A superb editorial management strategy is the key to a successful, organized online marketing and audience development system
We have a giant collection of best practices for online editors in our Editorial Management Guidelines for Online Publishers white paper, but while we were reviewing it this week, we thought it might be nice to bust out a few on the blog that we thought were particularly important.
1. Require double opt-in on your email newsletters.
Of 100 people who sign up for your free email newsletter, about 75 percent will double opt-in. Research indicates that the email subscribers who double opt-in have a 17 percent greater lifetime value simply because they double opt-in. The act of getting them to open their email client to look for the confirming email and respond — before they can download your free report — causes those who double opt-in to be worth 17 percent more in customer lifetime value.
Additionally, by using the double opt-in process, you’ve managed to get many of them to whitelist you with their email provider — another good outcome.
2. Align your editorial content with your promotional messages.
Congruity and alignment augur well for product sales. If your email newsletter or blog article topic today is about how to prune rose bushes, then your ideal text ad today would be for a book or other paid product about growing roses.
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3. It’s OK to outsource content to provide variety and another point of view.
As a Mequoda System Editor, you have specific day-to-day responsibilities for the creation and deployment of this content. Ideally, five or six days a week, you will send out at least one email newsletter, published in different formats. You’ll also make as many as 780 blog posts annually, and create a minimum of 26 free special reports.
That’s a lot of content creation and dissemination. But you don’t need to write everything yourself. The creation of some content can be outsourced to other copywriters. In some cases, free reports can be excerpted from existing books, and assembled/edited by freelancers. Additionally, many online promotions can be written by product managers, often by reusing content borrowed from online sales letters.
4. Create content ahead of time and work with a schedule.
Writing daily content is busy and stressful. The only way to make it more work and more stressful is to wait until the last minute to write. This type of organization degrades the quality of the content you’re writing as well as the consistency of how your blog is updating.
Smart and organized editors try to work seven days or more in advance to allow time for planning, emergencies, approvals, vacations and other things.
5. Make friend with bloggers and create new content at the same time.
You can conduct an outreach program, by recommending and linking to other publisher’s blog posts. These can be brief, 150-250 word posts. If you want Google to pick these posts, make sure they’re at least 300 words.
Here you are looking for reciprocity from other sites, recommending and linking in the hope that other sites will link back. You might encourage this by writing to your professional colleagues to inform them of your blog post and link, or informing them of a post that their readers might find interesting.
If you make five recommendations per week, you will generate another 260 blogs posts annually, for a new total of 780 annual posts — a reasonable objective for a Mequoda System Editor. With this strategy, you can achieve the “magic number” of 1,000 blog posts in a less than 16 months.
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