Business Media and Publishing

In this case study, Founder and Editor of RFID Journal, Mark Roberti, discusses how he played to his strength by creating a cornucopia of content around radio frequency identification (RFID) and then made more money by hosting industry-specific events. This is a great read for anyone interested in hybrid business models and managing multiple revenue streams. Of particular note is the journal's ability to convince 25% of its paying members to commit to a three-year subscription through the strength of its content, as well as the different options they offer advertisers.

When it comes to marketing, almost nothing can surpass "coolness." While trends vanish, and hip is for hipsters, coolness can cut through almost any demographic. It's why everyone loves TED talks and no one disses the Beatles without looking utterly foolish.Paid content is not cool. At least not yet. Those of us in the business meet skepticism and outright disdain from time to time. But comedian Louis CK's recent online success may be an inflection point…

Amazon is looking to become the Netflix of e-books by launching a subscription service to e-books for an annual fee, reports The Wall Street Journal. There are already sites -- such as 24Symbols.com and BookSwim.com -- working on a similar model but Amazon has the position and power to negotiate with publishers on a far larger scale and put in place a compelling service." Amazon has told publishers it is considering creating a digital-book library featuring…

Think people won't pay for content that is already available for free on the Internet? Sure they will.  This example from Ars Technica is fascinating: Ars Technica's John Siracusa wrote a 19-page review of the new MAC OS X operating system. He offered it for free at his site (where it got 3 million views) and as a $5 ebook on Amazon's Kindle. In less than 24 hours, 3,000 copies of the ebook were sold bringing…

Amazon's e-book reader the Kindle holds 67% of the e-book reader market share with Nook by Barnes & Noble in a distant second with 22% of the market, according to Goldman Sachs. So it will be interesting to see what if any effect the latest news from Consumer Reports will have on the market. For the first time since compiling e-book reader ratings, Nook has beat Kindle to win the best e-book reader title.Consumer Reports finds…

Did you hear the news today that Kindle ebooks are outselling print over at Amazon.com? We truly are in a new world. When you have published your ebook, how do you get it in front of the best target buyers? Lindsey Buroker over at SellingBooks.com has pinpointed four places to advertise your ebook offerings: 1. Pay-per-click advertising at Goodreads.com. If you're an ebook author without print copies, Buroker suggests wording your ad carefully to target the…

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,…

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…

Jesse Hopps, CEO of Demand Metric, describes how his site attracts individual members and group subscriptions with tools and templates that make marketers' jobs easier. See how adding video overviews of the content doubled the online conversion rate, and how a multi-track email nurturing program helped the inside sales team reduce the number of dials-to-sales by half.

Since launching its web-based business in 1998, BLR-Business & Legal Resources has come a long way in converting visitors into subscribers online. Starting with basic testing in the early 2000s and graduating to more advanced, segment-based testing during the past four years has helped BLR hone offers and page design to get high conversion rates.