For most subscription sites, having multiple revenue streams is a wise move. And while many legacy publications are used to looking to advertising dollars to boost their profits, savvy digital publications are now looking to events and conferences.Live events is a $100 billion a year global industry, and $13 billion is in the US alone. That’s why both ad-supported and subscription-based publications are looking to cash in, according to a recent article in The New York Times. In fact, The New York Times hosted only one conference in 2011, but will hold a total of 16 by the end of 2013.We recently perused some sites to see how they were attracting people. Some of them had events departments or pages linked to from the homepage, like this one from Business Insider. Other subscription publications, like The Wall Street Journal, had specific URLs for their branded events. This latter method is a definitely a best practice, as it allows prospects to discover and search for your event outside of your publication (thereby drawing a larger crowd).But a surprising number of subscription sites bury their events pages. And more frequently, even when a subscription site does have a separate URL for their live events (one for each, please), they don’t include an email capture box. This is a definite wasted opportunity to engage with new prospects.So, if you’re a digital subscription publication, make sure you launch your live events revenue stream with two digital marketing must-haves:
- A separately branded website
- An email capture box on that website
Then read our two in-depth How-To articles below to learn how you can market best to your subscribers and optimize your live events to get the most bang for your buck!
