pyramid features a complete year of Mequoda data. On the left, you’ll see the number of people/subscribers/attendees/clients, and on the right, you’ll see how much money is charged at each level. The lower levels of the pyramid, marked in blue, represent everything we do for free. If you just look at the blue, you might think of us as a publisher offering free content. Not coincidentally, it’s what the largest percentage of our audience gets to see: the Mequoda Daily portal, our free downloads, and our email newsletter. These are our audience development efforts, also known as our “marketing expenses.” We spend about $200,000 a year generating content for the bottom of the pyramid, and we don’t charge anything for it. The next step up on the pyramid, marked in green, is our live Digital Publishing and Marketing Intensive event, where people go to learn the Mequoda System (or train their employees on it),

and our Business Development program – which are both value-priced. For this level, we generate around $165k per year, but spend more than $400k to produce them. If you look at levels one through five, all revenue is spent on content creation and delivery, and client engagement. They are lead generators to the top of the pyramid, and a marketing expense that we absorb. These levels are qualifiers. It’s where we ask people to spend some money with us, but it doesn’t cover the cost of the services being rendered. The top of the pyramid, in yellow, funds the lower level pyramids. And like the yin and the yang, they give rise to one another. All the research we produce on the lower levels gives power to the top of the pyramid, where our development, management, and optimization clients are getting the most up-to-date consulting best practices and state-of-the-art systems being built that are constantly evolving. Our clients at the top of the pyramid benefit from every level below them. Currently, we spend 14% on marketing, but as you might assume, our version of marketing isn’t the same as other consultants. Instead of sponsoring events, we hold our own Intensives. Instead of paying to be featured on other people’s blogs, we write our own. Instead of sponsoring other company e-books, we produce and publish our own. And compare that to other consultants who spend an average of 25% on marketing, typically outside of their company via sponsorships and ads. We not only keep our costs down, but our money is spent in a way that benefits our readers, subscribers, and especially our clients. Every nickel is spent to support the top of the pyramid. If you look at all of our Mequoda Pyramids, you’ll notice a similar business model with different products. Mequoda publishers distribute free content in order to build their email addresses and sell books, magazines, and events instead of consulting and development. Creating your own Mequoda Pyramid The media pyramid enables us to identify, build, and manage a Mequoda System. Building a media pyramid is a fundamental strategy for modern publishers.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

One of the first questions a publisher must answer for each platform is whether to use it for affinity content – i.e., content you will give away to build and maintain an audience – or for premium content, which you plan to sell. The bottom of your pyramid: your portal visitors The broad bottom of the pyramid represents the largest entry point. Most of the new users who will experience your brand will discover it on the Internet, either through a blog, portal, or community in a social network that you use as an audience aggregation mechanism. Publishers use the Web to help users discover their website via organic search, give away content, and build a database. For example, a customer who has no prior knowledge of craft publishing mogul Interweave can Google “free sock patterns” and discover Knitting Daily, subscribe to its free email newsletter, and eventually become a premium product customer of this high-quality art and crafts publisher whose content includes magazines, books, TV Shows, e-patterns, and e-projects. The next level of your pyramid: your email subscribers The core use of this platform is the daily email newsletter. The percent of all the users who visit your website, and offer up their email address to become email subscribers, are exponentially more committed to the brand. Creating a portal that aligns free content with calls to action that build an email subscriber list is fundamental to the modern publisher’s marketing program. This is where the business relationship is launched, nurtured, and eventually monetized. Most Mequoda System publishers send out a daily email newsletter; some also offer a weekin-review. All send regular email promotions, and many send third-party promotions too. The next levels of your pyramid: all of the platforms that make you money, in order of price point What do you sell? Books? Magazines? Software? With the growing acceptance of tablets for reading, book sales are up, and book readership is climbing for the first time in decades.

A large part of the appeal of reading a book on an e-reader or tablet computer is the lower cost — generally about $9.95 vs. two or three times that amount to buy a hardcover book. Digital book publishing is not encumbered by the economic concerns of revenue sharing, inventory storage, limited press runs, etc. Here again, digital production and distribution have driven costs downward, which will continue. And naturally, your magazine is a level in this pyramid, which accounts for all of your singlecopy and subscription sales. If you sell access to your website, or offer digital software with your publication, there’s a another level to add. The Mequoda Pyramid is a core element of the Mequoda Method. Level by level, you monetize individuals by pushing them up the pyramid to product levels that are increasingly more valuable to them and certainly more profitable for you. And in case you’re wondering, this is true of purely sponsor-supported businesses, where users have higher levels of qualification in order to get access to higher levels of the pyramid, and sponsors pay more to gain access to those users. Designing your enterprise in a Mequoda Pyramid is a dramatic departure for most media companies, which have historically been horizontally integrated as magazine, newsletter, or book publishers. During the past 30 years, we’ve seen special interest media evolve toward vertical integration in which the goal is to produce media in and for a variety of content platforms. The top of your pyramid: your most expensive product At the top of your pyramid is the product that drives the most amount of revenue, the product that the fewest number of all of those portal visitors buy. For some, it might be a $99 special edition, and for others it might be a $2,500 conference ticket. Events are at the top of the Mequoda Pyramid for many publishers. Events may include conferences that can have thousands of attendees, as well as B2B workshops and one-onone consulting sessions. All of these are experiencing a renaissance, even though, with the exception of webinars, they are not digital. Even with all of the connectivity and all of the digital products that the Internet now enables, the demand for live events – high-fidelity, personal face time – has never been MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

greater. People who spend more time texting and tweeting than talking on the phone still crave live, social interaction with peers, mentors and subject matter experts. Publishers who have built their brand online are now discovering greater success at marketing their live events. Additionally, as database marketers, the cost of promoting live events with digital media is more affordable than ever. Here are some tips for building (and implementing) your own media pyramid for use in your online business plan: Media products have a natural hierarchy o This follows the time, money, and trust media continuum Use inbound marketing to acquire new customers o Leverage “free media” first – SEO and social media is key Use content to build a permission database of email subscribers o Portals and freebies are essential components of a niche media super-brand Create many products in many formats o Recycle, reuse, and republish content Pull customers up the pyramid to maximize profit!

• • • • •

For more than 15 years, the Mequoda team has helped publishing clients design and manage high-performance websites that deliver on their primary goals: • • •

To use free content to attract, convert, engage, and monetize users To sell and deliver premium content that generates revenue To build online communities that dominate their target markets

At Mequoda, we understand how search engines reward website design, and we know how to translate this knowledge into a compelling site that delivers an exceptional user experience. Our website design philosophy aligns premium content with free content. To do this, we first create a portal that is specifically designed to organically attract website visitors and convert them into e-mail and social media followers. From there, our system shifts to selling premium information products, including subscriptions, books, videos, events, or third-party products and services. Throughout the process, our primary goal remains constant: to built a website that attracts users and maximizes revenues.

Developing a Mequoda Portal Mequoda portals generate value from both users and sponsors Mequoda has guided the development of more than 110 successful niche media websites and has built more than 50 Mequoda Systems, and our best practice is to never, ever mix free and premium content. For one thing, it muddies your revenue streams. But there are even more compelling reasons. At Mequoda, we’ve identified 10 different subscription website business models: •

•

Premium (paid) subscription website models: Membership, Newsletter, Library, Newspaper, Magazine, Application and a seventh type we’ve just added, Course websites. Affinity (free) subscription website models: Community, Blog and Portal websites.

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. The seven premium models shown above are examples of exactly that. The three affinity subscription website models serve to build audiences of interested users who may become paying subscribers. Although the portal website seems carelessly thrown into the mix there, it’s actually the most important subscription website archetype to the Mequoda System. Your portal is the site that does all the heavy lifting. Portals are intended to build and feed an audience; they are specifically designed for SEO, email marketing, list building, and lead generation. Portal subscription websites generate value from both the users and the sponsors. Users pay—not with money (all website content is free) but with time and information. They spend time viewing web pages, emails and RSS feeds, thus creating advertising inventory that can be used to sell the publisher’s products (internal advertising) and/or sold to third party sponsors (external advertising) on a CPM (cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) basis. The most well-known of the portal subscription websites is Yahoo.com– but it’s actually more than just a portal. Yahoo is actually a huge collection of dozens of different kinds of MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

websites, making it what we call a media website, online business or website network. But many Yahoo sites are indeed portals, and Yahoo itself is widely known as a portal. Characteristics of a portal A portal is similar to its fellow free archetypes in several categories, including who pays, the MIU and the taxonomy. Who Pays

MIU

Frequency

% UGC

Authors

Taxonomy

Homepage

Magazine

User

Article

Low

Many

Issue

What’s New

Newsletter

User

Article

Low

Few

Issue

What’s New

Application

User

Record

Low

Few

What’s Popular

Membership

User

Profile

High

Many

What’s Popular

Newspaper

Varies

Article

High

Moderate

Many

Subject

What’s New

Library

Varies

Record

Low

Many

Subject

What’s Popular

Portal

Sponsor

Post

High

Moderat e

Many

Subject

What’s New

Community

Sponsor

Post

High

Many

Subject

What’s Popular

Blog

Sponsor

Post

Moderate

Few

Subject

What’s New

PAID

Application

FREE

Who pays: As with the community and blog free archetypes, sponsors pay for all content on portals, which is free to registered users. MIU: Portals, blogs and community archetypes all have posts as their minimum information units. On portals, the posts are from various authors associated with the publisher, or with syndicated content providers, while community posts are made by registered users, and blog posts are made by one or several bloggers. Frequency: Content on a portal is updated constantly, as it is on a community site and also on periodical websites, such as WSJ.com, a periodical benchmark site. The blog free archetype has content that is updated at least daily, but not much more.

User-generated content: A portal will have some user-generated content, but mostly the content comes from the publisher or syndicated sources. This is similar to a blog. Almost all community content is user-generated. Authors: There are many authors at a portal, including the publisher’s own staff and contributing sources – remember that Forbes.com says it has more than 1,000 authors! This is the same at magazine, membership, newspaper, reference and community archetypes, where either users (community) or a large editorial staff (the premium sites just listed) deliver the content. Taxonomy: Like its fellow free archetypes, and like a newspaper or reference site, the portal is organized by subject, such as Forbes.com’s Business, Investing, Tech and Leadership categories. Homepage: With frequently updated news content, a portal’s homepage focuses on what’s new, as does a blog. InvestingDaily.com, for instance, delivers automatically rotating “Stocks to Watch” that are constantly updated, and “The Latest Headlines.” Remember, portals can be standalones, such as Yahoo or HuffingtonPost.com, or they can also serve to help sell subscriptions to an affiliated magazine, such as Forbes at Forbes.com. When we create a Mequoda-designed subscription website for a client, we always have an associated portal. Examples of Mequoda portals It’s a Mequoda best practice to build a portal for every subscription website we create. Mequoda Chief Technology Officer and Lead Architect Aimee Graeber is one of the best in the industry at building these sites, and she knows that mixing free and premium content confuses your users. One Mequoda-compliant site that Graeber and her team have built is the Remonsy ETF Network site (Remonsy.com), an investing advice site focused on exchange traded funds, founded by Tom Vaughan, a longtime, highly successful stock advisor and investor in his own right.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

The network home page makes it crystal clear that there are free advice, free reports and premium advice. Period. Thus this network home page offers users a well-defined guide to what is free and what is paid content inside the network. What’s more, to make things even more explicit, the second your cursor touches any of these buttons, the image changes – an instant visual clue that something has happened – and the message in the white field to the right changes to further explain the purpose of each.

The “Free Advice” page is the actual portal homepage. And the tabs across the navigation bar here also serve as guidance on what’s free and what’s not: Free Advice, Free Reports and Premium Advice.

You could certainly call your free content something like “Email newsletters,” but you’ll confuse users who think email newsletters are premium products. Graeber says that while Mequoda has always stressed clarity in architecture and naming, over the years adding the word “free” to content that is genuinely free has dramatically increased tab clicks. You can see this in practice on other new Mequoda portal sites such as Psychotherapy Networker (psychotherapynetworker.org) – “Free Reports, “Magazine,” “Webcasts” and the like – and Nutrition Action (nutritionaction.com) – “Free Health Advice,” “Store,” and “Nutrition Action Healthletter.”

Words such as “magazine,” “newsletter” and “webcasts” imply a paid product, and “store” states it outright.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

And for a lighthearted B2C approach, consider Ceramic Arts Daily’s (ceramicartsdaily.org) term, “Freebies.”

Remember, a portal is intended solely to build an audience for your publication. They are specifically designed for SEO, email marketing, list building, and lead generation. Referring back to our chapter on the Mequoda Pyramid, this is the bottom of your pyramid – the free marketing content you produce in order to drive readers to the top. State-of-the-art portal subscription websites like Remonsy offer users free email newsletters, blogs, email alerts and RSS feeds that are all designed to directly and indirectly generate more page views and website revenue. Another, Investing Daily (InvestingDaily.com) is a small portal that produces its own content but also pulls bylined content from other subscription websites in its own publishing family. The portal offers a blog, “Stocks To Watch,” and supplements that with news from third-party sites and original content from eight sister sites.

The publisher’s strategy is to use the website to build an email list via its nine free enewsletters and 5 free reports, and upsell paid products, including 13 premium investing advisory services, to registered users. The site carries some display ads for its house products.

Building an audience with a portal website As you’ve seen in all the examples above, each publisher portal offers a variety of free products in order to convert all the traffic they’re attracting into email newsletter subscribers. The portals above created by successful publishers have been built using Consistent Channel Conversion Zone Architecture (3C Zone Architecture). When applied to a publishing website, 3C Zone Architecture is a fancy way of saying that every channel (or blog topic) consistently aligns with a product that converts the user into a subscriber or paid user of your website. Together, they create what we call a zone. This means that every piece of free content on the site has a call to action. It allows the publisher to capture the name and email address of the most interested visitors with free products so they can sell premium products to them later. This makes portals a highly valuable asset in the process of building email marketing lists. Across all English-language Mequoda sites, which includes our clients, the average sitewide email capture rate is 2.8%. Compare that to the industry average, which is 0.1 percent or so. That means that on average, 2.8% of visitors who visit a site designed with with 3 Cs in mind will submit their email address. Why? •

On our portals, we make it a rule to always give something back in return, like an ebook, white paper, video or even a knitting pattern (the same architecture without incentives sees a 50 percent drop in capture rate from 4 down to 2 percent).

•

We promote these freebies contextually, within blog posts of the same topics.

Ceramic Arts Daily currently has 38 “freebies” they give away on their portal in order to collect email addresses and start their initial “hello” with potential buyers. These freebies bring in 2,000 new email subscribers per month.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

Freebies include downloadable e-books like “The Salt Glaze Surface: A Guide to Salt Glazing and Firing and Soda Firing Techniques, Tips and Soda Glaze Recipes” The great thing about most of these downloads is that they’re evergreen and don’t need to be updated on a regular basis. This means an e-book they launched six years ago can be one of their main traffic drivers and source of email leads. Ceramic Arts Daily is built in the Mequoda way – using 3C Zone Architecture to convert visitors into email subscribers. We won’t divulge the size of their current list, but it’s impressive. And while most niche publishers hit a plateau in their subscribers after they’ve really penetrated the market (say, six years in, perhaps?), CAD is still going strong. “We release one new freebie per month and promote them to our newsletter list as well as through [3C Zone Architecture]” says CAD’s Jennifer Harnetty. “Since they’re promoted through our newsletter list, the most popular in any given month is the newest release, though some topics, like glaze recipes, tend to keep a more steady pace.” Organic search has done so well for CAD’s freebies that they don’t invest in PPC at all to build leads through those pages. “We do not do any paid advertising for our freebies,” says Harnetty. “The paid campaigns were not performing well for us so we discontinued them. The organic search is doing very well for us.” Their floater (part of 3C Zone Architecture) also brings in the largest percentage of their website email leads, which pops up any time a new visitor arrives to the site. See the floater on the next page.

Here at Mequoda we can never stress enough the value of a free portal to any subscription website, no matter what archetype it is. It’s the key to driving website traffic, it helps you convert random visitors into email subscribers, and it keeps paid customers engaged with your content. But just because it’s free to your users doesn’t mean it’s easy to create and maintain. The centerpieces of a portal are your regular, frequently-updated, concise posts. And that’s a style of journalism that few magazine publishers understand. Portal posts are not always long-form, labor-intensive, research-heavy reporting. They’re sometimes short-form, summarized digesting of the latest news in your domain. That’s why newsletter publishers, unlike magazine publishers, completely understand this model – after all, that’s what they’ve always done.

MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

How to hire the right person to manage your portal One of your first priorities when launching a new portal is to hire the right person to write and maintain your portal. This job is known as the online editor, daily editor, even community manager. Because content development is a large part – though not the only part – of the job, you could start by seeking a newsletter journalist. This person will be familiar with the task of researching and compiling concise but compelling posts quickly and efficiently. The Mequoda online editor job description describes the content part of the job this way: “Works with content partners to create tips, information product reviews and website reviews for use in the [Company Name] website network (hub and retail satellites), email newsletter and content syndication.” And if you can find someone with these skills who also has experience as a direct mail copywriter and is familiar with your domain, you’ve hit the jackpot. Another good bet would be an established professional blogger in your domain, because bloggers have to market themselves in order to sell advertising, and must understand SEO and other key metrics that are part of the job. In a later chapter, we’ll discuss the bigger picture of developing the ideal multiplatform publishing team based on personality types.

The Mequoda Portal Index (MPI)

If your website doesn’t attract at least 5x more free visitors than paid subscribers, your publication is probably in trouble

Marketing expert Seth Godin, speaking at a recent HOW magazine conference said, “I can reach 10 times more people writing a blog post than writing a book.” If you apply that logic to magazine publishing, then you should at least be able to get as many free online portal visitors as subscribers to your paid magazine, if not five to 10 times more. The Mequoda Portal Index (MPI) is a mathematical equation that can immediately tell us the effectiveness of any publisher’s online strategy – and we don’t even need to take a peek at your SEO, content, or audience development efforts first. The story is in the numbers. What’s your MPI? To find out how your portal fares, simply take the Monthly Average Users (MAU) of your Website and divide it by your Average Issue Circulation (AIC). The number should at least be 1.0, meaning the amount of traffic your portal gets each month is equal to your magazine’s paid circulation.

As mentioned previously, we think any magazine should be able to get a score of at least one, but ideally they should have a five or above. Finding these numbers is simple not only for yourself, but also for your competitors. Compete.com and Quantcast.com provide websites’ unique visitor counts, and the new Alliance for Audited Media will provide a publication’s verified circulation numbers (abcas3.auditedmedia.com/ecirc/index.html).

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In theory, it should be easy to get more free traffic to your portal than subscribers to your magazine per month because web traffic is free. It’s completely dependent on how much you give away and how well optimized your content is for search engines. Understanding the Mequoda Method is crucial to improving all of the above. How did your publication do? If you’re in the A to B range, congratulations, you’re doing an excellent job driving your audience to your portal. If your score is any lower than a 1.0, you should consider the record-setting growth that the online advertising industry is achieving and how you are going to capture that growth. How the “top” magazines compare Somewhat surprisingly, most of the top circulated magazines haven’t even made a dent in web traffic compared to paid circulation. The top 10 magazines with the highest circulation, such as Better Homes & Gardens, Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping, all have scores of less than 1. People is the only major publication with an MPI of 5 or more, while Time and National Geographic get a B. The rest of the “top” magazines pale in comparison. The reason why this is so important is that a publication like Family Circle, which is already in the top 10 list for circulation, is leaving money on the table by not boosting traffic to their portal, FamilyCircle.com. Imagine if they brought their score of .02 to a 5 like People? They could be at the top of the list! All they have to do is follow all the best practices in this handbook. Instead, their site gets less traffic than a mommy blogger and so it can’t be used to sell more magazine subscriptions. On the other hand, a niche magazine is unlikely to ever end up on the top 10 list for the very basic reason that they have a much smaller audience. They do, however, tend to blow their general audience counterparts out of the water. Forbes’ portal gets more than 15x the amount of traffic to their site than their magazine circulation. To get to this point, they have learned how to use content, SEO, email newsletters and social media to build an online audience that’s larger, often vastly larger, than the circulation of the

magazine whose brand they share. They understand that while their basic website may use a magazine brand, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a totally different medium and requires a unique system of publishing strategies to power online success. This represents an opportunity, whether they choose to take advantage or not, to build 3C Zone Architecture and turn their sites into subscription-generating machines.

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Identifying your Content Assets The first step in building a successful publishing business is defining your multiplatform media assets So far we’ve talked mostly about your portal. Now let’s talk about the broader picture of your online business model and how that portal can be used to sell many different products. The first step is identifying what you already have. Most of the multiplatform media publishers we work with are rich with content assets. If they’re not rich with revenue, it’s usually because they don’t know how to leverage those assets. Efficiency is key to success in a multiplatform publishing environment. Before you can design a system that minimizes manpower and maximizes automation, you need to do a thorough inventory of your content assets. Your multiplatform media assets may be spread out in places that you haven’t thought of as repositories. Some of those places may be channels and others may be platforms. It’s also possible that you have a dusty warehouse full of old copies of magazines, books and other content assets that no one has touched in years. Once you’ve performed that thorough inventory of your assets, you’ll see what content recycling opportunities may already exist.

Nine elements of a successful multiplatform publishing system Stephen Covey likes to say that you should begin with the end in mind. The end, in this case, is a multiplatform publishing system for publishers. Using our definitions, the system includes four platforms and five channels. Let’s take a look at how you’ll be using all that content in the hopes that it helps you discover all of the assets in your brand family.

Store assets These are all of the books, magazines, videos and other content assets that you’ve sold on a one-shot basis over the years. Make sure you include items that are “out of print,” because there’s no such thing in the digital age. Magazine assets This would include all of the issues of the magazine brand you’re building the system for, plus any related brand that may no longer exist. If necessary, use the words newspaper and newsletter as a substitute for magazine here, because we’re really talking about the same thing, or at least variations on a theme. Email assets Many publishers we work with have never thought to repurpose the emails they send as web posts or anything else. Of course, taken one by one, emails don’t represent much content. However, when you take them in aggregate if you’ve been publishing emails for a while and if you’ve been doing it daily, you may have a lot of content sitting in an email repository. Website assets This could include blog posts, repurposed articles, databases, and even web-based apps. Include your comments and forums of all types, and you may be surprised at the amount of content stored in even a small website. Search assets For this exercise, we’re trying to discover how often our website shows up on page 1 in Google. You may not think of Google and other search engines as a content publishing platform, but it’s certainly a content publishing channel. Most of the publishers we work with have hundreds of listings that show up on page 1 for search terms that are trackable. A keyword benchmark study is the tool needed to do this asset inventory.

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Social assets For starters, let’s stick with the major players: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Inventory the content you’ve posted, along with the content your staff may have posted under your brand family identity. App assets If you were early to the app party, you may have already produced one or more contentdriven apps. These may be as simple as replica magazines and books, or as complex as games and gadgets. Whatever their format, make sure that all your apps are listed as part of your content assets. Legacy assets If your magazine brand has reached beyond books and videos, you may have other legacy media assets to inventory. This would include any physical inventory of back issues, special interest publications, books and videos plus other content that you’ve distributed elsewhere. We’re always surprised, for example, at how many publishers produce television shows that have been in syndication or aired on a one-shot basis. Many publishers also do live events that have generated reams of content in the way of video, audio, or transcripts. Link assets Start with the big picture by doing a link asset inventory using one of the many commercial software programs available to automate the task, starting with Open Site Explorer (opensiteexplorer.com) and possibly moving up towards a program like Advanced Web Ranking (advancedwebranking.com). Then take a look at Google Analytics to discover which websites are driving substantial amounts of referral traffic into your hub on a prolonged basis. Add to this some qualitative information about the relationships you have with the website that are driving traffic on a consistent basis. Pay specific attention to those to which you syndicate content and will be able to do so in the future. Many hands, many perspectives This review often leads to discovery of additional assets and brings everyone up to speed on the assets at hand. The inventory creates a sound foundation for building an online business

plan that includes the four key platforms in the illustration and the five primary channels. While every online business plan is unique, most include these nine elements. Â

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The Niche Media User Experience How many platforms can your content be recycled on? Back in 2006 there was an article in USA Today titled, “If you wanted to watch 'Superman,' which media would you choose now?”. This article compared the fidelity and convenience of watching a movie on an iPod, a home theater, or in a state-of-the-art movie theater. The author cleverly pointed out that the three media platforms offer the viewer an inverted user experience on the dimensions of fidelity and convenience. In other words, the users will experience high convenience and low fidelity on the iPod, or what now would be an iPad; moderate convenience and fidelity with the home theater; and low convenience and high fidelity at the cinema. And for some people, it’s just about preference. For example, not everybody wants to read a magazine. Some people like podcasts. For that reason, The New Yorker offers a 12-month audio subscription to their magazine. You’d think that a magazine so well-known for their artwork wouldn’t think up something so non-visually oriented, but their audio subscription gets rave reviews. One subscriber writes, “Many of us have subscribed to the New Yorker over the years, only to leave piles of them unread … this is the way New Yorkers were meant to be enjoyed.” Another writes, “If you’re like me, there’s so much great writing out there that demands to be read, but you just don’t have time to read it. That’s what makes our audio version of “The New Yorker” so rewarding.” And finally, “If you’re going to spend your commuting time wisely, or you’re looking for a more intellectual way of multi-tasking, this is the subscription for you!” Based on the fact that every platform has completely different user experiences, we came up with our idea of the niche media user experience dashboard — that is, what users get out of the many different platforms. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and we find savvy publishers use that as an excuse to publish on all six of them!

Multiplatform publishing focuses on three main types of content: online, offline and in person, or live. The image above helps visually describe the concept of multiplatform publishing. Mobile is not part of this grid because we consider it a device type instead of a publishing platform archetype. Smartphones support all of the online and offline media archetypes, some better than others. Smartphones excel at hosting audio books and magazines and are much too small a screen to do a good job of hosting highly visual books and magazines. As you can see, moving from left to right, you begin with massively searchable, easy-toaccess content, which is most likely the first place people come in contact with your brand. If online is not the absolute first time a person comes in contact with your brand, then it’s at least the first time where you get to control the scenario. All the way to the right, you have your smallest, but most loyal consumer audience – the ones who attend your live events. Medium: We’ve defined six major platforms – website, email, magazines, videos, books and events – for publishing, and segmented them as to whether they’re online, offline or in person. Relationship: When someone visits your website, they’re a visitor. Once they’ve subscribed to your email list, they become the subscriber of a free, recurring product. They are also a MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

subscriber once they’ve purchased a subscription to your magazine. When someone buys one-off videos or books, they become a buyer. Finally, if they purchase tickets to your event, they become an attendee. Session Time: This is the amount of time most visitors, subscribers, buyer and attendees will spend with you. For example, most website visitors will only spend two minutes on your website, but they’ll spend 60 minutes with your magazine and 1,200 minutes at your event. Knowing these numbers offers the perspective of how much time people are looking at the content you create for the many different platforms. Length: Some content is infinite, like your website, and some is finite, like a book or a magazine. Your website continues to grow, while each of your magazine issues has an end point. This is why we don’t mind when people spend 2 minutes on your website, so long as they come back again and again and eventually becomes a subscriber who spends 60 minutes with your magazine or becomes an attendee and spends 1,200 minutes at your event. Fidelity: Users most highly value a first-person experience from a combination of experts, colleagues and peers. The best high-fidelity user experience is a live event that can be any inperson event, from a cocktail party, to an industry conference, to dinner with friends. Convenience: Some platforms are more convenient than others. In the movie example above, it’s much less convenient for someone to go to a theater than to watch a video on their iPad. In the same way, it’s more convenient to visit your website and get an answer to a question than to attend an in-person event to ask it. Ownership: Ownership has value. The permanence of a text, photo, video or any tangible medium is an important media attribute. A user never “owns” the content they find on your website, but they can certainly own and even collect your magazines, videos and books. Posture: In what position does a customer absorb your content? On the web, they’re leaning forward. They’re on a mission, and often they’re at their desk.. But when they’re reading a magazine, they’re leaning back. They’re more relaxed, and they’re absorbing the information in a more leisurely way. Cost: As you can imagine, web and email content tend to be free, or inexpensive, and offline and in-person content gets increasingly pricy.

And it doesn’t need to be expensive to publish on all these platforms. 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:

In this example, a magazine article turns into one chapter of a handbook. That one chapter gets turned into an entire free e-book, which then gets disaggregated into several blog posts.

The magazine article could be turned into a few pages of a handbook, a single chapter of a much shorter free e-book, and finally into a blog post. This model might be for publishers putting out jumbo handbooks and large e-books who don’t want to give away the cow on their blog. 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. At Mequoda, we don’t have a magazine. So we do it backwards, building as we go. The handbook you’re reading now is a set of 12 different posts from our blog. It’s been beefed up and certainly teaked here and there, but the content is recycled from cover to back. It MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

takes 12 weeks to write the 12 blog posts, which is then turned into a handbook. This is how many publishers create their handbooks and white papers.

This process needs to be more methodical than the previous. For example, if you want to create 12-chapter freebie, then it requires writing a table of contents for the white paper at least 12 weeks ahead of time. If you look at it in terms of our content pyramid, where live events are close to the top, you could easily transform the magazine recycling model into the event recycling model. You’d replace “magazine” with “presentation” and “handbook” with “slide” because many of our blog posts also refer to the infographics we present in our Intensive workshops.

And this can be remixed as well, just like every model we’ve mentioned so far.

As you might have picked up on, content recycling comes in unlimited varieties. The only thing you need to know is what your strategy is. As a multiplatform publisher, your goal is to create the most accurate content by compiling first-person knowledge from reputable sources and making it available to your audience through various platforms. You can then use your content to create other products. As you’ve learned from our previous chapter about Mequoda Pyramids, live events are often the best high-fidelity user experience, with the highest price point. But most publishers will be comfortable producing downloadable media, like books, special reports, or video pieces. Or, if you’re The New Yorker, you ask the article writers to record their pieces and offer them as an audio subscription. Successful content marketing will begin with understanding your users’ needs. After you discover what will make your audience happy, you can begin working towards that goal with the content you produce and the process in which you promote it.

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Build your own Multiplatform Brand Wheel Niche multiplatform publishers have seen great success in multiplatform publishing, especially when they recycle! Even the smallest of magazine publishers publish on two platforms: their magazine and their website. Mequoda publishers typically publish on five to six different platforms, and within those platforms, many more sub-platforms. Some of the most successful publishers we know publish on 10 or more platforms. When we present these case studies at our events, we create brand wheels, a concept borrowed from Time Inc. when we worked with Real Simple several years ago.

By recycling content, a small niche publisher can build a robust multiplatform publishing company on a much smaller budget with a higher profit ratio. As we discussed in the last chapter, several of the products above can be the result of content recycling from one platform to the next.

ÂŠ 2015 MEQUODA GROUP

The Harvard Health Publications Brand Wheel The Harvard Health Publications mission has always been to improve the health and quality of life for the general public. As you might imagine, with health information, there is no such thing as evergreen content. You still need someone with a lot of expertise going through it because you never know where a change may have occurred. Still, Harvard Health Publications reuses content across their multiple platforms to create a very robust brand wheel. Health.Harvard.edu alone gets more than 1.7 million unique visitors per month to their website, which is a hybrid of the premium newsletter subscription website archetype and the free blog subscription website archetype. (We do always say that it takes two subscription website archetypes to tango!) From there, much of their content gets recycled across their 10 platforms.

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The HR Daily Advisor Brand Wheel It’s important to note that HR Daily Advisor (hrdailyadvisor.blr.com) is just one of Business & Legal Resource’s six identically-built audience development websites. The model that BLR developed with HRDA was so successful they replicated it five more times for compensation, safety and environmental professionals. All six audience development websites look like clones but offer completely unique information and products for the niche professionals they serve. One major strategy for which we applaud HRDA is the way they use and reuse content. Any good publisher knows how to recycle content across many platforms, and HRDA is no exception. “It’s always been our goal to repurpose content on every medium people can use,” says Rafael Cardoso, who heads up the BLR team. As you can see from the brand wheel we’ve created for them, there’s a lot of content moving around.

The Nutrition Action Brand Wheel On Oct. 14, 2013, a print newsletter publisher blossomed into a multiplatform publisher. That was the day we helped relaunch NutritionAction.com, the home of a health newsletter from Center for Science in the Public Interest that’s celebrating its 40th year. With the relaunch, NutritionAction.com has gone from a print newsletter publisher to a multiplatform publisher, and their results have already been dramatic. Featuring 99% recycled content from their print newsletter, they’re something of a golden child of the Mequoda Method.

In the near future, CSPI Deputy Director Bill Dugan would like to start producing virtual and in-person events. “I have big dreams of doing an annual food and nutrition consumer summit. We need to get in front of people in person.” In the longer term, he sees a mobile app in their future.

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The Mequoda Multiplatform Media Matrix Get your ducks in a row and plan your multiplatform publishing future Some publishers reading this handbook are trying to start a publishing company. Others are trying to grow or even save their current publishing company. Some want to sell their publishing company and can’t find a buyer. Which are you? No matter your situation, multiplatform publishing is your solution. If you’ve considered selling your publication, the market is saying they will not value a publication at all if they are not at least on the road to multiplatform publishing – there are no willing buyers for your company. Consumers are saying the same thing with their wallets – as multiplatform publishers are knocking revenues out of the park with new online and offline products. However, the market values different media companies in different ways. Legacy print publishers are selling their companies and getting a 1-2x their EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization), while others cannot find a buyer. As they approach break-even or begin to spiral into the red, they just shut down because they don’t want to take on such a major transformation – one that requires investing significant sums of money immediately. However, if you are a multiplatform publisher, we’e seeing our clients and others selling for up to 12x their earnings, sometimes 20x their earnings if they are both multiplatform and consistently growing their revenues. This is what you’ll hear: “I’ll give you 10x revenue if it’s solid and stable, 20x if it’s doubling its revenue every year.” When we work with magazine publishers – both legacy and digital natives – we create a business plan that includes a chart we call the Mequoda Multiplatform Media Matrix. We do this in order to identify the opportunities that exist for their brand, and also which platforms should be prioritized.

The Mequoda Multiplatform Media Matrix Across the top, you’ll see various kinds of premium platforms. There can be others too, depending on your business. For example, data could be a platform if you have a directory. Down the left side are the different marketing channels.

The Mequoda Multiplatform Media Matrix is all one big way of figuring out where your opportunities exist. The way to read the matrix is by taking one column and reading it downward. We coded it green, yellow and red—like a traffic light—to identify which ones we see as easy, and which ones are more difficult to expand. For example, in the matrix above where we’re using our composite case study Green Gardens Network, where can we promote the print edition of Hidden Gardens. We can easily promote it on the portal website, magazine website, store website, email newsletters, email spotlights, legacy newsstands, house ads and inserts, direct mail, and subscription agents. We would not try to sell a print magazine through a digital newsstand, although we may try through media ads and inserts. In the same way, we wouldn’t sell a web edition, or Apple, Amazon and Google editions through legacy newsstands. If you’re wondering why the Apple edition is the only edition MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

that is marked green for sale through a store website, it’s because many publishers sell their Apple edition through their websites, not just the newsstand. The Mequoda Multiplatform Media Matrix represents the opportunities that exist so you can plan for the future. If no product exists, or if we don’t plan on creating one, it would not be on the grid. For more elaboration, let’s dive into each of these marketing channels Portal website: As you know by this point in your reading, it’s a Mequoda Best Practice to build a portal for every subscription website we create. Portals are intended to build and feed an audience; they are specially designed for SEO, email marketing, list building, and lead generation. Magazine website: A magazine subscription site archetype is set up to build subscriptions for a related print or digital magazine and to provide access to issues of the magazine. A magazine site is only a magazine website if the user can view or download an issue of a magazine—one that is linear and periodic, has pages and a regular frequency, and can be viewed in HTML, downloaded as a PDF or downloaded to a mobile device. Store website: A cart-based store like Amazon offers many products for sale and uses a shopping cart for checkout. An event-based store like Farm Progress Show (farmprogressshow.com) sells one or many events, but may also have many different price / package tiers or number of attendees. A solo-based store like Independent Living Bullion (independentlivingbullion.com) uses a solo order flow instead of a cart system. Email newsletters: Another Mequoda Best Practice is to maintain and publish a daily email newsletter, with a soft promotion for one or more featured products that are aligned with the content. Email spotlights: In addition to email newsletters, email spotlights are promotions that highlight and feature just one product. Thus in the case of the Media Matrix, it’s whichever platform you are currently promoting.

Digital newsstands: Your Apple, Amazon and Google editions can be promoted through the Apple Newsstand, Google Play store and the Amazon App store. Legacy newsstands: In print, your magazine is promoted on the physical newsstand â&#x20AC;&#x201C; where the majority of single copy sales are made. House ads & inserts: At little or no cost, you can promote your products through internal publications and ads. Media ads & inserts: You can also pay to promote them through outside publications, radio, etc. Direct mail: Traditionally, you can use your list or buy a list to send physical direct mail. Subscription agents: This promotional strategy only applies to your print editions. This would be a third party agent that sells your subscriptions. Have you begun planning your multiplatform future? The market is rewarding companies that are moving to a multiplatform publishing stance and can grow their earnings on a year over year basis. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a publishing renaissance going on as the magazine industry begins to see what their brands can be when they expand into multiplatform publishing.

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Selling Multiplatform Sponsorships How to sell sponsorship advertising across platforms So far we have talked at length about generating revenue through products. But multiplatform publishers can generate revenue from users, from sponsors, or both. There are five unique ways a publisher makes money through sponsorship advertising, although they’re sometimes mixed and matched: 1. CPA (cost per action) – Based on how many sales or leads an ad generates, such as IMDb.com. 2. CPC (cost per click) – Based on how many clicks an ad receives, such asAbout.com. 3. CPM (cost per thousand) – Based on the number of page views an ad receives, such as Forbes.com. 4. DIR (directory) – Based on the sale of a directory listing, such as MediaBistro.com. 5. SEA (sponsorships) – Based on selling dedicated ad packages to entire sections of your website, such as VidaySalud.com. If you think we forgot native ads, we consider these a choice that can be used in any of these different models, not a model in itself. Stay tuned to the next chapter for more on native advertising. CPA

STRATEGY

CPC

Cost per Action

Sponsor Benefits Scarcity Exclusivity Alignment

CPM Cost per Thousand (M)

Cost per Click

DIR

SEA

Directory

Scarcity, Exclusivity, Alignment

Low Moderate High

Low Low High

Moderate Moderate Moderate

Low Low High

High High High

Publisher Benefits Cost of Sales Yield Fill Rate

Low Low High

Moderate Moderate Moderate

Low High High

Moderate High High

Measurement

High

Moderate

Low

In this chart, we’ve gathered the experiences of the hundreds of publishers we’ve worked with and spoken with to determine which sponsorship advertising models provide the most value for both the sponsor and the publisher. We’ve evaluated the five different models using the following criteria: Sponsor benefits • • •

Scarcity: Is it easy to land an ad in prime real estate (low), or is it hard (high)? Exclusivity: Will you be competing with a lot of other advertisers (low), or few (high)? Alignment: Are the ads less relevant to the content on the page (low), or very relevant (high)?

Publisher benefits •

• •

Cost of sales: Does it take less money to make money (low), or more money to make money (high)? Yield: Does is create a small portion of revenue (low), or a significant amount (high)? Fill rate: Is it hard to sell these ads (low), or are they easy to sell (high)?

And finally, are the results hard to measure (low), or easy to measure (high)? CPA (cost per action) CPA advertising involves finding out what a retailer is willing to pay you per action, sale, or lead. CPA advertising is easy to measure, easy to align with the content you’re publishing, and cheap to implement (free, actually), but requires a high volume of traffic to generate significant revenue. Implementing CPA advertising is as simple as partnering with CPA partners like Amazon, or CPA networks like ClickBank or ShareaSale. When you decide to generate revenue with CPA affiliate advertising, you have control over the ad’s effectiveness. Most advertisers provide an inventory of ad options that you can choose to place wherever you want to on your website. IMDb.com uses CPA advertising to drive users to buy movies and other items, and is now owned by Amazon because it became such a valuable affiliate. IMDb.com is supported by a MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

variety of advertising, licensing, and sponsorship opportunities aimed at people both inside and outside of the film industry. Links to Amazon.com appear in “Shop” boxes on various IMDb.com pages to accommodate anyone interested in buying books, videos or DVDs. CPC (cost per click) CPC sponsorship advertising involves accepting an ad on your site, where the advertiser pays for every click they get, regardless of whether they buy anything or perform an action, such as submitting their email address. Google isn’t the only CPC network, but it’s certainly one of the largest. This is because when you use Google Adsense on your website, Google’s ad algorithm will display ads that are contextually relevant to the content on the page. This increases click-rates and user satisfaction. The publisher is paid through Adsense, which is also the platform the advertiser uses to set up their ads and decide how much they’re willing to pay per click on their ad. About.com grabs the eyes of around 87 million unique visitors per month, and hosts 1,000plus content portals with more than 4 million articles. Because of this immense amount of traffic and content, which is also promoted by its 800-plus freelance topic experts, About.com (and sites of their magnitude) generates more than half of its revenue through cost-per-click advertising. No publisher is better at selling clicks than About.com, one of Google’s top advertising partners. CPM (cost per thousand) CPM advertising can most be compared to traditional print advertising, where the advertiser is paying for eyes on their ad. In this case, they’re paying per thousand views regardless of whether the user takes an action or clicks. The challenge is some publishers have been selling digital ads on the cheap, and thus, many have been unhappy with their revenues compared to their print revenues. We’ve heard the term “trading print dollars for digital dimes” and then “trading digital dimes for mobile pennies.” At Mequoda, we believe CPM rates for digital magazine advertising should be the same for digital editions as for print. That opinion is shared by Megan Doherty, VP and Director for Print at media agency BPN, who noted at an MPA seminar on digital magazine advertising that publishers should also charge more for each interactive element in the ad.

In surveying rate cards across the industry, we find most publishers simply give away digital edition ads to print advertisers. For example, National Geographic gives all print advertisers running a half-page or more a free static ad in its digital edition. Others make no mention of their tablet magazine at all, leaving us to assume they also give away those ads to print advertisers. Popular Scence is one of the few exceptions, and they find advertisers are willing to pay extra for these enhanced ads, including web links, video, and 3D video. Bonnier Senior Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn says PopSci’s high-tech ads deliver a “good, steady revenue channel.” DIR (directory) In a whole different ballgame is the directory advertising model, where the publisher produces a framework and reference content, and the advertiser pays to post content, usually in the form of a listing, like the job board on MediaBistro.com. Website traffic needs to be a major focus for publishers who are selling listings to generate revenue. Advertisers who pay to be listed on websites do so to be part of a directory, in order to be found by prospective buyers, job seekers, or someone else of value. We consider this model to be multiplatform-friendly, because publishers who have a directory as part of their business model and have digital and print counterparts can include the listings as ads in their digital magazines as part of special sections. SEA (scarcity, exclusivity, alignment) At Mequoda, we’ve long preached the scarcity sermon. If you can give an advertiser an entire channel of your website, it holds great appeal. For instance, if you’re a home electronics website like ElectronicHouse.com, you could potentially sell every ad slot on your lighting articles to Lutron. Opportunities to acquire this slot are scarce, so the value is high. We believe scarcity, whether it comes naturally in a small subscription website niche or is the product of vigorously working to create it, operates best when combined with two other advantages all publishers should offer advertisers: exclusivity and alignment. We refer to this concept as SEA, for the first letters of the three attributes.

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Scarcity: Subscription website publishers must create positions on their sites similar to the positions they’ve always been able to sell in print – back cover, inside front cover, inside back cover. For the most profitable websites, this coveted real estate might be on your home page, or next to your wildly popular columnist, or your expert analysis of the market. Exclusivity: In Mequoda land, exclusivity on subscription websites is created by selling that scarce advertising position to only one sponsor for an extended length of time – one month, six months, one year. This instantly creates competition for that position and adds value for the advertiser – and revenue for the publisher. Alignment: Technology allows every advertiser to access positions next to highly relevant content. But it’s highest for the niche subscription website publishers we advise, because their tight focus on specific topics gives them an advantage over general interest publishers. At Mequoda, we believe the SEA strategy is superior to traditional strategies listed above, which suffer from the reality that advertising demand is finite but online advertising inventory is infinite. In the words of Dan Ambrose, “On the Internet, EVERYTHING is one click away. Competition has never been so fierce. But when you have great content, everyone who is interested can find it – and you can earn money from it.” Advertisers are always looking for new opportunities to be “part of” rather than separate from the content of a website and platforms. Because your users already trust you, they also may trust the brand you associate yourself with, and vice-versa.

Selling Native Advertising Offer advertisers more value on your multiplatform publishing website beyond simple native ads

Speaking of making your advertisers part of your content, this is where native advertising comes in. Call it what you want – a native ad, sponsored content, or even an infomercial if you’re in broadcasting circles. A native ad (aka all those other things) is an ad that walks, acts and talks like an editorial. The content is typically provided by the sponsor themselves, although some creative publishers have begun to build native advertising departments that create the copy for the sponsor. Native advertising involves paid ads that align with a webpage’s content. They can be articles, snippets or simply links that are assimilated into the design and flow with the platform functionality, so viewers feel the ads belong on the page. The best native advertising examples offer fantastic editorial content that doesn’t turn off the reader as being too promotional or non-contextual. The content of native ads is typically provided by the sponsor themselves, although some creative publishers have begun to build native advertising departments that create the copy for the sponsor. While evaluating the use of native ads, there are a few things to consider: • • • • •

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Form: Is the ad in the viewer’s activity stream? Function: Does the ad function like other elements on the page? Integration: Do the ad behaviors mirror content behaviors or introduce new ones? Targeting: Is the ad placement guaranteed on a specific page or section? Measure: What metrics are used to judge success? Brand engagement or direct response? Disclosure: Is disclosure clear and prominent?

Here is a general evaluation you can use on your native ads:

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In-feed units In-feed units are articles that walk, talk and act like an editorial article, and they may be editorial in nature, but the content placement has been paid for. The content of these ads are usually non-promotional but include a snippet before, after or both, promoting the sponsor.

Paid search units Paid search units can be found in search results, in line with organic search results. Advertisers pay to list themselves contextually within results that have similar content.

ÂŠ 2015 MEQUODA GROUP

Recommendation widgets When reading an article, you may see ads for related articles. On some websites, like MensHealth.com, these related articles are paid for by a sponsor.

Promoted listings Similar to paid search units, a publisher who sells listings can also sell sponsored listings, like AutoTrader.com.

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In-ad with native element units A hybrid of a few of the native ad units above, this ad is editorial in nature, but is excerpted and looks more like an ad than an in-feed unit, which blends in seamlessly.

ÂŠ 2015 MEQUODA GROUP

There are, of course rules for native advertising. First and foremost, readers aren’t stupid, but even geniuses can be deceived. It’s of paramount importance to establish a line between your advertising and editorial. In this example on USA Today, a “news” article is being sponsored by G/O Digital, and it’s clearly stated at the top of the article, in the byline and at the beginning of the article. G/O Digital also receives a banner ad within the article itself. At the bottom of the article, there is yet another clarification that the article is sponsored.

One criteria the FTC uses to gauge whether an ad meets their standards is the immediate “net impression” on consumers. Though its formula is known only to the agency’s attorneys, we can come up with an approximation: If a reader looks at an ad on a magazine’s portal and initially believes it to be independent editorial content without a commercial agenda, you are inching closer to what the FTC terms a “masquer-ad” … and, in turn, potentially approaching illegality. In the example above, there is no question for the reader whether this content is sponsored.

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How to sell native ads Native ads are low-hanging fruit. They’re easy to do and they sell like wildfire. Your biggest concern should be to not undersell them. For example, a leaderboard ad might be $10 per M, but an email spotlight / native ad would be in the $30-50 range per M. In a good example of a case where one of our clients underpriced, they were selling leaderboards for $2 per M to $6 per M on the web, and $30 per M in email. They sold out at lightning speed which told us they may have been a bit underpriced. As a rule, native ads should cost three to five times more than your leaderboards. Whatever you’re getting for a full-page, four-color ad, an email native ad will sell for the same. A web spotlight will be 1/5th of that. We also find that publishers who are most successful with digital advertising and native ads sell these ads separately from their print magazine advertising program. Not to say that you can’t offer a multiplatform discount, but native ads simply aren’t bundled or included in a print package, because it’s a premium upsell. You can give them a Chinese menu of all the different options they have for ads, and offer a bigger discount the more they choose. Sponsored e-books – the ultimate native ad example Stuart Hochwert runs Prime Publishing. We’ve talked about him often in Mequoda Daily and he’s a member of Mequoda Digital Publishing Hall of Fame. This is yet another good opportunity to bring him back up because he’s the king of e-book native ads. Here’s a native ad example you may not have even thought of yet. Take a look at Mr. Food Easter Celebration: 35 Excellent Easter Recipes Free eCookbook. The cookbook is sponsored entirely by the American Egg Farmers.

Mr Food’s Turnkey Program: •

• • • • •

The e-book is promoted on their website and newsletters, earned media (bloggers, social media) and via paid marketing (i.e. paid search, affiliates). Recipes use the product – in this case egg recipes — which also show up on the website and in email. Videos are created in their Chicago and Ft. Lauderdale test kitchens. Full solo magazine ads go to their subscribers promoting the e-book. Full-page magazine ads within the e-book promote the client. Distribution is on Amazon and Apple.

It’s made clear that the e-book is sponsored right on the download page, but does this sound like a no-brainer to you, if you’re an advertiser? Hochwert says the distribution on Amazon and Apple has proven to be a huge asset. “We started promoting our e-books for the Kindle and iPad about six months ago. I believe in the first week of January [2014] we have 127,000 e-book downloads via these two stores.” Hochwert charges anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for a full-scale turnkey program like the one you see above. An e-book by itself is around $9,000. One of their top performers garnered over 100,000 downloads on their website and another 75,000 via Apple and Amazon. But wait, there’s more! March is National Craft Month, and it just so happens that Hochwert also runs FaveCrafts.com. In 2013, Hochwert and team created an e-book titled The Ultimate Craft Guide: 25 Free Craft Projects for Every Crafter that was sponsored by 18 different companies. The main sponsor was Michaels craft store, who got their name on the cover and in other places within the book. Other sponsors got to include different patterns and craft projects with a top-to-bottom banner on the right-hand side of the page. These sponsors paid $2,500 – $3,000 each, depending on the options they chose.

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The best part is that readers love them. Not only are they getting what they ask for (recipes, craft projects, etc.) but they’re getting them from the source, the actual makers of the products they buy, like Lion Brand Yarns and Red Heart. As you can see, native advertising opportunities are endless, as long as you play by the rules.

How to Create the Right Multiplatform Publishing Team Understanding Myers-Briggs personality types helps improve team performance

At this point, you have a general foundation for building a multiplatform publishing business. However, one of the most crucial stages is hiring. If you don’t hire the right people, the gears will not move the way you want them, and with the efficiency that you need them to. The first thing that’s important to know is that people who are in jobs where they’re a good fit tend to be happy. They are also more productive. Making business more productive is a centuries-old goal. For much of the 20th century, the emphasis has been placed on improving business processes with management providing virtually all of the critical thinking skills. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote in Principles of Scientific Management that workers are treated as parts of a process, not unlike the parts of a machine. In his book he explained how workers were told exactly what to do, how to do it, and rewarded for success. Some attention was given to improving the task-oriented skills of the individual worker, but little thought has been given, until recently, to teaching individuals how to work together as a team and to help them understand how differences in individual temperament play a key role in the productivity of work teams. You might not know this, but the grand turnaround of Ford Motor Co. in the early 1980s is attributed in large part to the huge success of Team Taurus, a high performance work team that cut across the conventional organizational structure at Ford. How different personality types can affect a larger multiplatform publishing team People are not the same. They gather, perceive and judge data differently. The writings of Swedish psychiatrist Carl Jung have been used to categorize these seemingly random differences into 16 psychological types that can help us understand our self and those around us. These types can play a key role in modern team building. MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

Jung first described two fundamentally different orientations to the world: “extroverted” people, who prefer to exist outside themselves and who draw their energy from the world around them, and “introverted” people, who prefer to exist inside themselves and draw energy from focusing within. He then added two additional dimensions: the process of “perception” or how we become aware of new information, and “judgment” or how we organize and prioritize our thoughts and actions. Jung separated the process of perception into two types of information processing preferences: sensation and “iNtuition.” • •

Sensing is the process by which we gather factual data. iNtuition is gathering data by becoming aware of abstract patterns and meanings.

Both processes are important to every human being, but each of us tends to emphasize one method of gathering data over the other. Jung also noted two ways in which people judge information: thinking and feeling. • •

Thinking judgment is based on objective facts. Feeling judgments are based on personal and universal values.

Jung’s writings further imply that in addition to each person’s preference for their dominant mental process, or what their “type” combination is, (extroverted Sensing, introverted Sensing, extroverted iNtuition, introverted iNtuition, extroverted Thinking, introverted Thinking, extroverted Feeling, introverted Feeling), they would also have a preference for a secondary process. This secondary process would come into play in different challenging situations. Put simply, an Extroverted Sensing type could also, for example, prefer either introverted Thinking or introverted Feeling as their secondary mental process. Jung’s observations were thus the foundations for 16 personality types that can now be accurately measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) developed by Isabel Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs. Myers used Jung’s theory of opposites (Sensing or iNtuiting, Thinking or Feeling) and a battery of test questions that ask subjects how they prefer to interact with the external world to discover each individual’s MBTI® Type.

Applying MBTI® to business The process has been so successful in predicting the characteristics associated with the 16 types that it is now used around the world to help individuals understand how they see the world and how their view differs from other people in their lives. Most recently, the MBTI® has moved into the workplace as a valuable tool for helping co-workers understand how other members of their team view the world differently. In fact, around 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies now use the MBTI® instrument at some level in the organization. Many systems have been introduced in recent years to provide organizations with a process for building high performance teams. Susan Nash’s SCORE system is one popular paradigm for understanding and improving work teams. An examination of her five-factor model makes it clear that effective communications between team members is critical for team success. 1. S – Strategy: Shared purpose; clearly articulated values and ground rules; understanding the risks and opportunities facing the team; clear categorization of the overall responsibilities of the team. 2. C – Clear roles and responsibilities: Clear definitions; responsibility shared by all members; specific measurement of individual results. 3. O – Open communication: respect for individual differences; open and nonjudgmental communication environment among team members. 4. R – Rapid response: to the team’s and the customer’s problems and opportunities; effective response to and management of changes in internal and external environment. 5. E – Effective leadership: Team leader who is able to both help the team achieve their objectives and build the team; team leader who can draw out and make available the skills of all team members, and develop the potential of every team member. Like many others, Nash’s research concludes that team building must begin with creating a profile of each team member using the MBTI® instrument and then combining the data from those individual profiles to form a team profile. The process creates an opportunity for team members to know themselves better, know their teammates better and finally to understand how to combine their strengths to create a powerful, effective team. While there aren’t good or bad MBTI® types, some tend to correlate more to success in certain positions. When the MBTI® types aren’t as natural a fit, it’s particularly important to be aware of that and how individuals and the organization can act to compensate. MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

We recommend asking every new hire to take the MBTI®. There are many different ways to take it; in fact we include it as part of admittance into our quarterly Intensives. If you decide to use this assessment when hiring, you may want the MBTI® Step II Form-Q version, containing the full 144 questions. However, here is a shorter free version you can take and/or distribute right now at 16Personalities.com. Working within personality types Below is a graphic that breaks down the 16 different personality types into their most basic forms.

At our Intensives, we give all of our attendees access to the official MBTI® Step II, which is a full 144 questions and can only be administered by certified practitioners. This version of the MBTI® offers deeper insight into your personality type and offers the most accurate results. Based on years of work building different multiplatform publishing teams using the MBTI®, we’ve found that there is no “right” type, although there are certainly optimal combinations. Teams that take time to create efficient group work processes can become extremely effective at furthering the actual work of any organization. Taking time to build and maintain

these high-performance teams can thus have a very positive impact on productivity, return on investment, and worker morale. Is it any wonder that American business has grown willing to invest time and resources into a process that would have been thought unproductive by management experts like F.W. Taylor, who believed in treating workers as parts of a process, rather than as part of a team? When the MBTI® types aren’t as natural a fit into their positions, it’s particularly important to be aware of that and how individuals and the organization can act to compensate. Shawn Bakker wrote an excellent guide to managing a multitype team called Working With People With Different MBTI® Type Preferences that you might find helpful. Here’s how we’ve translated those guidelines into managing a multiplatform publishing team. If you’re an Introvert on an Extrovert team: Your team loves to talk out their ideas, even if you, say, prefer to write them out first. In order to mesh better with an extroverted team, find time in your day to take advantage of quiet moments in the office and on your way to work so that you’re prepared to voice your ideas in meetings when the opportunity arises. A well-thought-out plan can also be communicated initially through email, but don’t let the fear of having to publicly present your ideas hold you back from growing within the team. If you’re an Extrovert in an Introvert team: Your team is a little less vocal in nature. You might find that they prefer completing tasks and communicating through email while you’re eager to walk into their office or request a formal meeting. When in meetings, take time to encourage your team members to speak their ideas, and give them time to think about your ideas before asking for feedback. You may also benefit from networking outside of the office. If you have a preference for iNtuition, and your teammates have a preference for Sensing: Your team likes getting to the point, the most effective way possible. Take time to practice offering information in a step-by-step fashion with examples that illustrate your points. When offered instructions yourself, read each step carefully. While growth requires innovation, respect that there is experience within your organization you can learn from first. MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

If you have a preference for Sensing, and your teammates have a preference for iNtuition: While you might get lost in the details, your team analyzes the big picture. Work on your team-building and brainstorming skills by getting involved in more long-term group projects. Instead of homing in on the specifics, practice looking for patterns, meanings and themes. If you have a preference for Thinking, and your teammates’ preference is Feeling: Being blunt may get a point across, but it doesn’t build a motivated team. Practice finding the positive side of every situation, and work on your people skills when it comes to offering constructive criticism. You’ll need to learn how to offer the good old-fashioned compliment sandwich which may be as simple as looking for where you can agree before you begin to disagree. If you have a preference for Feeling, and your teammates have a preference for Thinking: In the publishing environment, ideas will be accepted and rejected regularly, so practice the fine art of accepting feedback graciously, even when it’s critical. When making your own arguments, try to find logical points of debate, like the results of feedback and other data. If you have a preference for Perceiving, and your teammates’ preference is Judging: Your team appreciates sound decisions, strict deadlines, and planning. In order to work best with this type of team, work with them to explain how your decisions are made, and avoid surprising them with new deadlines or challenges too often. If you have a preference for Judging, and your teammates have a preference for Perceiving: Your team might not be as disciplined as you, so learn how to create your own deadlines, or try to find projects you can work on that have milestones and deadlines that will help keep you organized. In order to work best with your team, you may also find the need to listen more before coming to any final decisions.

Creating a Team Profile Team building must begin by creating a profile of each team member using the MBTI® instrument and then combining the data from those individual profiles to form a team profile. The process creates an opportunity for team members to know themselves better, know their teammates better, and finally to understand how to combine their strengths to create a powerful, effective team. Often, when you take a few people and put them together and ask them to do something, they will take on their own type with a bias toward the type of the CEO. During the Intensive, we combined the team member profiles into one composite case study that ended as an ESTJ, which, as predicted, was also the same profile as the CEO.

We find that ESTJ and ENTJs are the most effective CEOs, and there are many logical reasons why. Keep following along. Hiring to lead revenue Every effective multiplatform publishing company should have eight executive positions. If you’re a small niche publishing company with revenues less than $1 million per year and you’re the only employee, then you’re doing the job of all eight. But, for example, if you have one executive plus yourself, then you will have one or more of those jobs taken off your plate. The goal is to fill all of the positions, in the order below. We’ll explain why, later.

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CEO – Chief Executive Officer COO – Chief Operating Officer CMO – Chief Marketing Officer

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CCO – Chief Content Officer

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• • • •

CDO – Chief Development Officer CTO – Chief Technology Officer CSO – Chief Strategy Officer CAO – Chief Analytics Officer

Some of these roles combine naturally. For example, the CAO is the COO doubled up. The CSO is often doubled up with the CEO or your CMO. One point of discussion that we come across is the difference between a manager and an executive officer. •

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An executive officer takes responsibility for the whole organization, not just the department they oversee. A manager focuses on their department and does not take responsibility for outside issues.

Knowing the difference will help you build a team with the right tools for the task. Tips for hiring a multiplatform publishing team Hire the people the most unlike you in personality type and skillsets. Don’t hire someone just like you. Most importantly, hire to lead revenue, don’t attempt to reach your revenue goals and then hire; you’ll get to that level having hired the right officers. In the graph below, you can see which executive roles account for the next level of revenue. In other words, this is the order in which we suggest you hire your executive team.

The “Best” Multiplatform Publishing Team Types There’s no such thing as a perfect personality type for any given role in an organization. There are, however, types that have consistently proven to have above average chance of success in certain roles. Below is an example of a small, niche multiplatform publishing team. In the graphic you can see the MBTI® profiles of the senior executives in our composite case study. According to our chart above, this team generates between $3-5 million dollars per year in revenue.

While there is no “ideal” team profile, this team profile is one of a very effective executive team and similar to many effective leadership teams we’ve coached over the past 20 years since we started to use the MBTI® as a team building tool. • • • • •

CEO – EXTJ (ESTJ or ENTJ) COO – ISFJ CMO – ESTJ CCO – ESTP CDO – EXTJ (ENTJ or ESTJ)

You might notice X above (EXTJ), but X isn’t a personality type; it means that the person can be either/or. In the examples above, X is in the second position for both the CEO and CDO roles. This means that someone who is either S (Sensing) or N (Intuition) would be a good fit for each. MULTIPLATFORM PUBLISHING STRATEGY MequodaFree.com

Below is how an ENTJ would look on the MBTI®. You can see that most characteristics lean toward the left side, for E, T and J, whereas this CEO leans heavily toward the right as an N.

We find that the COO should have a strong S and be able to see the reality of any situation and figure out how challenges will get accomplished. They may be less of a people person – that’s the I (Introvert) – and be more focused. A CEO will always be high on the T and J scale. They have a low tolerance for irrationality and want things done. Hiring the right multiplatform publishing team will be the most challenging part of everything you’ve read so far, but it’s the final step in success. Just kidding, there are no final steps. This is just the beginning! --If you’d like to learn more about how Mequoda can help you build a multiplatform publishing empire, please call us today: 508-686-6018.

About Mequoda Mequoda Group helps legacy publishers make the transition to digital publishing Can we help you make that transition? If you’re a publisher, content producer or content marketer searching for a simple yet comprehensive way to create, build and maintain long, lasting and profitable audience and customer relationships, your search may be complete. Mequoda Group offers consulting services for publishers on content marketing, online publishing, search engine optimization, email newsletter marketing, editorial management, landing page best practices, social media optimization and online business management. For the right client, our consulting services can go on to include keyword research & reporting, website systems planning, business plan development and ultimately website design, development and support. Mequoda Group supports publishers who use some variation of the Mequoda Content Marketing System (Mequoda System). Our members include more than 36,000 individual marketers, editors, writers, copywriters, graphic designers, webmasters, information architects, software developers, project managers, usability engineers, media producers and publishers. Mequoda Group members create and monetize content on hundreds of special-interest topics ranging from investing to human resources, cooking to healthcare, and archery to zoology. Our members serve audiences, users and customers who are both consumers and professionals with content, communities and commerce that improve the quality of their lives. Mequoda Group Mission We’re dedicated to helping content marketers, producers and publishers use the Internet and other media to create, build and retain long, lasting and profitable audience and customer relationships. Learn more at Mequoda.com.

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