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.

The blog is up and funtional! Expect lots of posts soon on intelligent and helpful topics. REALLY SOOON.