Legal Alert: California’s Strict Anti-Spam Statute & Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns
Even if your marketing department obeys California law (which is not the same as Federal CAN-SPAM law) for all commercial emails... if any of your affiliate or other partners sending offers on your behalf break the law, then you may be looking at a not-so-fun court case. A few keys -- it doesn't matter where you are headquartered. You could be in Kalamazoo, but if you send email to people in California, then California state law…
Case Study Lesson: Highest-impact Places to Promote Trial Subscription Offers
In this week's new Subscription Site Insider Case Study, we interviewed SmartCredit's CMO Ethan Taub. SmartCredit is duking it out in the consumer credit info industry against such brand giants as FreeCreditReport.com. So, his marketing has to be hugely effective to gain market share. One of his best tactics -- putting free trial offers for SmartCredit on marketing partner site's thank-you pages. For example, a mortgage company might feature a SmartCredit offer on the thank-you page…
What Subscription Site Audience Development Pros Can Learn From AOL’s Traffic-Source Plan
According to the leaked documents from AOL's plans posted at Business Insider this morning, AOL's audience development team expect their basic traffic to come from 5 major sources, listed here in order of anticipated size: 1. SEO =40% 2. Direct clicks from bookmarks, etc = 30% 3. External "partners" (presumably incl. affiliates) = 15% 4. Social media = 10% 5. Email newsletters = 5% ====================== Total = 100% In addition the team plans to gain 5-10% more traffic from PPC, paid search, and…
Kindle eBook versus Print Book Sales Data from MineThatData’s Kevin Hillstrom
If you love direct response analytics, as all successful subscription site publishers should, Kevin Hillstrom, a former circulation and database marketing director for brands such as Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer and Lands End, is the go-to-god.He's released data on how his own ebook sales are doing on Kindle, accompanied by analysis of course. Some lessons he learned: Price point and page count don't seem to affect sales much, as long as they're "reasonable". What matters, far more,…
A Potted Financial Analysis of Murdoch’s Upcoming iPad Daily: 130,000 Paying Readers Needed Per Week?
According to James Murdoch's remarks at the DLD Conference in Germany this week (as reported here in TechCrunch), the company's hired 126 journalists for its upcoming iPad Daily.That's a lot of journalists. I'm assuming that many of these are stringers or part-timers. That given, let's run some numbers, shall we? 126 journalists @ an average of $45kyear incl. tax & tags = $5,670,00010 other staff (our estimate) @75k each = $750,000Offices, legal, insurance, PR, tech, etc.…
Founders of Whitestone Communications & Peachtree Capital Advisors to Speak at Online Publisher Site Valuations Webinar
I'm happy to announce the names of our two guest star presenters for Subscription Site Insider's Jan 27th live webinar on Subscription, Membership & Paywalled Site Valuations: Baran Rosen, Founder & President, Whitestone Communications Mr. Rosen has been an M&A leader in the publishing, information and training industries since 1986, and founded Whitestone in 1994. He carefully guides clients through the intricate process of successfully selling and buying businesses and product lines. His particular strength is…
Highlights from WishList’s Membership Website Awards – the Wishies for Self-Publishers
Spurred on by the recession and ease of self-publishing, thousands of small-time self publishers have been entering the paid membership site arena in the last 24 months. I thought it would be fun to take a break from examining mainstream paid content publishers' businesses to take a look at what the self publishing crowd is doing these days. Out of a field of a dozen or so, WishList is one of the better-known software firms selling…
Case Study Lesson: Mad Mariner’s User-Generated Content Tactics
This week's Subscription Site Insider Case Study features the Mad Mariner, a site visited by more than 70,000 unique boating enthusiasts each month. One of the lessons we learned from site publisher Glen Justice was that you have to test different types of interactive content to find exactly what will engage and inspire your audience. Magazine sites often throw up a message board or add commenting capability to their articles and assume that's all it will…
Why Publishers Should Design for the Thumbnail… Instead of Just Squishing “Regular” Cover Art
Although Apple debuted its iBookstore in April 2010, they sent one of the first major email promotions to their customer email list about it just this Sunday Jan 15th 2011. I guess it's tough for product managers to get their broadcast on the schedule over at the marketing department, sort of like planes jostling for runway space at an terribly busy airport. The promo was list of book cover art thumbnails, with nothing more than book…
Case Study Lesson: Compete.com’s Clever Homepage Design
Based on our exclusive interview with Compete.com's Senior Internet Marketing Manager Drew Fortin, Subscription Site Insider's newest Case Study examines how the site attracts triple the traffic of its more established competitors, and how it's converting those visitors into paying subscribers. To my mind, one of the best lessons that other B2B subscription database & research publishers should take to heart from this Case Study is how cleverly Compete.com's homepage is designed.Most B2B database sites have…
