Digital publishing tips, strategy #1: Start with a subscription website. Depending on your goals, you can create one of many archetypes, but at the very least, you’ll need a portal with SEO content to drive traffic, and a store to sell products to your visitors.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #2: Make sure your website is built to optimize conversion of visitors to email subscribers with 3C conversion architecture. This means having a free report for every category of your content, and harvesting email addresses in return for those reports. Your email list consists of your most engaged, loyal fans, and they’re far more likely to buy your subscriptions and other products than random visitors.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #3: Send emails regularly to your subscribers, including both high quality editorial and promotional content. Interweave is a master at this, right down to the time of day that they mail and the careful mixing of promotional content with aligned editorial content.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #4: Don’t forget your metadata. It’s not just your content that’s driving traffic: Google pays attention to your title tags and often your meta descriptions, too. Make sure your title is descriptive and optimized with keywords, but is not so long it will be truncated, preferably 20-66 characters. And descriptions that don’t appeal to searchers will leave them clicking on someone else’s content, no matter how well optimized or how high you rank.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #5: Use digital magazine content to build retail visibility. Whether you decide to charge for premium content, or want to build more brand recognition with free content, making sure there’s plenty of SEO’d digital magazine content in online retail stores will help increase visibility.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #6: Transform your best-selling print products into digital products. Print publishers know what sells with their target audience. Turning these print products into digital products can help you increase revenue and find a new form of consumer that prefers digital.
Bonus digital publishing tip: Turn your back issues into an online magazine library as a completely new product, or as an add-on to your digital subscriptions. The Biblical Archaeology Society has had tremendous success doing just that.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #7: Sell more advertising with less work. Selling transactions, clicks, impressions and listings is old school. What you want is SEA: Scarcity, Exclusivity and Alignment. Boost your scarcity and exclusivity, and save constant effort, by selling sponsorship packages of content categories to one advertiser.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #8: Consumers love digital magazines! But they won’t know yours exists if you don’t promote it. The digital newsstands, where most people go to find digital magazines, is hopelessly botched when it comes to search. So find other places to tell your potential readers about your app: On your website, in your print mailings to customers, in your emails and on social media.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #9: Today’s consumers want you to use the technology available to you. And right now video is hot, hot, hot. It should be available in your digital magazine content and on your subscription website. Ideas for acquiring video: Get bloggers in your content niche to provide them in return for exposure, or get a camera with great audio capabilities, sit down your editor, ask him or her a pertinent question about your niche, and let the editor respond naturally. It doesn’t have to be fancy.
Digital publishing tips, strategy #10: One word: Multiplatform. Above all else, today’s digital publishers must be willing to deliver content on every platform available to them. That means print, websites, emails, magazines – both print and digital – videos, books and events. Remember to re-use, recycle and repurpose the content you already have or are creating, and you’ll become one very happy and profitable digital publisher.
Do you have any other digital publishing tips you’d like to share? That’s what the comments are for!
This post was originally published in 2013 and is frequently updated.