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If you use WordPress you might want to get your hands on the plugin.

It will turn WordPress into an issue based publisher.

We think so.

…and so do more and more publishers. But don’t take our word for it… read what New Hampshire Business Review thinks about Facebook comments (they recently switched):

Here is the their comment thinking taken from their site and distilled (you can find their original comment policy here):

The decision to change our commenting system was made for a number of reasons:

• For users who are already Facebook users, the system is very accessible and easy to use.
• Facebook requires users to use their real names and therefore users are held more accountable for their comments.
• Commenting using the Facebook system allows users to more easily share articles and comments.
• The system encourages high-quality relevant comments.

We understand that many users will choose to not use Facebook, and therefore will not be able to comment on our site. Our goal is not to shut out participants from conversations, but rather assist in providing an environment where more people can contribute to the conversations.

Once you login on Facebook, you can comment on our site using your Facebook profile. You can recommend articles, follow other readers’ posts, include friends in conversations, get notifications when someone responds to your comment, view relevant comments from your friends on Facebook, and hide spam.

Once you’re logged in to Facebook, when you read an article, you will be able to see your Facebook profile photo and name at the bottom of the article, but it will not be visible to anyone else until you type in a comment and it publishes live to the site.

When you comment on our site using your Facebook account, others will only be able to see the information you allow them to see via your Facebook privacy settings.

Comments on our site are public, which means anyone logged in or out of Facebook should be able to view them. If you cannot see the comments, check with your internet department. Often government agencies and employers may block Facebook.

 

What do you think? Leave a comment using our Facebook commenting below

Building your magazine’s subscriber base via email is job #1. The tools today also let you completely automate the task of sending your stories to your subscribers. Watch this video to find out how:

Here is the audio transcript:

In this video I’m going to show you how to build and automate your email list. One thing I want to say is that your creation of your email list is critical to your success.

You need subscribers to find out what is going on in your magazine. It is today the number one online marketing strategy and it still beats out social media. Why? Because it’s direct response. In other words, once you get a subscriber, that subscriber will get an email from you in their email box which interrupts their day and tells them, “hey this is new and please click on me.”

A lot of emails get deleted, but some get clicked on and if subscribers are paying for your magazine, they obviously will want to read your magazine, and if it’s free they will see that there’s something of interest and they can go to your magazine and get exposed to your advertising.

Take a look at this chart on the right. What’s interesting here is this shows you the average click-through rate for email across the last few years and for all industries, all magazines, all newsletters it runs around three percent, but what’s really interesting is in the last couple of years, that’s up to 2010, the click-through rate has actually increased. In other words, people come to me and say, “Hey Pete, I don’t like email. I just delete everything. I think email’s on the way out.”

What the data is telling us is, no, actually the click-through rate on email is going up and it’s higher than it was a few years ago. Yes, it’s still only three percent, but three percent isn’t bad across all industries and if you look at the average click-through rate for a targeted audience, one that a magazine, especially a niche magazine, might have, the click-through rate is 10 to 20 percent. So keep that in mind and let’s build that list.

Why should readers subscribe to your magazine? Well they want to read your articles, but really you want to give them free stuff. In those articles, you might be… if you have a paid magazine… you might be teasing those stories and you want to provide them with some teasers to get them to subscribe. But what will really get them to sign up is a free issue or maybe some selective stories.

In other words, you’re going to give away the December issue, all the stories and that will bring people in and, hopefully, get them to subscribe. Or may there are just some selected stories that are going to show up in their email box that will drive them back to the site and have them subscribe.

There’s one more thing you can do if you have a free magazine and that’s create something called a freemium story or a freemium piece of content. In other words, even though everything is free, what you might do is ask for an email exchange in return for being able to read an article, or watch a video, or listen to an audio. We call it “freemium” because technically you’re not paying anything, although you are dropping off your email address in order to read that.

OK, now how is this executed? So here in WordPress and Issue Manager, on this story all you have to do is go to the level and say this is for subscribers only or this is freemium so it’s level one. And then update the story. What that does is, it automatically creates a teaser for that story online that someone has to either be a paid subscriber or have dropped off their email address if it’s a freemium article and that’s it, that’s all you have to do. So this is managed right on the story side.

OK, switching gears a little bit, how do readers subscribe to your magazine? How do they get on the list? Well they’re going to have to opt-in on your website. You give them a form that has the name and email and what I would suggest is, better yet, just ask for an email address. Forget the name, forget everything else. What you really want is to deliver your stories into their email box and we’re busy, we are rushed, we’re distracted and the more you ask for, the less chance they’re going to have of subscribing to your magazine.

Also, very, very important, tell the potential subscriber what they’re going to get before they drop off their email address. I see this happen over and over again. It says, subscribe now and there’s an email form and a submit button. OK great. Well, what am I getting? You have to be transparent. You have to be clear about what they’re actually going to get, so if I don’t know that I might think maybe I’ll just get advertising or maybe I’ll get a feature story, maybe I’ll get a PDF download. I don’t know what I’m going get. I think it has to do with the magazine and the stories, but I’m not really 100% sure, and the confused customer never buy. So be very clear as demonstrated here.

Now let’s talk about how to automate email delivery. This is every marketer’s dream. The emails just get pushed out and this is how we do it today and it does work. It uses a technology called RSS to email. You don’t have to know what it is or even worry about it, but that is the official technology.

The two biggest providers, the two best providers we like anyway, is MailChimp and AWeber, they both work great. The way it works is, MailChimp and AWeber they actually check your site every day and see if there are new stories on the site and if there is a new story on the site what they do is they use that RSS feed and they actually pull that story off your site and match it up to the list, people that have subscribed on your site to the email list and it sends your stories to that email address automatically. You don’t have to do a thing.

Unfortunately in Constant Contact, you have to log in, you have to copy and paste all your stories and then mail it out manually, which takes time. Here, with this, the way we set it up, it happens automatically. You set a schedule so you can do it every Friday, you can do it once every two weeks, once a month, whatever you want. Set the schedule and you forget about it.

The other thing you want to do is drive your readers back to your site. In another words, they get the email, what they do is they get a teaser and a link back to your website. I’m going to show you here on my Gmail account. Here’s the Dartmouth Now News. I get it, it has titles and thumbnails. I click on the title Back to School. It takes me straight to the story Back to School and I can read more about the story here. I can go off and click and read other stories and if I am potentially going to pay for this, then I might actually subscribe and pay for it, so you want to your site for lots of reasons.

What should I email subscribers? That’s a funny question, but if you have a small magazine what I would recommend is just deliver all your stories. Just set MailChimp or AWeber up so all the stories get sent out, but if you have a large magazine it might be too much to end up in a mailbox and what you could do is you can create a category and for example you could say, I want feature stories to be delivered to a subscriber’s email box and then they can click in and read some of the other stories, that might be a nice approach for a larger publication.

The way this works is very simple, with the software, and we’re looking at a story again, all you have to do is go down to the section called categories, check off features and that’s it. Update the page and you’re done. That story is now categorized as a feature story and MailChimp or AWeber knows that it’s going to mail only feature stories to the list and it works great.

So how do you do this? The answer is with Google Analytics which tracks your visitor activity and with some study will tell you exactly what you need to do next with your magazine in order to make it better.

Watch this video [7:14] to understand the what kind of information is available to you and how to put it to work. You will start the path to building a better magazine… guaranteed.

Here is the audio transcript:

In this video, I’m going to show you how to make decisions about what to do next with your online magazine. And what this boils down to is interpreting what your visitors and readers are actually doing on your website.

Now, the problem today is there’s usually a lack of information. Most publishers are not paying attention to the reader activity on their website. In other words, each visitor, each reader that lands on the site, what are they doing? Where are they going? What are they enjoying?

Now, ask yourself a couple of questions. How do readers find you? Do you know how they get to your website? Or what keywords they’re using, in Google search, let’s say, to get to your website?

What other pages do they go to? And ultimately, where do you want them to go? Do you want them to click on ads, you want them to subscribe? If it’s a paid magazine, you want them to read, of course, comment maybe. There are things that you want them to on your website, and in order to get them to do that, you have to understand what’s working on your site and what’s not working on your site.

And ultimately, you need to make decisions about your publications. So, you need information. And that information comes from visitors who leave footprints on your website.

And your website should track every single visit. So, when a reader comes to your site, you’ll know exactly where they came from, what they clicked on, what they read, and how long they stayed for. And there’s a bunch of other information, but those are the primaries.

And what you’ll find is, some of your stories, some of the pages on your site, just don’t work. And you’ll also find that some of your stories and pages are home runs. You get tons of traffic to those pages. And you need to know which ones they are so you can make decisions about what to give your readership more of and what to give them less of.

So, what I would recommend you do is review every issue, take a look at the data. OK. How do you do this?

Well, this is the magic of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service that you can install on your magazine, and what it does is, it tracks how visitors got to your magazine, it tracks what they were interested in on your site, and it also tracks what they didn’t look at, which is almost more important.

In other words, it’s great to know what people are interested in, but it’s as important to know what they didn’t like, so you can weed away the stuff that they don’t like, and keep and build upon the stuff they do like. And you get that direct feedback from Google Analytics. The data will tell you.

Now, in the next screen, I’m going to show you Google Analytics in action. And I think you’ll be impressed by the level of information that you get and how easy it is to use, really.

Let’s take a look at Google Analytics in action. And here, we’re looking at what we call the dashboard, which gives you a snapshot overview of what’s going on with the magazine. In this case, we have a date range, last 30 days, that’s automatically set. You can adjust that to whatever date range you like.

This is the amount of visitor traffic that has occurred during that range. And if we scroll down, we have the high points. How many visits came in, how many page views which translates into how many pages per visit the average visitor viewed.

The bounce rate, an important statistic. This is, if somebody lands on your magazine, whether it’s the home page or a story, and they go away, that’s called a bounce. So, how many people are bouncing off your magazine? Of course, the lower the number, the better.

How much time does the average person spend on your magazine? And how many new visitors were coming in?

The other thing I want to point out is the pie chart. Traffic sources overview. This is, what three main areas are people getting to your magazine? How are they getting to your magazine?

In this case, we have 60 percent are coming through search engines, mostly Google. 25 percent are coming in from other websites, and 14 percent know about the magazine and are going directly to it.

OK. Let’s take a look at another high point. And that is, what are the most popular pages or stories on your website? It’s under content and it’s called top content.

If we scroll down a little bit, what we’ll see here is the most popular page, this hash mark, is the home page. Gets the most amount of page views.

And what’s important here, when we look at what the most popular pages on a magazine are, is not only the page views, but things like bounce rates. So, for the home page, look at this, the bounce rate’s at 45 percent. That’s very good. That means most people that land on the home page are sticking around.

Archive section, number two most popular page. And then, we get into individual stories here that are popular. And you go down from there.

OK, those are top pages. Let’s shift gears and go to keywords. How did people, readers, find a magazine in Google search? So, we go to traffic sources, here, and then we go down to keywords. And that’ll bring up all the keywords that people are actually typing into Google and other search engines to find your magazine.

So, in this case, we have the name of the magazine, and then we have individual items that are usually in the stories, that are landing on different stories, science versus nature, here’s a John D., 007, alternative archaeology, and you can drop this down and continue to look at all the different keywords that readers will type in to find your stories.

And note, as I’ve said before, typically, these keywords take you not to the home page, but to the story itself.

All right. And last thing I want to look at is landing pages. And landing pages is related to top pages. And it falls under content. We go to top landing pages. These are pages that people land on, readers land on when they’re searching in Google, or Yahoo and they come in to your magazine.

So, in this case, we have one story here, Lake Michigan’s mastodon. This is, you know, in the last 30 days, the most popular story in the magazine. This is the one that’s landed on most often. It’s beating out the home page by a wide margin.

Archives is the second most popular landing page. Then the home page, and then other stories. So, obviously, the more you publish, the more people are going to land on those stories as they look for information that your story is about.

And that’s a quick overview of Google Analytics.

Bottom line, your online magazine is a living document, and you need to regularly update it to make it better, so it attracts more readers and keeps your existing readers happy. So, what it boils down to is assessing the strengths and the weaknesses of your publication, building on your strengths, removing your weaknesses, and that will build a stronger publication for you down the road. And Google Analytics is the way to do this.

In this video [3:58] I will cover the following:

• How your website should be formatted to be scannable
• Voicemail
• What to do with printed matter
• How to use your email signature as free advertising
• And the secret sauce fo driving readers to your website…

What are the biggest benefits of publishing your magazine online today? Well, let’s define what a web based magazine is today. Just look at the bigger publishers, Better Homes and Gardens, Sports Illustrated, even in the newspaper, The Realm, New York Times, boston.com. They are publishing on the web which means that their stories can be found in Google search. Their stories can be commented on and forwarded into social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Now, let’s start answering some questions. How do you reach new subscribers with an online publication? Well, here, Google is your friend. What I am showing you here is an example of a search for a tip. In this case, it’s tips for arranging book shelves. Look at that, the number one result is a Better Homes and Garden story about arranging and organizing book shelves. Now, stop and think about that. The number one result for this search is a story inside a magazine that answers that question for that person who is searching it.

We skip the home page, we go straight to the story and a new reader lends a Better Homes and Garden and has a chance to subscribe to the magazine. Pretty neat, huh? How about social media, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn? Each story that you published should be set up so that it can be liked in Facebook. If I like your story in Facebook and I have a 100 Facebook friends, then a 100 of my Facebook friends might see that I like the story and I give them the link straight back to your story.

There you might find a new reader. On the commenting side, I give my readers the ability to leave comments on each story. Each comment becomes more content for that particular story. OK. What can you publish on your magazine site? Now, we are really talking about content. Well, of course, you can publish stories. You can publish Pdf downloads but I want to focus on comments a little bit more. If you’re a reader of New York Times, for example, you might notice that some of the stories get hundreds of comments, hundreds.

What’s interesting is that I can jump into a story not read it, jump right to the comments and through the comments I can figure out what the story is about and what people’s opinions against the story are. It’s almost more interesting than the story itself. It’s a powerful way to add dynamic content to each story. And guess what, you are not doing any other work. Your readership is.

OK, how about adding audio interviews? Fire up Skype interview somebody of note in your industry and produce an audio file that can be imported into somebody’s iPhone or Android while they are traveling. How about video? If you are not exploring video today, you need to because guess what? YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. That’s right. YouTube is in search traffic within YouTube.com. It’s the second largest that’s after Google.com.

Hey, yes, we are the Boob tube generation or generations. We love video and you should be able to produce public and subscriber only videos on your publication. There’s another benefit to publishing public videos and that’s their findable search. You know how sometimes you go through Google search and also you get a few video results? Well, if you’re publishing video on YouTube, those videos will show up when people are searching for you.

Those are new readers to your magazine who might subscribe. No size limits, that’s right. Stories can be any length. You can have any number of stories and you can publish any schedule. Pretty straight forward, right? Let’s talk about smart devices – iPads, Androids, Kindles. Your magazine should be readable on these devices. Look at this statistics, Nelson recently revealed that at the end of 2011, over 50% of cell phones will be smart phones.

Now, think about that. That means in 2012, 13, 14, we’re going to have… Most cell phone carriers are going to be carrying smart phones. What do people do with these smart phones? They read. They read while they are traveling and they read while they have downtime. Now, when I got my iPhone a few years ago which is the first generation iPhone. I suddenly realized that I had no more downtime. If I were standing in a supermarket, I’ll be looking at my iPhone, checking my email.

I were getting an oil changed, I would be dialed into my iPhone looking at email, reading stories, following people on Twitter and Facebook. All of a sudden, I had no downtime anymore. Now, the key here is that your magazine needs to be readable on all these smart devices natively. In other words, automatically, without having to install an app of some kind, so that, if I’m on my smartphone, I’m on my iPad, even a Kindle, or I’m online, I can just read the story without having to go to an app.

Now, apps have fantastic applications, and I love them to death, but the foundation for your magazine needs to be readable on all smart devices.

Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about workflow. Publishing your stories online is very different from publishing your stories in a paper magazine. You design once. In other words, you create a master design for your site. Then, you get to focus on content, and you get to focus on marketing. That is easy, much easier than having to re-create a layout for every single issue as it comes out on paper.

As far as a content management system goes today, we like WordPress. We promote WordPress, that’s what we use. We find that it is the easiest content management system for clients to use. They love to use it. It allows them to publish stories quickly with video, with audio, photo galleries, anything they like.

Let’s talk a little bit about cost reduction. I’m going to go to a different place. There’s some obvious benefits to publishing online, versus paper. Yes, you’re not laying out every issue, you’re not printing issues, and you’re not paying for the mailing costs of all of these issues. But, what if you want to change development companies? You publish your magazine online. You decide, for whatever reason, that you’re going to do to a different company.

What this brings up the discussion of open source versus proprietary software: in other words, the software that you’re going to use to build your magazine. It’s very important.

Let me give you the examples.

“Open source” means software development by a community, and it’s free. Firefox is a great example of open source software that is given away. It’s great software, lots of people use it, and yes, it’s free. It’s developed by a talented, passionate group of volunteers.

“Proprietary” is like Microsoft or, in the web world, content management systems. There are thousands of them. Companies produce proprietary content management systems to give people specific features. The downside is that the client gets tied into those proprietary systems. When a client decides to move from a proprietary system to a different platform, the cost and time is almost as much as the original bill. I’ve seen this happen, for myself, over and over again.

Now, just for your information, the three most popular open source content management systems–CMS, you might have seen around, standards for Content Management System–are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. We use WordPress, we love it, clients love it, and that’s what we recommended.

Now, making money. How do you make money with an online magazine?

People pay for subscriptions. There’s a pay wall, it’s called. You can take it further and have a membership community, where the subscribers get to interact with themselves, and you get to produce special interactive content for them. You can serve up ads, charge for ads. You can serve up “advertorials”–in other words, stories that are really ads for your advertisers.

The big thing you can do is repackage your existing content in ebooks, CDs, and DVDs. You have a great series of stories? Well, create an ebook and sell it for 19 bucks as a digital download. Or, let’s say you’re interviewing experts in the industry once a month, and after 12 months you have great interviews. Well, put it on a CD and sell it so people can listen to it in their car.

The same goes for video. If you’re publishing video, put it on a DVD and put a price tag on it, and sell it.

Let’s wrap up the major benefits of publishing online. Your stories have reach: major reach into Google, and into social media. Content. You have the ability, online, to publish audio, video, photo galleries, all kinds of content. There are no size limits to the content. Your magazine should be readable on smart devices all by itself, without the need for an app.

Workflow. Use a content management system that’s going to be easy to train other people to use, and even fun, so that you can push the stories out and focus on marketing, and more content.

Finally, yes, you can absolutely make money with a magazine, and you can reduce your long-term risks and expenses by doing it right online.

Just as an example, we had a client come on board that was printing, stopped printing, went to 100 percent online, and in their first month, they actually gained subscribers.

Yes, some complained and went away, but more than enough subscribers joined, in that first month, to cover and increase the subscriber base. It was a big win, and you can do it too.

Watch this video (4:40) to find out how to find and choose a great magazine web address: