Here’s a new bit from the world of search that it’s rather urgent that you know: Google is taking personalized search to a new level.

First, what is personalized search? It’s where the search engine tracks your user preferences and takes them into account when presenting search results. For example, if you are doing a recipe search (to use Google’s own example), have done such a search in the past, and usually navigate to epicurious.com, Google is more likely to rank epicurious.com higher on your results page than other recipe pages.

Now Google has done this for some time—on an opt-in basis for users signed in to their Google accounts. Their recent announcement extends this to every Google user, whether they have signed up, opted in, or even know it’s happening. Your search history will in part determine your search results.

That might be a boon to established sites with a good search history. It sure isn’t good news for new publishers trying to break in, or for ones who are just getting around to working on their search optimization.

It’s kind of like that corner newsstand that will display the cooking titles that have proved themselves but keep tucked away in the back the ones that haven’t yet done so, isn’t it?

So what does that mean to us as online publishers? It means we have to work even harder to get and to keep our loyal audience. We need them coming to us from all sources, not just Google; and we can’t rely only on our SEO efforts to reward us with high rankings. We have to make sure that our audience will visit our site by using our social media, our email lists; we need to snag every possible visitor to our site and capture their name and get it into our database; we need to keep those visitors happy while they are there so they will return so our page will continue to show up in search results.

We also need to make sure that our descriptions are enticing so when our site does appear on page one of the search results we get the clicks we need.

In other words, we need to implement best practices—the same best practices that have put us in business and kept us in business in the first place.

Before you get lost deep in the wilderness of social media with no breadcrumb trail to lead you out, simplify your Twittering using a very easy tool.

Of all the handy Twitter tools, the best in my opinion Is Social Oomph (www.socialoomph.com; formerly TweetLater). With Social Oomph you can automate your twittering to the degree to which you are comfortable.

It will track all tweets by any keyword you select and deliver a digest of the tweets made using that keyword to your inbox as often as you like. You can set it up to automatically follow the people who made the tweets, or you can check out the people yourself and choose whether or not to follow them. (I prefer to do it manually. While it is a slow way of building your twitter list, it keeps you from adding people who will spam your list. You can tell pretty quickly who the spammers are just by checking out their pages).

You can also use Social Oomph to automatically un-follow people you start to follow that don’t follow you back. Twitter is based on reciprocity, and people do notice whether or not your account is in ratio or out. If you too many people are following you, relative to the number you follow back, that tells people you won’t follow back, which will hold them back from following you. If you follow too many more people than follow you, that seems to imply that your tweets aren’t really a happening thing. An account in good ratio is reassuring to potential Twitter pals.

Auto unfollow, by the way, carries with it the risk of losing your entire list, if the Twitter API goes buggy; but Social Oomph protects against that by only unfollowing ten people at a time.

Social Oomph allows you to line up a batch of tweets and release them into the twittersphere one at a time—handy if you only want to think about it once a week but want to tweet daily, for example.

My other favorite tool is bit.ly, and I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Linda Ruth can be found on Twitter @Linda_Ruth, and she will follow you back.

Most of us are twittering by now. Fewer of us really know why.

Lots of publishers are asking: why am I doing this? What do I get from it? Is it really worth it?

To twitter effectively, it helps to have a plan.

First, who to follow? Simple: follow those you want to see following you. That means, you target your list and go after them name by name. Follow people who are interested in what you have to say. To find these people, do a twitter search by keyword; search keywords in member bios; go to members that focus on your topic and follow their list of followers.

If you have a crafting publication, search crafts and see who is tweeting about what. If you have a trade publication, search bios to find people in your targeted business. If you have a food publication, go to Whole Foods and follow their followers.

About a third of those people will follow you back. After a few days, drop the ones who don’t. You don’t want your followers to be out of ratio with those following you—that’s the kind of thing that people notice, and it can make a bad impression.

What kind of tweets should you do? That’s easy—think about your audience. You now have a very targeted list you can communicate with weekly, daily, hourly—what do they want to hear?

Despite what many seem to think, they don’t want to hear what your cat ate for breakfast. They don’t want every tweet to be a self-promotion (and they can tell if it is). And they don’t want an RSS feed of links with no copy. Come on. 140 characters is short, but it’s not THAT short.

Give them a reason to click through. That reason is going to be some useful, valuable links with a little copy showing WHY they should click through. What’s in it for them.

What do you get out of this? An increasingly loyal following of people who realize that when you tweet, you offer and deliver value. What publisher doesn’t want that?

The annual conference of magazine publishers, distributors, and wholesalers convened last week in Phoenix, Arizona. Attendance appeared to be at an all-time low, but meetings continued as usual, new titles were presented, business was transacted.

Spotted: Samir Husni, AKA “Mr Magazine” giving his message of hope to publishers eager to receive it.

With the sobering news from Conde Nast kicking off the week of meetings, a pall settled over the proceedings. Have we gathered together to preside over our industry’s demise? Samir insists that those rumors are exaggerated and that for those publishers willing to take their own franchise seriously, serious results are still to be had.

Spotted: Irwin Billman, first male member of Women in Periodical Publishing and supporter of many other worthy causes providing, as always, a sane and humorous perspective.

We’ve had our Anderson bankruptcy, and Thailand had an uprising of activists sympathetic to an ousted prime minister (they closed the airport for 10 days); Spain had their own bankruptcy with the remaining distributor picking up the pieces; and lots of countries had business as usual. I am fascinated to note that the end result appears to be about the same. The fall off in sale ranges from a low of about 8% to a high of about 25% but overall it seems to average about 15%–the same as ours. Really maybe this global village thing has some truth to it.

Spotted: Al Cook, marketing maven extraordinaire, managing our business down under.

Why, Al wonders, has Distripress brought members from all over the world to Phoenix? Let’s not get him wrong, it’s nice to be able to cross the street without having to look out for traffic. At least Al and his lovely wife Mandy are taking a few days to sightsee—but many members are not doing even that. It’s that pesky recession again…

Spotted: the Richards, newsstand reps for an important American publishing company, musing aloud about the impact of working small changes sequentially day after day, market after market, country after country throughout the entire world.

Nowhere more than at Distripress does it become apparent that this is still in many ways a grassroots business, despite the computer systems and retailer clusters and category assortments.

Spotted: Lal Uttam, with Durga Edson of Amcorp, distributors to the less-voguish (than 10 years ago) but still-important, even crucial, Pacific Rim. Lal tells me he never misses one of my posts, but points out that my perspective is very publisher-oriented, not always taking into account the challenges distributors face domestically and abroad.

Another observation that seems to be almost universal is the September uptick. Sales appear to be rallying—the abysmal performance of the first three quarters begins to see some relief. As is the case with some other market indicators, it’s early to tell—is it a mere blip on the radar or a beacon of hope?

Negotiating Distributor Contracts

 

 Negotiating Distributor Contracts: Play Now | Play in Popup

I set up my newsstand consulting website back in the 1990s, when I didn’t expect to use it much but felt I needed to have it there, serving as an online business card or a directory listing.

It quickly gained search rankings, appearing on the first page of Google, Ask Jeeves, and some other search engines we hardly remember anymore (remember Infoseek)?

The sub-logo or tagline of the site was pretty cheesy:  “If you are looking for expert newsstand consultants, look no farther!  PSCS is your answer!”

After many years of living with that line, I finally decided to update the line.  I reasoned that the visitors to my site didn’t want to hear me boasting about how my company was the best.  They would want to hear what my company could do for them; how it would make their newsstand work easier and more effective.  So I changed the line to:  Newsstand Made Manageable.

And dropped off the search listings.

While better in every way from a marketing point of view, Newsstand Made Manageable lacked one important thing:  my keyword phrase, newsstand consultants.

While in an ideal world your search terms and keyword phrases will be an exact match for your content, it doesn’t always work that way.  Finding the right mix might be a task that takes some thought and some trial and error.

In my case, I put the phrase “newsstand consultants” back on the home page, just under the logo and tag.

Luckily, it turned out to be an easy fix.  Search “newsstand consultants”–you’ll find me there. Number one on Google.

Right where I belong.

Using such simple (and free!) tools as Wordtracker, Tag Cloud, Google Trends, and Technorati, publishers can identify the words and phrases that their audience responds to and use those words and phrases, not only in their SEO work, but also in direct mail pieces, email solicitations, and on the cover of their magazines.
 
While the physical appeal of focus groups, mall interviews, and newsstand tests are in no immediate danger of becoming passé, you now have low-cost access to what can be seen as an online focus group—people with interest in your category doing searches for the topics that are of specific interest to them.  These search terms and keyword phrases represent more than what your audience searches for online.  They represent the questions they  are asking, the problems they are trying to solve, the issues of most pressing importance—and the specific way in which the issue is articulated in their minds. 
 
This is a great tool to supplement your research efforts; and to some extent it can also be used to direct and validate them.  The information you get is constantly updated, fast, and cheap.  What’s not to like?

A recent study showed that while over the past couple of years the number of business magazines offering digital editions increased 300%, and the number of consumer magazines offering digital editions increased 200%, the penetration of print subscribers opting for the digital edition dropped to only 1.4% in consumer publications.

This might be sobering news to consumer magazine publishers hoping to save costs in paper, printing, and postage by switching to online.  Publishers that I know or have been following have abandoned their digital editions, and one of them even commented that the digital magazine thing had run its course.

The point of online however, is not a digital edition of a print publication.  At least that is not the only point.  Online content can be offered in so many ways–and that content can be used in so many ways, paid and unpaid, for marketing, education, and branding–that focusing only on digital versions of print publications can be missing the big picture for one detail.

 Publishers are used to focusing on the publication, but that shouldn’t overshadow the bigger picture.  There is much that can be done online, and digital versions of print products are only the tip of that particular iceberg.

At www.magazinedojo.com, the first social networking site for magazine publishers, a thread has been started for launches and special issues.  You can post your cover and some information about your upcoming launch or special and start the buzz there.

There’s a “great ideas” series going there too–a series of short videos wherein magazine publishers give tips of some of the great ideas that have helped them lately.  There’s something from the Old Farmere’s Almanac about using the internet to improve the production process.

 The great thing about this place is it’s still fresh and new, full of possibilities.  Anyone can create something.

See you there.

For magazine publishers, the best practices of internet marketing today–what I’ll call Publishing 2.0–are focused on getting content out on to the web.  Some publishers still resist the widespread sharing of content, but to resist this content sharing is to resist the most effective promotions strategies available online today.

Ideally the posts you do in the big wide world of Web 2.0 will include anchor text leading back to your site’s home page, to a deeper content page, or to a conversion landing page.  The best approach is to use all three in various contexts so that your same links aren’t used everywhere (if you use your home page link too often on the same site, for example, that can be considered link spamming); also by directing people to different pages you can tailor their landing to their area of specific interest (based on the article or part of the article they are responding to) and also test the conversion of different landings. 

This is essentially SEO 2.0: search is optimized through content and presence in ways that it has never been before; backlinks from partners and affiliates and recent content posted do more, today, to getting search rankings than do old SEO techniques (keyword packing, standard link building practices, etc).

Even if specific links are not included, however, or if the links are “nofollow” (in other words, you can’t click to a page from them), the presence of your content on the web helps brand the parent site, creates trust in the audience, and adds to the authority of the content’s source.Here are the ways that publishers are very successfully using their affiliations to get content out on the web:

1)      An affiliate publisher will refer to your article or use a snippet of it in their blog.  It will include a link to the original article which brings very targeted people into your site for more information.

2)      An affiliate will take your entire article or a portion of it and post it on their site with credit to the source.

3)      You provide an article or bit of information for an affiliate’s newsletter.

4)      Allow an affiliate to post one of your videos or an excerpt from it on their site or blog.

5)      Do an interview with the affiliate and send it out as a podcast or post it to video sharing sites.

There are lots of things beyond that you can do but this should get things rolling and give an idea of possible ways to build out the potential of interested affiliates.  I’d love to hear additonal ideas from some of you, and let’s go more deeply into some of these content sharing ideas in coming days.