Proper Promotion of the Digital Magazine

In our monthly webinar to customers about growing readership off their digital magazines, we encourage them to blog about their digital magazines for two key reasons: 1.) It demonstrates synergy within your brand, which always makes sense for all of your products (eg. talk about your mobile program in print, etc.). 2.) It elevates the digital edition in the eyes of search engines by providing links to your digital magazine content.

Here’s a textbook example. The Blog from the Suffolk Arts+Sciences magazine linking to their latest digital edition. Well done!

CM Becomes Audience Development…

According to the mail I received yesterday and confirmed by Bill Mickey’s post is news that Circulation Management Magazine is being rebranded as Audience Development. As a reader, advertiser and critic, I applaud this move.

As a digital magazine provider, we’ve struggled with this dance for years. Unlike print, digital magazines allow publishers to know how big their audience is - people devouring the content. Circulation numbers - from a digital perspective - only exist to satisfy our egos. In lieu of good data, they provide us with some sort of metric, but it’s 2008. We’re not "in lieu" anymore.

Here’s hoping that the folks at Red7 go further than simply renaming the product.

Prediction: Hearst Could Sell More Digital Subscriptions in Coming Year

Keep in mind, we’re saying this even though at Nxtbook Media, we only (currently) work with Hearst b-to-b titles. But still, we’re going on record saying that the publishing giant stands to be more successful with digital magazines next year. Here’s why:

When speaking with consumer magazines, a good question to ask them is, "What percentage of your new subscriptions currently come from the Internet?" Simply put, if a publisher can’t sell subscriptions online, the chances of them selling a digital subscription are that much less. In this recent story in Publishing Executive, Hearst reports they’ve improved greatly in this regard:

At Hearst, Loughlin cites the circulation-development tool Circules as a key product reflecting the company’s approach. Circules allows Hearst to tailor subscription offers to a consumer based on his or her specific online browsing history—again, an approach made possible by the development of tools in (and coordination between) the company’s digital media, consumer marketing and subscription-fulfillment
operations.

The project, launched in November 2006, has allowed Hearst to capture 1.6 million net paid subscriptions in 2007, up from 400,000 the year before. The company expects the number to top 2 million this year.

The article doesn’t say if any of these subscribers were offered (or accepted) digital subscriptions, but it is indicative of a more focused effort on the part of Hearst to use the Web to generate subsriptions. If a publisher can do that, they can also use the Web to generate digital subscriptions, too.

Psst…they’re talking about you!

As a publisher, that’s what you’re looking for, of course: Proof that readers are talking about your content. Over at BoardReader, you can follow the conversation for yourself. A recent scan shows nearly 300 instances of people asking questions and posting comments about our publishers. This leads to more readers, of course, which is a very good thing!

Nxtbooks on Twitter…

You’ve probably heard of Twitter — the "micro-blogging" service that enables people to tell you what’s going on in their life 144 characters at a time. Due to our page-specific permalinks, it’s for people to "tweet" their favorite Nxtbook content. You can check out two examples here.

Nxtbooks Make You Look Smarter

One of the advantages of the Nxtbook are our page-specific permalinks that make it easy for readers to share your content. Assuming you’ve got great content, letting people share it makes them (and you!) look smart.

If you’ve got a LinkedIn account, you can see what me mean. In these two cases, people posted a question in the LinkedIn Questions area, and received answers with links to Nxtbook content. In both cases, the answers were selected as the "Best Answer" given.

What you’re seeing here is a passive (yet effective) use of social media through technology. The Nxtbook product is inherently designed so that people can share it online. When they do, both publishers and participants benefit.

On the Value of Social Media

The next time somebody asks you how to get value out of social media, show them this post:

Social Media is not a silver bullet. There are not countless uninformed consumers floating around in some world called "Web 2.0" just waiting for you to sell them your wares. People engaged in these online social channels are not looking for your advertising, they’re looking for your engagement. Your engagement can’t only be there when it’s something self-serving.

E-Mail Share of Nxtbook Readership Continues to Fall…

If you’re doing a digital magazine and you’re spending all of your time worried about e-mail open rates, you’re missing a trend which continues to grow.

Last month, more than 1.5 million people read a Nxtbook - our third highest month ever in what is traditionally a slow month for web activity. However, for the first time ever, readership to Nxtbooks via e-mail fell below 40 percent to 39 percent. While e-mail activity from customers continues to increase, e-mail share is dropping, due to dramatic increases in readership from social media and search engines (which themselves are highly influenced by social media). 

A great way to boost Nxtbook activity outside of e-mail is through great Web site synergy. Look at this cool example. In the widget Nielsen has on their Web site, they’ve seamlessly integrated Web content with digital edition content. Very clever. Very cool. Very effective.

Ask your Nxtbook account manager for tips and techniques to ensure you’re getting your share of the ever-increasing social media pie.

 

Do Nxtbooks Insulate You From a Poor Economy?

Publishing Executive posts a story about page counts being down in the B2B sector. A few weeks ago, we posted that among Nxtbook customers, it isn’t. While some of our titles are down in page counts, the averages tell a different story. While we could say the reason for this is because these publishers use Nxtbook, an equally plausible reason is that it’s the forward-thinking publishers that find creative ways to keep up the page counts and the same forward-thinking publishers look to optimize their portfolio via digital magazines. 

Helping Circulators with Digital Editions

Media Business has a good write-up on our new Nxtstand, offering key differences between the Nxtbook strategy and other strategies.

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