CURRENT NEWSLETTER PUBLICATION WEBSITE TIP 

 

Referral and Source Tracking

Implement "referral source" tracking in your publishing business process that will allow you to analyze your most effective promotion strategies. This can be as simple as adding a field or drop down list box to your online forms or asking the question when you receive a direct phone call from a potential business partner. Many publishers are surprised at how many people either located or researched their publication online prior to subscribing or making contact via email or phone. When you ask about how someone found your publication don't be afraid to ask for specifics. If your advertiser found you online ask what website or referral link brought them to your own website. This information combined with website analytics can help you to make decisions about where your best brand building return on investment exists.

Selected Reader Feedback Surveys

It's always great to get positive feedback about your publication's website from friends, staff, and family. It's also important to get comments and suggestions from specific visitors that are high value targets using hand selected email surveys. Prepare a short survey with at least one open ended "suggestions" topic that you can email on demand to certain readers that are a strong fit within your target demographic. It's likely that a simple and personalized request to take a few moments to answers your survey questions will result in some very valuable feedback.

 

Website Banner Advertising Startup Tip

This tip is for for small to mid-tier publishers that are developing a website with interactions to support online advertising programs. Many publishers often ask us how to roll out their initial online ad programs. An approach that will make the process easy for you and will provide a clean and consistent site advertising impression will be to adhere to the "less is more" concept. Sell the online advertising as a campaign to include ads and sizes across your whole site instead of trying to sell individual ads and placement locations.

First identify those print advertisers that can benefit most from the immediacy and conversion opportunities of direct clickthroughs from your publication website. A clickthrough from your site should be a valuable lead and the potential for your advertisers to convert these leads to customers should be considered. Next, prepare an entire online campaign that allows your selected advertisers to have professional and consistent "call to action" messages across your website. Forget trying to establish a CPM online advertising rate card and set your rates to the value in clickthrough and converted customers that you can provide advertisers. Remember, you'll need to deliver results to keep the online advertisers happy too. For a highly targeted clickthrough lead, your advertisers should be willing to budget fifty cents to five dollars per clickthrough. You can estimate your initial clickthrough rate at 1% to start if your want a benchmark for setting a starting monthly ad rate for your online ad package based on your current website stats.

Once your traffic and online return visitors is growing you can get more detailed in the cost and formalization of your online advertising programs. Your banner advertising is just one element of your online revenue opportunities, but its a very visible element and should enhance your visitor experience. Choose those initially advertisers wisely and make sure the offer or promotion is credible and valuable to your online visitors

 

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Online Website Directory to Define your Industry Niche

If you publish a magazine about a specific business or consumer niche you should own that niche and its related resources. If you publish a regional lifestyle publication or newspaper you should own the best or at least a leading and growing directory for that geographic location. Regardless of your representation of this directory in print, which will likely be based on paid advertising, your online website should demonstrate to readers that your website is a full resource for companies, services, and resources related to your publishing niche. You'll also be able to extend your display advertising sales by utilizing a multi-tier online dynamic directory.

 

Your Advertiser Highest Value Targets

Depending on your publication and current website resources you should be seeing 5 to 25+ percent of your current readership circulation as direct inbound visits to your website each month. If your website offers resources and interaction that your readers seek in making REPEAT visits to your website your advertisers can be provided some premium results. For example, if your circulation (or readership) is 20,000 and you are achieving just 10% or 2000 direct in-bound traffic hits monthly, it's likely this represents a majority of your most loyal readership if they seek your website monthly for interaction with your content. Just think of the 80/20 rule applied to these 2000 visitors. It's likely that with properly integrated website advertiser campaigns that you can turn these visitor into leads or clickthroughs to your top advertisers. Advertisers will always pay a premium for direct and traceable results and many have online budgets which you need to be asking to have applied to your online campaigns. Just note the banner advertising tip below!

 

Providing Unique Value Online without Degrading your Print Publication Medium

Many publishers are concerned that if they post information to their website they will cannibalize their print medium value. It's a major reason given for not making the website a priority for many publishers. In reality, the online brand can provide unique value to the publication brand and can be leveraged not only for revenue generation but is a key marketing tool to build readership of the print publication. The online offering of a magazine and newspaper publication is only a URL web address click away from the majority of readers and advertisers that fit into a publications total market demographic potential. Therefore, the online offering should be focused on a strategy attracting these valuable prospective readers and advertisers and should also clearly build interest in the complete brand interaction of your publishing niche.

Infoswell provides a complimentary review of the key strategies that allow publishers to create unique value with their website. Just contact us to schedule a review.

 

Optimizing the article content on your publication's website

While many publishers provide home page links to key website functions and stories, they often move articles and change URL names when new information is posted. if you're not already using a formal publication website content management solution like Infoswell that optimizes your article content you'll want to begin saving and publishing your full story website pages to permanent URL link positions on your site. Article lead-in links on your home page or located in article categories should lead to the same full story website URL to enable the information to be searched and indexed online. This also insures that if other websites link to your article information, these valuable inbound links won't end up broken or pointing to unrelated articles when updates are made to your site. A professional publication website content management solution should allow you to move your article headers and summary to various positions without affecting or changing the permanent full article location on your website. As for article "Archives" folders, there's often a better way to organized this information also since even old articles can be highly relevant, especially if it's exactly what someone is searching for online that will enable then to discover your magazine or newspaper.

 

Do you know who visited your website today? Review your website statistics for marketing opportunities with your publication.

There are many products on the market today that perform website analytics to help you understand how and who is visiting your website. Just type "Website Statistics" into your favorite search engine and you'll have plenty of choices. It's probably worth paying for a nominal fee stats service to get the type of detail that will be valuable to analyzing your website and integrated "print and web" marketing campaigns.

Not only will the website statistics show you where your visitors are coming from, but it will help you to determine the keywords that are being used to search for your site. Sometimes less is more... Especially if you're paying for traffic clicks. You want to send the targeted readers to your site that are either existing readers, potential readers, or people that could have a positive influence on your site from a media and publicity perspective. So if the keywords you're seeing in your phrase and single keyword stats are totally unrelated to your publication content, then it's time to revamp the marketing campaigns. Tracking visitor navigation paths and site visitor duration will also help to identify your online visitor demographics.

 

Banner Advertising Design Tip

How many times a day do you land on a website with "no design standards" banner ads packed in and around the site in a manner that clearly diminishes the value of any content posted? Why degrade your content and design presentation when there are plenty of advertisers that would be happy to meet your online display advertising design requirements.

Affiliate link and banner exchange programs usually achieve marginal results and offer little value to your niche visitors. Develop a complete online adverting campaign for your ad partners and their clickthrough performance results will likely be much higher than average. You'll build value with an advertiser that should also become print advertising partner. If the advertiser is already participating in your print programs you can develop special campaigns from your print publication to demonstrate the effectiveness of your combined print and web marketing capabilities.

 

Simple steps to make sure your publication is building an online presence for your publication

Start by making sure that once you receive a web site visitor, they clearly see you've got something valuable to offer. Can a potential new reader or subscriber see that your publication may be a fit for them within the first 45 seconds of visiting your website? Insure that your Home page provides a message that connects your publication brand and value with what these visitors to your site should expect to find. In addition to the content, it's very important that your site structure is balanced and optimized for searches.

Next, find other compatible web sites that will exchange referral links based on specific information and value. Don't just trade links anywhere as this provides little value to a reader on either web site. Place your links on a relevant content pages. Be very selective about the pages you want inbound links. A higher quality and ranked referral site is better than several links from sites that have nothing to do with your content. 

Participate in forums that have potential readers interacting online and put your newspaper or magazine title and URL in your post signature (but be very careful about what you write since it's bound to come up when searching for your publication).

Determine the best short one to three word phrases that describer your publication, maybe it's simply your magazine or newspaper name assuming this is a possible search term. Run a keyword advertising campaign on these words in Google or Yahoo (formerly Overture) to get these visitors to your site. Make sure your online ad message is clear and that your paid visitor know they are going to a publication website focused on a specific subject or content. You don't want to pay for visitors that like your paid ad but have a low likelihood of becoming readers or returning to your site.

 

Word of mouth referrals are great... so are referrals from your own website.

Put a "e-mail this story" to a friend link on your online posted articles. This is a great way to invite your readers to share an interesting story with a friend.

 

Invite your print readership to interact online.

Keep your brand in front of readers after they have read your current publication by inviting them to comment about certain articles appearing in print.  At the conclusion of your print article try:

“We want to hear what your think about…”
“For the full interview visit us online at…”
“To see more pictures of…” or
“We have created an online poll for this article…”

Give the direct link to the website page with this specific interaction and make sure this page has proper navigation back to the home page.

Your Magazine or Newsletter's Website Home Page Layout

A publication's home page should be focused on the interest of your readership visitors.  Just as a magazine cover or newspaper front page provides a clean overview of the key print contents, give your home page a clean and organized impression of your online value.  It's ok to start simple! Until you have the content resources to populate other areas of your site, be sure your home page links all lead to valuable content and no "dead end" website pages that are likely to have your visitor move on to another website. Make readership interactive functions your primary navigation elements and keep business and company related elements organized together as sub navigation pages. 

If a potential or existing publication reader visits your home page and is quickly skimming your website, assume they will make a decision about the website and the website's representation of the publication in less than 45 seconds.  That's just enough time to click 4 to 5 of your top level navigation links, so make sure the pages these links open demonstrate your value and niche.