May 10, 2001
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(((((((((( From MarketingSherpa.com
ContentBiz May 10, 2001 Vol II, Issue 18
(((((((((( Free subscriptions at
http://www.contentbiz.com
PRACTICAL NEWS:
- My First Online Subscription Purchase (What Was Yours?)
- Less Than 10 Tickets Left for Online Subscription Seminar
- Email Newsletter Pioneer Tests Offline Syndication
- Professional Book Reviewers Race to Sign Up at ForeWordReviews
- F---Company.com Reveals Subscription Sales Figures
CASE STUDY:
- Legal Content Distributor Mondaq Changes Its Business Model and
Blows Away Budgeted Revenue Expectations
READER LETTERS:
- Fred Langa Details the Solution to Newsletter Publishers'
Intellectual Property & Email Forwarding Woes
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((((((
PRACTICAL NEWS
((((((
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: My First Online Subscription Purchase (What Was
Yours?)
Like many people in the industry, I'm a voracious content buyer.
(I think I was one of Amazon's first 500 customers!) But, I'd
never, ever bought a subscription to online content, such as an
email newsletter or Web site, until last Saturday.
It's not that I'm against paying, it's just that most stuff I
would buy is already free (for now anyway.) Then one of my
favorite email newsletters requested a $10 "donation" for a six-
month subscription. My gut reaction was to feel grateful for the
chance to show my appreciation in a tangible way for their fine
product. I also felt as though the publisher cheapened himself a
little by not asking for more money. I would have paid $25
easily.
Now it's your turn -- tell me what online subscriptions you
already pay for, and if you think they are under (or over)
priced. We'll run "best of" letters next week. Email at
editor@contentbiz.com today!
P.S. The publication I popped for was LiesDamnedLies.com, a
personal support newsletter for former dot-com workers.
* Less Than 10 Tickets Left for Online Subscription Seminar
As of today we were down to eight tickets left for the ContentBiz
"Seminar on Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content", May 18th.
So, time would be of the essence. If you can't make it, yes you
can buy audiotapes. For either tickets or tapes go to:
http://www.marketingsherpa1.com/seminar
* Email Newsletter Pioneer Tests Offline Syndication
For the past year, Dr Ralph Wilson of Wilson Internet Services
has been syndicating his Dr eBiz column to Web sites in exchange
for them allowing him to collect new subscriber names via a form
imbedded in his articles. (See link below for more info.) Now,
Wilson's testing a guerrilla marketing to get paid syndication
spots in print newspapers.
He automatically adds the following to every outbound email he
sends to dozens of fans that contact him daily:
"P.S. Would your city newspaper's Business Section benefit from
carrying my weekly DOCTOR EBIZ column? If you'll write a two-
sentence recommendation, I'll be able to approach your editor.
http://www.doctorebiz.com/newspaper/yourhelp.htm Thank you for
considering it."
Wilson says about 10% of recipients either use his online form or
simply email him back with their local newspaper's info. Fancy
printed press kits at $2+ each proved not to be worth the
investment; so, now Wilson sends interested editors to his online
press kit at: http://www.doctorebiz.com/newspaper/
Although he's had "considerable interest" he hasn't finalized any
sales yet. Wilson notes, "Money for syndicated columns is
unbelievably poor. But if I can get enough it brings in some
money, and creates a lot of synergy with a book and website and
[paid] speaking."
Link to our 11/00 interview detailing Wilson's business models
and marketing tactics:
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1157
* Professional Book Reviewers Race to Sign Up at ForeWordReviews
Within just 48 hours of announcing that they were willing to pay
$50 each for professionally written book reviews, ForeWordReviews
has been contacted by 60 applicants, including "about half of the
members of the National Book Critics Circle board," says
Publisher Victoria Sutherland.
The program, an offshoot from three-year-old print pub, ForeWord
Magazine, formally launches June 1st. Publishers and authors
will be able to submit books (or eBooks) to receive professional
reviews for $295 a pop. Several prominent services that
librarians and trade buyers use as a purchasing tool have agreed
to carry the reviews, including Ingram's iPage, Bowker's and
Baker & Taylor's Title Source II.
Sutherland says, "Some people are dismissing this as
journalistically unethical, but I think book industry
professionals are living in an ivory tower that's being eroded.
70,000 books are published each year and our print magazine only
has room for 50 reviews. Many other books and eBooks are very
good and they need to be recognized." And in these ad-dollar
strapped times, this may be the only business model that could
make it possible.
ContentBiz will run a follow-up story on ForeWordReviews this
Fall when their clients have some real results to talk about.
http://www.forewordreviews.com
* F---Company.com Reveals Subscription Sales Figures
Publisher Philip Kaplan, who began offering an upgraded version
of his free F---Company.com site to paying subscribers at $25 and
$75 price points this March, told NYPost.com this week that he
has, "860 subscribers, paying an average of $63 a month."
Combined with branded t-shirt and coffee mug sale commissions of
about $10k a month, he's making a total of about $60k a month.
Not bad for a content site with virtually no expenses.
However, for those of you keeping score on publishers' reported
conversion rates from free-to-fee, Kaplan's are on the low end.
He claims about 55k free newsletter subscribers and 3.3 million
free site visits a month. Perhaps, as [Inside.com] has
discovered, if too much of your content is free, people are less
likely to pay for the rest. Figuring out where to draw that free
vs. paid line can be difficult ....
http://www.nypost.com/technology/29972.htm
(((((
CASE STUDY: Legal Content Distributor Mondaq Changes Its Business
Model and Blows Away Budgeted Revenue Expectations
(((((
Bored of hearing about subscription Web sites? In our continued
quest to bring you details of profitable, online content business
models, we contacted the folks at Mondaq. You could call them an
electronic vanity press for lawyers. Ka-ching!
CHALLENGE
Mondaq, a content distribution company headquartered
in London, has been selling lawyers in the US and around the
world on the idea of having their articles distributed as a
promotional tool since 1994. (In fact Mondaq also works with
other types of professionals but we're gonna focus on the lawyers
for this Study.)
The theory is that a lawyer will write a substantive article
that's so wonderful that potential clients will read it and want
to hire him or her.
Mondaq's biz model was to be the conduit between these lawyers
and their intended audience. A hybrid of a vanity press and a
marketing tool. As Executive Director Megan Hill told us,
"Traditionally a law firm would pay us not insignificant amounts
of money and then we would distribute their articles to all the
major proprietary databases -- Lexis/Nexis, Dow Jones
Interactive, Dialog, Bloomberg, Westlaw, etc."
By 2000 the Company had more than 500 paying legal clients. But
Mondaq felt the Internet held the promise of much larger
revenues. So they decided to turn their whole pay-to-publish
business model on its head.
CAMPAIGN
First Mondaq expanded its distribution channels by
offering free content feeds to related Web sites and high profile
sites corporate executives might surf such as sites owned by The
Economist. So far more than 50 sites have agreed to take
Mondaq's feed and they're shooting for 200 by the end of the
year. (The deal they're proudest of is one with legal directory
publisher Martindale Hubble.)
Next Mondaq set up two sets of internal systems -- a measurement
system to create reports for lawyers on how their articles are
being viewed, plus a "tidy little CRM system" to deal with the
projected volume of new customers.
Then they carefully broke the news to their current clients first
-- as of January first 2001 lawyers could publish and distribute
through the Mondaq system for free. The only charges they would
incur would be if they wanted to add their email address to the
article, or a hotlink to their Web site, or a personal
photograph, or a link to their bio, or receive handy measurement
reports to learn how many potential clients viewed the article,
etc. Each feature was offered on an a la carte basis.
After January first, Mondaq's marketing team began reaching out
to new clients by sending useful comments to email discussion
groups that legal marketers participate in; exhibiting at related
trade shows; and through sales reps (aka Account Managers.)
RESULTS
Hill says, "Market reaction has been overwhelmingly
positive with the only real problem having been that many people
assume that there must be a catch to our free to contribute offer
as it seems too good to be true."
Mondaq's Co-Founder and Managing Director Andrew Partridge backed
this up by emailing us the following figures:
- 100% of Mondaq's previous clients converted to the new system
- After 12 weeks of marketing, Mondaq has 2,900 additional new
clients. The budgeted figure for the entire year was 3,300 which
means they'll pretty much blow it out of the water.
- Mondaq projected that 10% of free article contributors would
convert to paying for additional items (such as a hotlink to
their Web site), so far only 6% of them have done so. But....
- The average paying author is spending $750 to buy enhancements
-- versus the $450 Mondaq's budget had projected. (This is where
the ka-ching comes in.)
In fact Partridge told us that it looks like budgeted goals may
be "exceeded three-fold."
Wow.
http://www.mondaq.com
NOTE: Here's a link to a Case Study that our sister site
B2BMarketingBiz just did on one of Mondaq's happy clients --
* How Big Law Firm, Mayer, Brown & Platt, Markets Itself Through
Web Sites Focused on Potential Client Needs
http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1655
NEXT WEEK: We're bringing you a Case Study on the clever tactics
Lee Enterprises uses to train print ad sales reps at dozens of
small-city newspapers to sell online ads. So, if you're not
already a subscriber, go to:
http://www.contentbiz.com today -- it's still free!
(((((
READER LETTERS: Intellectual Property & Electronic Content III
(((((
Several ContentBiz readers have written praising the tactics the
LangaList email newsletter uses to get readers to forward
individual articles without breaking copyright or losing
attribution. We were impressed with the system, but wondered if
it only worked for HTML newsletters.
Thanks to ContentBiz reader Kevan Judah of Adventure Publishing,
we learned that Langa's text-version includes easy-article-
forwarding as well. So we contacted Publisher Fred Langa to get
the details on how this works.
Langa was happy to reveal his forwarding secrets in the letter
below:
"It's actually easier than it looks, although (as with many geek-
ish things) it may seem complicated at first.
Conceptually, it's simple: a web page Form gathers data, adds it
to whatever boilerplate you've built in, and send it to a server-
side mail handler that creates and sends the form contents as an
email.
In practice, you need to work it backwards. Start with your web
server, and see what it's running. Depending on the answer,
you'll need to use an appropriate server-side mail handler.
Most Unix/Linux servers (and many NT servers) can run "CGI"
scripts--- based on the "common gateway interface." The Langa.Com
servers, for example, run the Apache web server on Linux boxes:
CGI support is built in. In fact. my web host has already
installed "CGImail," a free an hugely popular mail handler.
(http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/) CGImail can take the output
from a script on your web pages and mail the results wherever you
specify.
NT/Win2K servers may be able to use CGImail, but a conceptually
similar tool called ASPmail is more commonly used there.
(http://www.serverobjects.com/products.htm)
Once you've picked a mailing package, go through the docs and see
what it wants in terms of input, and adjust your forms
accordingly.
In my case, I provide a boilerplate text file that contains most
of the explanatory info about the issue that a reader is sending
to a friend, but there are three main variables: the reader's
email, the friend's email, and the portion of the issue being
recommended.
To provide readers with a running start, I provide a mini table-
of-contents as the "what's recommended," but that can adjust that
(by editing the form's text filed) as desired.
When the reader has filled in their address and the friend's
address, the form then bundles the form content and sends it to
CGImail.
CGImail then creates a new message, on my server: the FROM is
created from the form variable containing the reader's own
address, the TO is from the form variable containing the friend's
address, and the body is a combination of the boilerplate I
provide and the "what's being recommended" variable.
Again, this sounds opaque, but if you follow the steps above, and
read the docs (both mailing apps are well-documented), you'll do
fine.
Many commercial Web hosts also pre-install one of the above mail
tools, and usually offer online help, too. Experiment with a
private page at first until you're sure it's working ok, and then
go public!
I use this kind of form in three places:
1) the "send this item to a friend" in every newsletters
(example: http://www.langa.com/sendit.htm )
2) a general "recommend and win" page
( http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm )
3) and a gift-subscription form
(http://www.langa.com/plus_gift.htm ) This latter one has a
fully-editable body text--- the entire text of the note is
a form variable."
Fred Langa, Publisher
LangaLetter
http://www.langa.com/newsletter.htm
NOTE: This is Part III in ContentBiz's ongoing discussion of how
to stop readers from cutting and forwarding electronic content
without attribution. Here are links to the first two parts:
Part I - Our Publisher's Open Letter
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1632
Part II - Industry Pros Respond with Input & Advice
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1641
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
CONTENTBIZ INFO
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
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Publisher:
Anne Holland
anneh@marketingsherpa.com
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