http://www.singlecopysales.com/covers/ How to design a magazine cover that excites interest and sales issue after issue. Read more…

http://www.singlecopysales.com/covers/ How to design a magazine cover that excites interest and sales issue after issue. Read more…

http://www.singlecopysales.com/covers/ How to design a magazine cover that excites interest and sales issue after issue. Read more…

http://www.singlecopysales.com/covers/ How to design a magazine cover that excites interest and sales issue after issue. Read more…

http://www.singlecopysales.com/covers/ How to design a magazine cover that excites interest and sales issue after issue. Read more…

http://www.singlecopysales.com/covers/ How to design a magazine cover that excites interest and sales issue after issue. Read more…

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?