It’s Summer Solstice; 10 Reminders To Fill Your Extra Hours of Daylight
Here are 10 key informational items to serve as reminders as we all move forward into the days of summer.
1. Segment your bounce rates. “I love investigating why bounce rates are so high for Websites because usually what you find is that it’s not the overall bounce rate. It’s a specific segment of people,” says Matt Bailey, president and founder of SiteLogic. “They’re searching for a specific word or phrase—so when they don’t see it they leave. Google Analytics makes it so easy now to segment based on just about anything you can imagine—and then you can find these little problems in your Website.”
2. Lucretia Lyons, president, Business Valuation Resources, says that lowering the price of BVR’s Webinars “changed strategic positioning for us. We were kidding ourselves before that we could sell it at the higher price.” Once more people started signing up, good things happened.
3. “Always develop the strategy first. It’s tempting sometimes to jump into a new project or idea, but it’s important to outline your goals, strategy and measurements of success first,” says Stephanie Ivy, president and publisher, EB Practice, Norcross, Ga.
4. It is important to note that a blogger who regularly receives free samples and then writes reviews could be characterized as an “endorser.” The FTC has taken the position that both the advertiser and the reviewer/endorser have an obligation to disclose any compensation—or else the endorsement might be deceptive. “As a result,” says Chad Bowman, an attorney at SIPA counsel Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz in Washington, D.C., “the safest practice for a blogger or online publisher is, when writing about a commercial product or service, to disclose any compensation.”
5. “Work with professional associations [on events],” says David Foster. “Sometimes it’s hard to get them to cooperate, but I give them something very generous and then suggest a reciprocal relationship; they tend to go for bright shiny objects. With the New York State Society of CPAs, I offered them any of our events; these run from $600 to $1300. They get to market it to their members and pay us $275 [per registration]. That can account for 30% of our attendance at some events. It may be enough just to cover chicken at lunch, but it puts more people in seats, you don’t have to cancel, and you get past the point where you have to put bowties on your relatives and sit them in the front row. For the associations, there’s no risk, no hotel contracts, just pure clean profit and they get a number of events to market.”
6. Foster also recommends paying commission on product-launch sales when possible, reducing the monetary risk. He waxed rhapsodically back to a book model he used at IOMA. The partner company “would pay an advance to our author to write the book, we would release it as a $350 guide, and they would release it a year later as a $99 book—same content. Both of us did extraordinarily well.” He also mentioned a BVR book that an industry colleague approached him about. “She said that if we change one chapter, then she can sell it.” Done.
7. Robert Lerose reported this from the DMA’s recent Circulation Day in New York: The speakers on social media reported that customers prefer being talked with, not to. Customers expect feedback from the brands they communicate with, not necessarily free stuff.
8. From Bruce Levenson, a founding partner of United Communications Group, about the value of good people: “Some of our best asset acquisitions have been the managers [who have come along with the businesses UCG has acquired]. They’ve then built those businesses up from inside UCG. So the best things are not the subscriber lists we gained but the management people.”
9. “Make connections between unconnected things.” Opening Keynote Joseph Kayne at SIPA 2010.
10. Eleanor Clift just gave a keynote where she said, “I used to be a journalist, now I say I’m a multi-platform content provider.” Touche.
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Come to Chicago and Continue the Learning!
Join the savviest movers and shakers in the specialized
information publishing business and attend the
SIPA Fall Publishers Roundtable in Chicago, Sept. 22-24, 2010.
If you are a publisher or key executive in a for-profit
publishing company, you must attend.
Join a small group of senior executives for a day-and-a-half,
peer-to-peer roundtable discussion on the most pressing issues
vital to running a specialized-information publishing business
in today’s environment.
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