Don Nicholas

Founder & Executive Publisher

Don Nicholas serves as Executive Publisher for Food Gardening Network and GreenPrints. He is responsible for all creative, technical, and financial aspects of these multiplatform brands. As senior member of the editorial team, he provides structural guidance, sets standards, and coordinates activities with the technology and business teams. Don is an active gardener whose favorite crops include tomatoes, basil, blueberries, and corn. He and his wife Gail live and work in southern Massachusetts surrounded by forests, family farms, cranberry bogs, and nearby beaches. Don is also the Founder of Mequoda Systems, LLC, which operates and supports numerous online communities including I Like Crochet, I Like Knitting, and We Like Sewing.

Articles by Don Nicholas

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

The State of Publishing on LinkedIn

Publishing on LinkedIn is a practice we believe in: As a social networking service aimed at professionals, what better way to share content with digital magazine executives and digital marketers?

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Magazine Readership Grows Online, Again, Says Latest MPA Report

Digital magazine readership – or audience, for our purposes – keeps climbing. Even as publishers grapple with ad viewability, mobile content strategy, and other challenges, they can take comfort in

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Data-Driven Publishing Steers Time Inc. Digital Course

Big data is a big term, but there's not a lot behind the concept itself, and no need to complicate it – collect the information that consumers provide and use

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Digital Only Magazines That Flopped and Why Tablets Couldn’t Save Them

These digital only magazines have disappeared from existence, but we’ll take this opportunity to learn from their mistakes There's a basketball game between print and digital, and we're rooting for digital.

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

More Newsletter Open Rates: Taking a Look at the Times’ Numbers

Yesterday, we relayed MediaPost's news about the Movable Ink study finding that mobile email marketing has eclipsed desktop open rates, which is great news for multiplatform publishers who have Email

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

The Mequoda Lead Generation Website Business Model

Portals are seen most often because not only are they a profitable model on their own, they’re also intended to build and feed an audience for affiliated premium subscription websites.

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Mobile Email Marketing: Open Rates Eclipse Desktop for First Time

Mastering mobile email marketing might sound like it's low on the list of priorities for digital magazines, but, in reality, it's rapidly emerging as one of the most pressing skills

Why Subscription Website Business Models Are Ideal for Every Publisher

A magazine or newsletter subscription site paired with a portal subscription website leads to publishing success If you've been reading this blog long enough, you're quite familiar with the Mequoda Method

6 Ideas For Where To Put The Facebook Like Button on Your Website

6 Ideas For Where To Put The Facebook Like Button on Your Website

Since the future of your articles in SEO-land is now so dependent on social media, it's more important than ever to enable your readers with easy-to-use like and share buttons.

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Digital Publishing Business News: Economist Value Yields Interesting Lessons

The digital publishing business gets more and more interesting by the week. Time Inc. digital investments and innovations have been relentless; recent personnel changes from Ogden to Bloomberg Businessweek have

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Publishing Events a Point of Emphasis for New Ogden CEO

Bryan Welch's successor, Bill Uhler, aims for more publishing events and ecommerce content strategy; plus, an industry update halfway through the year Publishing events comprise a big piece of the puzzle

Digital Magazine Publishing

Digital Magazine App Publishing Best Practices Are Still Evolving

Our Mequoda Best Practices list continues to evolve. Last year certainly proved that standards – and even what is technologically possible – can change almost overnight. Here’s a look at our

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Are PPC Publishing, Visual Search, and Long-Form Video the Future for Digital Magazines?

PPC publishing takes the pay-per-click model for advertisers to a compensatory one for platform contributors, and it's gaining steam. The shift acknowledges the realities of digital publishing: With so much

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Music Mags Making a Multi-Platform Production Out of their Digital Efforts

Multi-platform production doesn't have to be a mystery. Here are three examples of musically-inclined niche publishers who use digital platforms to expand their reach. Efficiency is key to successful publishing. There

The Mequoda Classroom Website Business Model

The classroom website is one of 10 website business models that Mequoda currently supports. There are six premium (paid) archetypes, including the classroom model, and four affinity (free) archetypes.

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Magazine Audience Grows on Mobile Web

Magazine audience is the most valuable commodity publishers can acquire. All revenue efforts hinge on it. For legacy media, going about this acquisition was a fairly straightforward task, historically speaking.

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Mobile Video Trends: Spending, Vertical, Social

The phrase mobile video trends combines two challenges for publishers into one mega-challenge: conquering cross-device advertising and mastering multimedia with strong production and distribution platforms. More and more, the two

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Niche Magazines: The Future of Publishing Is Now

The power of traditional media companies is diluted these days, as legacy publishers struggle to keep up with the proliferation of content across the World Wide Web. Print is an

Digital Magazine Publishing

7 Digital Magazine Apps and Web Magazines Launched by Brands

Even Sesame Street is pulling together more dynamic digital magazine apps than most legacy publishers The magazine industry used to be a tank of big fish in big pools. Only the

Digital Magazine Publishing

The Reality of Current Tablet Statistics

The upsides and downsides to the tablet statistics floating around Tablets have no doubt shaped the future of reading. From digital magazines to eBooks, publishers have embraced the technology almost as

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Online Circulation Is Up, but So Is Meredith’s Print Performance

We're not digital-and-damn-the-torpedoes here at Mequoda, believe it or not. While digital magazines are our focus, we believe there's room for print in multi-platform publishing; while Mequoda Members approach us

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

7 Content Marketing Resources for Mastering Advertorials

Content marketing is more than advertorials, but they're certainly a big part. When you think of content marketing, you probably think of blogging. Blogging is certainly a big part of content

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Digital Magazine Design Features: Progress Bars, ‘Read More’ Buttons, Ad Blocking

Digital magazine design is evolving nearly as fast as digital magazines themselves, because digital magazine design plays a huge part in defining digital magazines. Publishers continually implement new features to

Webify Your Subscription Website While Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome

Designing a good website isn't easy. Many interconnecting elements have to be correctly executed to achieve profitability. Even when your website is created, how can you know if it wouldn't benefit

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Email Campaign Strategy: Google’s Latest Tool + Content Best Practices

Email campaign strategy has emerged as a crucial component of multi-platform publishing, even as wrong-headed observers have pronounced it DOA in recent years. The Mequoda Method highly values online newsletters

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Video Publishing Sites Gaining Steam With Latest Moves

How do you define video publishing sites? Must digital magazines host their own video? Can they distribute via social media? Are platforms like YouTube and Vimeo fair game? We say

Digital Magazine Publishing

7 Great B2B Magazines Gone Digital

As MediaShift puts it, "what advertisers want from B2B media is solid leads on potential customers for their products and services." Not so long ago, web and digital magazines were considered

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Worldwide Publishing Offers Attractive Opportunities for Digital Magazines

Worldwide publishing represents a daunting proposition for digital magazines: Audience development and digital advertising is tough enough domestically, and it's called the World Wide Web for a reason, so why

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

How the Multi-Platform Mobile Development Challenge Was Accepted By These Savvy Publishers

App-less in Seattle: the next frontier of multi-platform mobile development doesn't involve apps Appearing erudite and august themselves, the August 3 cover of Time magazine features Presidents George W. Bush and

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Podcast Publishing: Another Strong Link in the Multiplatform Strategy Chain?

With the explosive success of Serial and Slate's Panoply, podcast publishing has emerged as a viable – and, more to the point, profitable – option for digital magazines. Audio content

Get More Subscribers: Top 8 Reasons Why Visitors Resist Subscribing to Your Website

Do new visitors to your site subscribe, or do they take one quick look, then click back to where they came from? Here are the top 10 reasons your visitors

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Mobile Advertising Trends: Instagram, Marketers, Programmatic

Monitoring mobile advertising trends is a must for publishers aiming to monetize a platform that promises riches but has thus far eluded a precise formula for success. Digital magazines face

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Monetizing Social Media: Bloomberg’s Strategy

Monetizing social media by converting side-door traffic into subscribers is one of the most important challenges publishers currently face. Convincing curious visitors to sign on as customers via quality content

Digital Magazine Publishing

Is Digital Advertising a Bust? 6 Ways to Fight Conventional Wisdom

Over the past few years, publishers have been wringing their hands over the failure of digital advertising to come to their rescue as print advertising revenues continued to evaporate. You

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Metered Content: Another Digital Magazine Goes for It

More and more, metered content is becoming de rigueur for digital magazines looking to generate higher revenues with higher quality product. As big believers in smart subscription strategies, we love

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

How Multi-Platform Media is Created from Dusty Archives

Recycling is associated with cutting costs, but is cutting costs a surefire sign of downward sales? Not when it comes to publishing and the smart publishers who have succeeded their

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

News, Food, Health, and Celebrity Are Reader Favorites for Digital Magazines

If we had to pick two words to describe the Mequoda Method, the first would be "multi-platform," which, as Don wrote recently, is the new normal for digital magazines years

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

2 Out of 3 Readers of Digital Magazines Prefer 20 Articles or Fewer Per Issue

We've covered a lot of ground during the past couple of weeks as we roll out stats from our 2015 Digital Magazine Market Study. But have we covered too much

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Immediate Delivery Tops List of Coveted Attributes of Digital Magazines

That's the question we asked 3,642 U.S adults with Internet access earlier this year, looking to learn more about consumption of digital magazines – and, more to the point, the

Digital Magazine Publishing

What Bad Reviews Reveal About the “Best” Digital Magazines

Have you ever spent time poking around on your iPad, just to see how customers feel about the digital magazines they buy and subscribe to? We make this a habit

Digital Magazine Publishing

Tips for Launching the Best Digital Magazines

Given that we’ve already revised our thinking since I started regularly reviewing digital magazines back in March, I concede that anything we name as a Best Practice in digital magazines

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Readers of Digital Magazines Split on Most Important Format

Tablet, print, or web? The data shows that magazine consumers are split on their magazine format preference. The web edition showed a tiny edge over print and tablet editions, but

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Readers of Digital Magazines Demand Readable, Scrollable Text

Readable text, scrollable text, links to websites, embedded video, back issue archive, vertical swipe, copy and paste capability, content bookmarking, relevant advertising, general advertising, and companion print magazine. Which functions

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Americans Will Spend More than $1.3 Billion on Digital Magazines in 2015

Throughout the week, we've released stats from our 2015 Digital Magazine Market Study. One stat covered print readership, and the other covered readership of digital magazines. But they center on

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

1/3 of US Adults Read Digital Magazines

The primary stat we set out to understand in this study was what percent of U.S. adults with Internet access reported reading a digital magazine issue in the last 30

Digital Magazine Publishing

Results from Mequoda’s Latest Digital Magazine Market Study

Five years after Apple introduced the iPad and the magazine industry latched on for dear life, digital magazine consumption has reached 43% of print magazine consumption and is climbing rapidly.

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

More Than 2/3 of U.S. Adults Actively Read Print Magazines

Before quantifying the readership of digital magazines, we wanted to first understand what percent of the American adult population with Internet access reads print magazines. We also wanted to learn

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Remonsy’s Mequoda System and Dream Team

One of Mequoda’s websites is the Remonsy ETF Network, whose name is a portmanteau for Retirement Money System. Remonsy’s founder and investment guru Tom Vaughan started his first money management

Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Publishing Technologies: Best Practices From Top Digital Magazines

Are you making the best use of publishing technologies? Do you ever wonder how other digital magazines are doing it? Digiday recently took a look at how six big publishers

8 Subscription Website Homepage Ideas for Audience Engagement

These subscription website homepage ideas will help you provide a better user experience through website design Mequoda has long quantified its own best subscription website homepage ideas, which we put into

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