Five on Friday: Subscription Billing, Strategic Republishing, Email and More

This week we explore subscription billing, growing pains, email, strategic republishing, logo redesign and more.

Five on Friday with Diane Pierson — Photo Credit: Creative Commons

As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products. Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for June 17th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.

1. Find the Subscription Billing Software That’s Right for You

In the market for a new subscription billing solution? If so, this article is worth a quick read; it summarizes subscription billing software solutions Braintree, Recurly, Stripe, Chargify and Zuora. Need to learn more about payments in general? Our next Subscription Accelerator Bootcamp: Payment Processing is scheduled for September 29^th in San Francisco.

2. Handling Growing Pains at El Espanol

An interesting read from Digiday on the growing pains of Spain’s first crowd-funded, digital-only political journal, El Espanol. They will look familiar:

Illustrating the value of subscription when maintaining a soft paywall.
Attracting enough subscribers to minimize advertising.
Keeping the advertisers you must have happy with high-click content while staying true to your goal of providing thoughtful, independent and in-depth articles.
Staying close to your market while you also appease the advertisers.

The resolution of these dilemmas isn’t forthcoming, but at least it points out that no one is alone in this struggle!

3. Putting Yourself in the Shoes of Your Email Recipient

“I’m proposing a new “Golden Rule” of email list management:
Email unto others as you would have emailed unto you.”
Skyler Holobach, Pardot

4. Advice on Strategic Republishing

Whether trying to gain notice, credibility or revenue, making the most of every piece of content is critical to a subscription business. But how can you republish content judiciously, balancing the desire for more mileage without the hit to credibility (and SEO) that recycling identical content can bring?

A recent article from Mequoda that’s worth a read offer some inspiration. No time? Here’s a summary:

Create a new title for your article, introducing it from a different angle (e.g., instead of “Man Bites Dog,” how about “First Patient Arrives at the new Vet Clinic?”).

Link keyword phrases in the article back to related articles on your site.

Include a call to action at the bottom of your post (the article suggests a free related ebook).

Provide an update or new perspective on the original article information.

Include a link back to the original article.

5. Reinventing Your Subscription’s Logo

A look-and-logo refresh is an obvious expression of expanded focus or changing priorities, but can also keep your brand fresh even when your mission is unchanged. 99designs.com offers 10 trends in logo design happing now: