Combining Animation With Lead Generation…

Here’s a nice ad that combines effective Flash animation w/ lead generation. It’s a good example to utilizing two effective techniques in the prime real estate position of a digital magazine.

Five Ways to Make Money on Your Nxtbook Today

1) Sell a banner in the e-mail you send to subscribers telling them about the digital magazine.

2) Upcharge print advertisers to make their web links live. While I’m not a huge fan of this one, there are two realities: a.We’ve got customer that do it successfully. b.It’s a very easy way to start the print to digital transition conversation.

3) Ask them what the conversion rate is on their website traffic (visitors that turn into leads) and then offer to eliminate the drop-off by putting a lead generation form (Ad-Gen) inside the magazine.

4) If your content is locked down, have a sponsor pay to open the issue or open a certain number of pages.

5) Ask advertisers what video they have sitting on the shelf that can be easily repurposed for the digital ad. Ten years ago, marketing departments didn’t have these materials. Now, most of them do and they’d love the chance to get more bang for dollars they’ve already spent.

Role Reversal - Sell Online, Give-Away Print…

Well, it was probably bound to happen. Scott Karp shows us that the NY Times is now selling online and offering print as a ride-along.

 

Esquire Keeps the Wall Between Church & State Mighty High…

So I got a copy of issue of Esquire featuring E-Ink technology. Or rather, my wife noticed it on the newsstand and picked it up for me, so chalk up at least one impulse buyer courtesy of the moving ink.

There’s an article on page 73 that explains how the E-Ink cover came together. Or, save yourself $5.99 and read it here. It involves refrigerators and seven years of development.

What’s missing from the article, though, is any reference to the advertiser who - along with readers - footed the bill for the technology. Ford, after all, was the company which was willing to match the novelty of E-Ink with their current marketing goal: impress people with the rather un-Fordlike Flex, and though I haven’t seen the figures, I’d hazard a guess they paid a premium to do so. But while the advertiser supporting E-Ink has gotten good buzz on auto sites, there’s no mention of that with the ivory columns of the Esquire text.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for publishers with digital magazines:

Ford buys many ads in Esquire magazine, but they chose this ad in this format because it was special and cool and conducive to their marketing strategy. Guess what? If you pay attention to what your advertisers are doing and would like to do, you’ll probably find a way to do the same thing with an advertiser inside your digital magazine. If your magazine is locked down, have the advertiser "pay" to open it up to readers, in return for an intro. ad. If your advertiser launched a new video channel, post some clips inside the digital magazine. This is where the goals and strategies of your advertiser become more important than things like CPM’s and even clicks.

In the end, I’d bet that if you were thinking about the Ford Flex and saw this moving ink ad, it’s probably hanging proudly on your wall now. I’d also wager that some people are now thinking of the Ford Flex because of the ad. If that’s not the mark of great magazine advertising, I’m not sure what is.

Rescalable and Green Screen Videos - INSIDE the Nxtbook

What will our customers (partnered with our developers) think of next?? Here are two cool ideas:

1) Green Screen video — have a host walk onto the cover of your digital edition promoting the content. Simply too cool.

2) The Rescalable video — Video’s great, but fitting the player nicely within a page layout can be tough. But it’s no problem with our new rescalable player. Just drag the lower right corner to see as much of the video as you’d like to. Best of all? This is the latest product enhancement to be made available at NO EXTRA CHARGE!

How Engaging is a Buffet?

I admit it: I’ve been to one or 10 buffets in my lifetime. Most were fine. Some were  good. None, however, were memorable and none provided me with what I’d call an "engaging experience."

Over at FOLIO, Tony Silber recounts an interesting exchange where two-thirds of print executive say they consume more media online than they do print. When I hear the word "consumption," I think of buffets.

Here’s the thing: If asked that question, I’d likely answer the same way. But is that really the question that we should be asking? In a given day, I’ll visit dozens of websites and scan hundreds of feeds. I will — however — notice  few online ads and click even less. When I look at a magazine, though, I notice the vast majority of the ads and read well more than half. In short, I’m engaging with the content.

As we’ve said before, reader habits in a digital magazine are marketedly different than they are in the traditional online sense. Click-through rates, in particular, are crazy higher. People have been habitualized to read magazine advertisements. Quite quickly, though, we’ve been habitualized to ignore traditional online ads.

If you’re Google — and you’re serving up the world’s biggest buffet of content — you can get away with mass consumption low margin activity. But most of us in the niche trade world aren’t in the buffet business. Instead, our task is to provide a memorable experience for our customers. An engaging one, rather than one based on "consumption." For those publishers, the digital magazine provides just that experience at an expense far lower than print.

 

E.Republic on Revenue Today…

Nxtbook customer e.Republic is featured at FOLIO:

“But now we’re bringing on electronic products that opened up new a range of customers who couldn’t spend half a million to a million and a half dollars in an annual campaign. But they could spend a lot lower.”

Ad Pages Up in July?

With all the doom and gloom of the U.S. economy, we did a little study here, examining average page counts of all Nxtbooks in the past 90 days. While this evidence is far from the last word, perhaps things aren’t so bad.

In May the average Nxtbook had a 51 pages. This dipped down to a little more than 50 pages in July. However, July’s looking great, with an average page count per book of 55.47 pages. Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come for magazine publishers.

What’s Your Click-Through Rate?

The guys that watch the tracking whispered into my ear a bit of information about a certain client. I won’t give out their name here, but I am going to share the data, because it’s a classic definition of what an engaged audience fed by viral activity looks like.

First up, the magazine was e-mailed out to the subscriber list. This tried and true method yielded nearly 3,800 reads. But from there, things got crazy… Links posted to MySpace, blogs and internet forums netted the magazine an additional 18,900 reads, for a total of 22,642.

How engaged was the audience? The average reader read nearly 60 pages of the publication and stayed inside for nearly 15 minutes (Keep in mind - this is the AVERAGE - and includes everyone who left after seeing one page.)

Looking to monetize the publication? Check this out: 28 percent of readers clicked on at least one ad. Here’s the real head-turner. One ad in the magazine was clicked on by 170 readers. On, and by the way, the ad appears on page 25 of the publication!

What’s your click-through rate?

 

WEBINAR - Digital Edition Revenue Generation

While some publishers seek low cost digital edition solutions, the
greatest gains to be made are in digital edition revenue generation.
Successful publishers will present their plans for maximizing online
revenue via their digital editions.

Click here to view the archived webinar.