MarketingSherpa Blog

Great online journalism is just like Peggy Fleming’s skating. She
makes it look simple. Which again points to the hiring problem
for online publishers. You can get experts to spew out columns, and yeah you can get professional journalists to contribute lengthy articles. How about finding a contributor for the shorter readable-online-bit that’s deceptively simple?
Harder to find than even I realized.

I know this fact deeply, intimately, personally because for the past month I’ve been sifting through resumes and writing samples looking for more freelancers and full-time writers for our newsletters. There are some really great people out there. The ones who can hit the mark for us are… well let’s just say few.

Interestingly, the best writing samples are coming from journalists with backgrounds in print newsletters. Not magazines.
Not Web sites, not ezines, paid subscription print newsletters.
Because, I guess, they are used to writing really tight stories (to fit in a little 8-page newsletter) that are so useful that people will pay more money per year for them than they would for glossy magazines on the same topic with much more content.

Were navigation bars invented by lefties? Usability experts are always complaining about the fact that left-side navigation bars have become the ubiquitious standard across the web, because the hand (most) of us use to click our mouse with is on the right. So you have to slide awkwardly to get to stuff to click on.

With that in mind, as we redesign our own site (a seemingly endless project – arrgh!) I have tried to keep stuff I want people to click on to the right side.

This morning I noticed SRI.com also does this on their home page, where everything they want you to click on or use (search, newsletter opt-in, links to articles, etc.) is on the right, and their big picture and mission statement stuff is on the left. Check it out for yourself and see if it’s really easier, or more tempting to use.

ClickZ’s Rebecca Lieb posted a nice, brief, article today on the paid content business model. Instead of just talking about the fact that requiring paids reduces your traffic (something that so many other commentators are shocked and worried by for reasons that have always escaped me), she discusses whether this means you can raise your ad rates because paid content buyers are more qualified. And she slips in a mention of CRM issues that many newbie paid publishers forget to add to their budgets.

Personally I believe the online paid content world will begin to greatly reflect the offline paid content world. There will be audited circulation sites in niches that folks will pay a lot to advertise in, there will be lower priced paid sites in big niches that folks will pay even more to advertise in, and there will be higher priced paid sites in little niches that won’t carry any outside ads. There is very little that’s new under the sun.

http://www.clickz.com/feedback/buzz/article.php/1008341

If you follow the media writing about the media, you’ve probably already heard that Darwin Magazine, launched by IDG in June 2000 to scoop up their share of the business technology 4-color full- page ad money that was jamming pubs like The Industry Standard, has folded its print edition. However, what I find interesting is the fact that Editor-in-Chief Lew McCreary’s last (print edition) letter to readers says specifically this change is “for the time being only… when the time is right we will have survived to launch again in print (which is still the most pleasing and convenient way to package in-depth information).”

What his letter doesn’t mention (at all, anywhere) is “sign up for our opt-in list” so you can still get Darwin’s stuff in email. (Ok, remind me, what’s the number one thing every evolved marketing expert on this planet is telling companies to do now?
Umm, collect opt-ins?) The site itself does offer newsletters, but breaks best practices rules in doing so; so they are definitely only getting a tiny fraction of visitors to sign up.
For example:

– There’s no sign up box on the home page – you have to click on a link on the navigation bar to get free newsletters.

– There’s no description of the “free newsletters” on that sign up page. Nothing. Not frequency. Not a link to a sample. Not even the title of the “newsletters” or an indication of how many there are, or the opportunity to choose which one you want.

– When you try to leave Darwin’s site without signing up for a free newsletter, there’s no pop-up box. (Yeah, I’m against constant pop-ups, but hey, it’s proven that one single little ‘please sign up’ pop-up for new visitors will help you get lots of opt-ins without unduly annoying people. Then you cookie them so they don’t see it again for 30 days or so.)

– In fact you can’t leave Darwin’s site easily, because they’ve done that programming thing that sticks you in a loop, endlessly revisiting their home page when you hit your “back” button. So they annoyed me, but never asked for my email.

http://www.darwinmag.com

Next week, Paul Myers over at TalkBiz.com is sending all his email subscribers with Yahoo addresses a letter saying they *must* re-subscribe using a different email address. Also, if they chose to re-subscribe using another Yahoo address, their subscriptions will be be over, done, finito, the minute a single issue bounces.

Why the draconian efforts? Paul told me on the phone that he’s found “The Yahoo people on my list don’t tend to read their email on a regular basis.” Which means their average issue open rates as a group, are lower than any other group of opt-in subscribers for him. Especially now that Yahoo is discontinuing free email forwarding.
Why cut names when emailing is so cheap per name that it’s practically free? Paul says, “I want a high density of responsive people. I don’t care how many subscribers I have — I want active, involved readers. I have no interest in big numbers of useless addresses. It slows down delivery, bogs down servers.
Forget it.”

Sending notes of this type is one of several tactics Paul is famous for using to “recondition worthless lists.”

Interestingly, Paul doesn’t report the same problems with Hotmail. He says, “12 times as many Hotmail people will click through than if I send something to Yahoo people.”

This story forcibly reminds me of how different email and direct mail are. In direct mail you need to track the origin of a name (the list the name came from originally) and each list’s campaign and lifetime value. In email you also have to track the mail box provider. Are they at Hotmail? At AOL? At Yahoo? At work? How does this affect open rates, clicks, sales???

Ultimately, if other email publishers and marketers find trends remotely similar to Paul’s, even more stuff is affected. If you are an ezine publisher selling ads, advertisers may ask you for an ISP breakdown before they decide to buy media from you (“How many Yahoo users on your file?”) If you are collecting opt-ins yourself for any purpose, you may begin setting rules up-front about what names you want.

For example, in a campaign that our parent company MarketingSherpa is launching next week, the line next to the opt-in box reads “Please enter your work email address.” Our Programmer asked, “Do you want me to disallow them if they enter a Yahoo or Hotmail account? I could do a pop-up saying, Sorry no free accounts allowed, please enter an email that’s not Hotmail or Yahoo.” We said not to bother, but wondered inside if that might not be a portrait of the future.

http://www.talkbiz.com

If you’re involved in the non-profit or not-for-profit community, definitely check out Nonprofit Online News, now celebrating its fifth anniversary. One of my favorite recent articles,Preventing the Nonprofit Spam Epidemic, is actually relevant outside of the non profit community, because they are struggling with the same email marketing issues everyone else these days. What’s spam and what’s not? How good are so-called permission lists on the rental market? What’s a true “opt-in” and does it really matter if a list is built using opt-out instead?

Thanks to Sam Michel, moderator of my favorite email discussion group for UK-based Web marketers, for letting me know about this seriously funny site — The Devil’s Digital Dictionary.

My personal fave definition (so far), “Targeted Email — Communication sent to persons foolish enough to give their real email addresses to strangers.”

Sales rep continuity can matter tremendously when selling online ads. Fritz Hall, President Benton Foundry, has doubled his annual advertising budget spent with Thomas Regional Directories online over the past 5 years. He told me the reason was not just because he’s sure the ads are working, but also because, “a lot of it has to do with the people I’ve been furnished to work with at Thomas.
They are very knowledgeable people who know what they’re selling. They never approach me with one size fits all. They come in and figure out what I need.”

He adds, “They have not had a big turnover in salespeople over the years. Consequently, you have the same people call on you every year. They get to know something about your business. That has an awful lot to do with my final decision.”

(Mr.) Leslie Bunder of Bunder.com and Jewish.co.uk has started a new informal association for ethnic Web sites. According to The Guardian, Bunder wants to have quarterly group meetings, and “hopes the association would become a focal point for people wanting to start their own community-focused websites and accept membership from everyone in the new media industry with an interest in issues related to ethnic minorities.” To learn more about goals or joining, contact him at leslie@bunder.com.

A solid online resource I just tripped over — The Journal of Court Reporting has posted dozens of how-to articles online from 1998-March 2002. Check out their site here.

http://WWW.NCRAONLINE.ORG/JCR/ARCHIVES.HTM