Being a Product of Your Product

When we made the decision to launch LiNKED Magazine last year, it was due to a growing sense of frustration with how the press was focusing on print publishers who didn’t "get" new media - all while we’re constantly working with publishers trying to forge new digital initiatives.

However, we also understood that a secondary benefit of creating our own digital magazine is that we’d be able to see our product through the lens of our customers. Here’s what we’ve learned from the data that comes to us from our second issue being released this week:

1.) People stay inside a digital edition longer than they stay inside your website. The average reader from this week stayed inside LiNKED for 4:30 and read 12 of the 18 pages, though 15% made it all the way to the last two pages.

2.) People click-through a digital edition at a much higher rate than they click through a web-site. 10% of the visitors clicked on an ad in this current edition. This is actually a bit lower than what most of our publishers see (usually closer to 15-20%), but I think a good bit of that can be explained that we were the only company to run an ad in the publication. It stands to reason that if our readers had a choice for other advertisers, those advertisers would’ve benefited.

3.) Social media is a small - but vital - component of a digital edition. How small? According to our tracking data, only a  small percentage of people did something "social" with LiNKED - posted it to a forum, blog or saved it to a link aggregator. However, this small percentage of postings led to about 40% of the total traffic to the book. Posting to blogs and forums create third-party referrals for your content, which is vital for growing brand trust and readership. As important, these third-party readers came without any marketing cost.