Audience Development Strategy

Nicholas, Coburn, Van Doren, MacArthur
ORGANIC
AUDIENCE
DEVELOPMENT
STRATEGY
How to Convert Web
Visitors into a
Profitable Email
Subscriber Base
Mequoda Team
Advisory Board
Copyright 2015 Mequoda Group LLC
Don Nicholas
CEO & Lead Consultant
Active Interest Media
Ed Coburn
SVP and Lead Consultant
Business & Legal Resources
Aimee Graeber
CTO & Lead Architect
Laura Pittman
COO & Lead Consultant
Kim Mateus
CBDO & Lead Consultant
Julie Ottomano
Operations Manager
Mary Van Doren
Executive Content Director
Amanda MacArthur
Managing Editor &
Research Director
Biblical Archaeology Society
Center for Science in the

Public Interest
Dark Intelligence Group
Ebner Publishing International
EH Publishing
Farm Progress Companies
Forester Media
GiANT Impact
Nancy Horan
Systems Director
Karen Umans
Systems Director
Gareth Gunn
Systems Director
Lowell Allen
Lead UX Engineer
Don Nicholas
Ed Coburn
Mary Van Doren
Amanda MacArthur
Contributing Editors:
Christopher Sturk
Jane Zarem
Peter A. Schaible
Patrick Hughes
Michelle L. Rodriguez
Jeanne S. Jennings
Roxanne OConnell
Terms of Use
Investing News Network

Natural Health Advisory
Institute
Magna Publications
Norann Oleson
Analytics Director
Report Authors:
Metro Parent Publishing

Group
Program on Negotiation at
Harvard Law School
Prime Publishing
Remonsy Investment Network
Revolution Golf
Sovereign Media
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Organic Audience Development Strategy

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Table of Contents
Introduction ...................................................................................................... 4
What is Audience Development? ..................................................................................................................... 5
Website Architecture that Builds Email Lists ...................................................... 9

Using Email as the Foundation of an Online Marketing System ............................................................. 10
How Well Do You Convert Visitors into Subscribers? .............................................................................. 15
3C Zone Conversion Architecture ................................................................................................................. 33
The Anatomy of an RCLP ............................................................................................................................... 38
The Anatomy of an OFIE ............................................................................................................................... 45
The Anatomy of a Floater ............................................................................................................................... 51
The Anatomy of a Text Ad ............................................................................................................................. 58
Optimizing a Site For Search ............................................................................ 63

Picking SEO Keyword Fights You Can Win................................................................................................ 64
Writing Content with an Optimal Keyword Density .................................................................................. 70
Proven Strategies for SEO Campaign Management ................................................................................... 74
A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Google Visibility Report ................................................................. 84
Social Media Optimization ............................................................................... 96

Using Social Media to Drive Email Circulation ........................................................................................... 97
What is Social Media Optimization? ............................................................................................................ 104
Recycling Content on Social Media for Improved SEO........................................................................... 108
A Year in the Life of an Article on Twitter................................................................................................. 112
About Mequoda ............................................................................................ 122

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Introduction


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What is Audience Development?

Attract new customers through your website then all you
have to do is convert, engage and monetize them!
Imagine you own a landscaping company. You cut lawns, trim shrubs, design
landscapes and you even shovel in the winter.
Now imagine you throw a dinner party where your brother brings home his new
girlfriend. This is the tenth girl in 10 years who has sat at your dinner table, so you
assume that you may never see the lovely woman again. Well call her Sarah.
After dinner, Sarah mentions that she just bought a house and the yard is just awful.
So there you are, with a potential customer in your house. What do you do?
A smart business owner would begin to develop a relationship with her. You ask
about the yard, she tells you all the intricacies, you try to educate her on loam and
gravel and her rare shrubs. Shes there, she thinks youre smart, you have a solution to
her problem, and shell probably answer the phone if you ask for her number in order
to give her a quote.
So, do you ask?
This is not far off from what audience development looks like online.
Someone sees you online for the first time, whether its in social media, or on
your website. If they leave, you may never see them again.
You offer them good quality information, whether through a link, or through an
article they found in search.
Then, you ask for their email address, so that at some point, you can sell them
something.

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This might be the brash way to put it, but publishers dont give away hundreds of
thousands of words for fun. We do it so that we can build lists of loyal customers,
who well continue to serve free content to in the hopes that one day theyll buy
something. And they often do.
Audience Development Strategies
So, what is audience development, then? Its how you build a group of loyal readers,
subscribers and buyers, specifically online. Often, its the creation of new content in
order to succeed in the four major sources of website traffic: search, social, referral
and legacy. More on that in a minute.
Attracting new web visitors is the most crucial part of audience development, but
from there, you must convert those visitors into free subscribers, then you
must engage them enough to earn their trust and loyalty. From there, you have the
greatest chance of monetizing your relationship to turn them into paying
customers.

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An audience development portal is populated by content thats aligned with the

services or products you ultimately want to sell. Most of our clients are selling
magazines, books, videos, subscriptions, events or other information products.
While audience development can be used to sell pretty much anything, it works best
when selling information products because those products can be used to create the
content for your audience development portal.
The first step in any good content driven audience development plan is to be very
specific about the products youre going to sell and the topics those products will
cover. These topics for keyword phrases will form the backbone or taxonomy of your
audience development portal and the first part of your audience development plan.
How Publishers Build an Audience

The four trackable ways a publisher builds an audience goes into four buckets: search,
social, referral and legacy.
Search: The largest portion of your website traffic will come from search. For a
Mequoda System publisher, maybe 80% or even higher will come from search. Wellwritten content thats been optimized for search will ensure that you continue to get
traffic to your website in massive quantities.
Targeted? Yes. A reader that comes to your website looking for an answer to
your question, and depending on how tightly-focused youve SEOd your
articles, this reader is likely to be the most targeted there is.
Social: A smaller portion of your website traffic, although it still will be a decent
portion, is social. This is your effort on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and anywhere
else your content is shared.
Targeted? Sometimes. This reader may be very targeted or not at all. Traffic
that comes from the loyal following youve built in social media may be very

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targeted, but those who come from re-Tweets and shares may not be at all; thats
why conversion rates on social media are so mixed.
Referral: Next in line is an inbound link from another website. You wrote a post on
their blog and linked back to yourself, or you published a post on your own blog and
someone linked to you. Either way, this person is coming from someone elses
website, which you have no control over. On that note, these links are very valuable
to Search, so you want more referrals.
Targeted? No. This reader is the most untargeted of all, since you dont control
the content they came in on.
Legacy: This is the brand traffic that you receive, either by someone who already
knows you, or subscribes to you. It could be a person who came by typing in your
address from memory, or from a blow-in card in your magazine. This reader is easy
to upsell to product if theyve already been upsold to become a subscriber.
Targeted? Yes. This reader may already be a subscriber.
Audience development is dependent on online editors and an array of content

producers including event producers, app producers and product producers. The
major benefit of audience development in a publishing company is that there is plenty
of content to spread around. Big box stores tend to fail online when it comes to
Search, Social and Referrals unless they start building content an asset publishers
have coming out of their ears.
What is audience development? Everything you do to get people to your website, on
your email list, and into your best customers luxury box. Are you satisfied with
your audience development efforts? If not, keep reading.

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Website Architecture that

Builds Email Lists
How to design a website so that visitors have every
opportunity and desire to join your email list

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Using Email as the Foundation

of an Online Marketing System
Online newsletters are the secret youve been searching for
when it comes to selling more magazine subscriptions
If youre looking for an easy answer to online publishing success, stop reading. We
dont have one.
We know dozens of publishers who have made online publishing a large part of their
revenue stream.
But we dont know one whos done it without putting in the effort to learn
what actually works as opposed to what they heard works and then spending the
time and money it takes to execute the business model.
So Im going to tell you where our clients have found the money. Its not where you
think: Its not your website, its not social media, and its not the awesome gadget app
you just built.
The answer is one of the biggest secrets of online publishing. Its email newsletters:
the medium that at times, gets no respect from publishers.
The Power of the Email Newsletter

Let me put it this way. In the olden days before the Internet, you wouldnt try to
launch a profitable direct mail campaign and then refuse to buy any lists. You
wouldnt try to sell more single copies at the newsstand without increasing your print
run.
Yet thats essentially what many publishers do when they try to make money while
ignoring the most powerful sales tool to develop out of the Internet revolution.

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At Mequoda, weve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email
newsletters work to drive revenue. Its not the traffic that comes to your site, which is
the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon
early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After
all, if they show up on your website, theyre bound to subscribe to your magazine,
right?
Wrong.
Over and over again, weve found that passing website visitors dont turn into
buyers. They simply remain passing website visitors. They certainly dont help
you sell more magazine subscriptions online. Who is your prime audience? The folks
who like you enough to subscribe to your free email newsletter!
But what about social media? Thats the latest marketing darling, so I have to spend
more time and effort on Facebook, right?
Wrong again.
The publishers who use email newsletters, such as Rodale, Meredith and all our
clients, know a consumer publication can generate about $7 per subscriber, per year,
selling subscriptions, advertising and ancillary products. From Twitter and Facebook
followers? Less than $1. And those numbers are lower for B2B.
And as for gadget apps (as opposed to the digital magazine app your subscribers need
to access your digital magazine) why try to become a software company, when what
youre really good at is producing content? On the other hand, email newsletters
work incredibly well, and its what youre good at anyway, so shelve the app ideas

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until youre as big as, say, Cond Nast, and then you can afford to throw money at
apps just because its hip. Otherwise, put gadget apps wayyyy down on your priority
list.
Websites, social media and gadget apps simply dont help you build the type of
relationship with your audience that keeps them truly engaged and loyal. Contentdriven email newsletters from a publisher, however, speak directly to the
audience. Theyre free, daily, user-friendly, highly-targeted and personally-delivered
love letters to your subscribers.
Study after study has proven that content-driven email newsletters (as opposed to
strictly retail newsletters from, say, Nordstrom or Staples) are among the most
popular media that consumers read today. And if you think thats just older folks,
think again: Our own Digital Native Study found that digital natives those 30 and
under are highly attached to their email newsletters, for all the reasons given above.
If consumers are passionate about something, they want the newsletter that talks
about it to them, every day.
How to Do it Yourself
This isnt a quick and easy way to score big on the Internet. It requires discipline and
resources. There are three steps to success, and the dozens of clients whove taken
the time to implement it will tell you it works.
Build an optimized website to attract traffic.

Convert that traffic into email newsletter subscribers.
Engage those email subscribers with great content.
Then sell subscriptions and ancillary products to your email list, and boost your
advertising impressions as a way to more fully monetize this dedicated
audience.

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Do you need a website and passing traffic? Absolutely. But the website isnt the
endgame. Rather, its the steppingstone to building a big, fat email list of engaged
customers who cant wait to find out what content they can buy from you.
There are three key metrics we rely on for success. These are the primary indicators
or how successful your business will be.
Visibility Index
The first metric is the Visibility Index (VI). Thats impressions divided by searches. If
youre not visible to Google on the Internet, you dont exist, so the higher this
number is, the better.
Some publishers stick at around 2-10 percent. Brands that dominate their space can
get it into the 60s. But most publishers can make plenty of money by maintaining a
number in the 20s. Want to increase your VI? Work on your organic marketing,
which is where 94% of traffic comes from, generally speaking.
Email Capture Rate
The email capture rate is also within the publishers control. Of the 110+ websites
weve built for clients and including our own, 2.47% is our average. Industry average,
however, is less than 0.1%. This number is easy to calculate, even though most
publishers fail to track this one: For every 100 visitors you get, how many new email
subscribers did you generate? Remember, email is key to the Mequoda Method.
Without building a large email file, you simply cant make a lot of money or if
youre a really big brand, you can make money but still be leaving piles of it on the
table.
Orders per Thousand Emails Sent

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This is another easy metric to capture, and one that you can improve with rich
content in your email newsletters, compelling sales copy for promotional emails, and
well-thought-out offers.
Bottom line: If you keep building your visibility, focusing on that email capture rate,
and improving your orders per thousand emails, your sales and revenues will
blossom.

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How Well Do You Convert Visitors into Subscribers?

An email capture rate of 2% or more is healthy, but these
publishers are seeing much higher numbers!
The number of website visitors you convert into email subscribers is your email
capture rate (ECR).
If you have no idea what your ECR is, that's OK.
Your ECR is a simple ratio: The number of unique visitors who come to your
website during a 30-day period, divided into the number of visitors who join your
database by signing up to receive your free email newsletter during that same 30-day
period.
Divide the total number of new email subscribers you acquired via your
website in one month by the total number of unique visitors you received in
that month. This will give you your site-wide email capture rate.
If during a given month you have 100,000 unique visitors arrive at your website
(according to Google Analytics or a comparable measurement tool) and 4,000 of
these unique visitors become new email subscribers (according to your email
management program or service), your ECR is 4 percent (4,000/100,000 = .04 or
4.0%).
Most websites have an email capture rate of 0.1 to 0.2%. At Mequoda, Gold
Members average a 2.47% rate across both B2B and B2C markets. If youd like to
improve your email capture rate, just keep reading this handbook because thats
exactly what its for!

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Any website analytics tools can measure your unique monthly visitors, but projecting
optimal email circulation requires a calculation.
What is an acceptable email capture rate (ECR) for your business goals?
If you assume the ECR will be constant at that given percentage over 60
months, where will your email circulation level off?
The answer is a linear equation. The relationship between the ECR and email file size
produces a straight-line graph when you hold all other variables constant. If you can
double your ECR, you'll double the size of your subscriber file over five years (or any
fixed period).
How to Increase Email Capture Rates
Irresistible offers make it hard for visitors not to sign up. It all starts with your
content. After reaching a point of satisfaction with your content, make an offer that's
worth the exchange of an email address. At the most basic level, we recommend
giving away a free special report in exchange for your users email address.
In the next few chapters well be reviewing the many elements of conversion
architecture that will get you the highest site-wide conversion rate. If youre using all
of them, youll see a lift of 20-50% in your email capture rate.
Most publishers weve studied are only implementing one basic email capture. Thus,
they're only seeing a 0.1 to 0.2% conversion rate. The following publisher examples
are all Mequoda Gold Members and have significant conversion rates using these
methods. Those specific numbers will be addressed later on.

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Do you know why you've hired editors to recycle your magazine content online?
Probably because you want to attract lots and lots of web visitors. Naive publishers
might think that the transactional process starts with some highly SEO'd content that
brings readers to their websites and then POOF! they're overwhelmed by orders.
That doesn't usually happen, so the middleman becomes your email list. Do what you
can to build your email list, and your buyer list will grow with it. Put away your (wellintentioned) aspirations of converting every visitor into a magazine subscriber and
focus on the long tail instead. You'll be much more likely to convert a new visitor
into a free email subscriber than a paid magazine subscriber.
And what happens once someone is an email subscriber? Well, then you can try to sell
them your magazine. Once you've built a relationship with them through email
through quality content they're much more likely to buy from you.
The very successful publishers that we always turn to when evaluating our best
practices have used some or all of the following strategies to convert website visitors
into email subscribers. Not to say that they don't also use ample space on their
website to sell new magazine subscriptions, they've just also spent the time to build
their website appropriately so that web to email conversion is a cinch.
These 12 strategies are what those successful publishers are building into their
websites to convert visitors into email subscribers. Many of them involve coming up
with one or many free e-books or reports to give away in exchange for an email
address.
1. Rapid Conversion Landing Page

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2. Page Access Challenge

3. Email Capture Navigation Links
4. Interrupter Text Ads
5. Free Download Index Page
6. Free Download Index Widget
7. Curated Downloads Widget
8. Order Form in Editorial (OFIE)
9. Order Form in Navigation (OFIN)
10. Free Offer Floaters
11. Online Buyers
12. Order Flow Abandons
In the next few pages well review each of them in brief, while over the next few
chapters, well discuss Rapid Conversion Landing Pages and the other most
important elements of website conversion architecture at length.

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1. Rapid Conversion Landing Page
Well discuss Rapid Conversion Landing Pages (RCLPs) at length in a few chapters,
but as a quick example, all you need to know is that it has the structure of a sales
letter, except that it gives away something for free. To complete the transaction,
nobody has to buy anything; they only need to enter their email address. This copy on
the page, and the name of the free product being distributed through this page, is
keyword-optimized.
The copy length on an RCLP is
usually around 1,200 words. When
you talk about conversion
architecture, this is the king of
conversions. You might need one, or
you might need one for every
category on your blog. It's the holy
grail of maximizing conversions.
Every Mequoda System client has
these built into their system when
they launch.
Here's a perfect example from Bible
History Daily promoting their Top 10
Biblical Archaeology Discoveries ebook.

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2. Access Challenge
And then there's the value-added content giveaway with a bigger barrier and a bigger
return. Chris Kimball, who runs the show at America's Test Kitchen, has 4 million
unique TV viewers per month and generates a ton of traffic to his website. ATK sees
the importance of email too, so in order to convert those visitors into email
subscribers, they limit access to the website by asking people to register before they
can see the content and recipes.
Registration is free,
requiring only your
email address. If
you're logged in, you
won't get the Access
Challenge1. To please
the search engines,
they give away just
enough to get
ranked, but blur out
the rest until you
give up your email
address. Seems fair,
right?
http://www.americastestkitchen.com/recipes/6681-french-style-pot-roasted-pork-
loin
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3. Email Capture Navigation Links

Investing Daily's Phil Ash, one of our best operators2, finds that his e-letters are so
important and well segmented, they belong in the navigation. Each email newsletter
gets its own RCLP with its own 1,200 words and is treated just as if it were a paid
newsletter.
In addition, to amp up SEO, he also

has free reports that he gives away in
exchange for their email address like
the Bible History Daily example above.
Those get their own separate
navigation treatment.
http://www.investingdaily.com/
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4. Interrupter Text Ads

Black Belt Magazine, another savvy Mequoda operator, uses Interrupter Text Ads
flawlessly. Inside each editorial article, they include text links that bring the reader to
an RCLP.
The text ads are inserted half way through the article (hence the interruption). They are
also aligned with whatever category that the article is in.
So for example, below is an article about the The Role of Ancient Samurai Swordsman
Scrolls3 and the text ad promotes Miyamoto Musashi, the Samurai weapons legend4.
The key is alignment; you want the report being given away and the article to be
aligned.
http://www.blackbeltmag.com/daily/martial-arts-history/japanese-matial-arts-
history/budo-history-the-role-of-ancient-samurai-swordsman-scrolls/
4
http://www.blackbeltmag.com/freeguides/miyamoto-musashi-samurai-weapons-
legend-creator-of-niten-ichi-ryu-and-author-of-the-book-of-five-rings/
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5. Free Download Index Page

Ceramic Arts Daily is among the first sites we ever created and one of our favorite
success stories. Publisher Charlie Spahr had two print publications, Ceramics
Monthly and Pottery Making Illustrated when they didnt have a big online presence or
strategy. The American Ceramic Society turned to the Mequoda Method in 2005, and
over the next seven years, increased revenues from $2 million to $3.5 million.
One page on the site crucial to his online strategy is his Freebies5 page. People may
have gotten numb
to the words "free
report" or "free
white paper," but
everybody still
loves a freebie! On
this Free
Download Index
Page (a rose by any
other name, right?)
Charlie lists all 38
of his freebies and
all of them have
SEO-optimized
titles and RCLPs to
go with them.
http://ceramicartsdaily.org/free-gifts/
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6. Free Download Index Widget

On the Mequoda site, we have an auto-populating list of all our free white papers. We
use a widget to auto-populate this section of the website so that it shows up on
several different page templates.
The goal of using this widget is to increase the number of internal inbound links to
those pages for SEO purposes, but also to give website visitors an extra portal to
those RCLPs.

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7. Curated Download Widget

Another version of this offers a more "curated" list of your free giveaways. Website
visitors might not be able to focus on a list of 20 or more titles in a list, but if you
give them four or five, as Natural Health Advisory Daily does, you'll be doing them the
favor of curation.

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8. Order Form in Editorial (OFIE)

Invented by our friends at Time Inc., OFIEs were invented to present themselves
like magazine blow-in cards embedded into editorial content.
Many publishers still use them to sell subscriptions and other paid products, but we
usually task them to collect email addresses so that we can sell to email subscribers at
a later date. Like Text Ads, we align OFIEs with the editorial content.
Here's an example of Knitting Daily implementing an OFIE perfectly. A blog about
socks promotes a free sock-knitting pattern. Perfect harmony.

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9. Order Form in Navigation (OFIN)

We think we invented this. If we can have an OFIE, why not an OFIN? Same
premise, different location - in the navigation.
Here's David Baum at Golf Vacation Insider doing it the right way. This OFIN is
allowed to be buried toward the bottom of your right (or left) navigation just as long
as you have an OFIE up at the top.

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10. Free Offer Floater

This is not a pop-up because it's built in HTML and cannot be blocked by pop-up
blockers. Some marketers and publishers refer to it as a roadblock or a floater. Better
Homes & Gardens might have been the first, or one of the first to invent these. They
were routinely popping up for any new visitors and asking those visitors to sign up
for any of their 17 free email newsletters (at the time - they only have a few now).
We love this example from Simplify, which we call the "Death Star Floater," because it
darkens out the background in order to emphasize the offer.

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11. Online Buyers

Let's say you converted a website visitor into a paid customer on your first try. Don't
you want them to buy again? At one time, Interweave Knits used their free-trial
magazine signup as an opportunity to catch those buyers.
In this example, they had pre-checked boxes opting the user into Knitting Daily (the
site they came in on) and Crochet Me, a related community and email newsletter.
Here's a news flash: Buyers are more likely to buy again, so get them on your email
list!

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12. Order Flow Abandons

When you give away a free trial that requires a credit card, 10% of people who click
through will enter their credit card information and the other 90% will bail. When
Golf Odyssey's David Baum discovered this, seeing that people would come in for a
free issue, but abandon on the next page when asked for their credit card, he decided
to capture their email on the first page.
In his sales letter for a free trial
offer, they're asked for their name
and email address. Once entered,
they'll get the page that asks for
their credit card. This way, even if
they bail, David already has them
on his list. To prevent frustration,
David simply sends them an optin email letting them know that
they're getting Golf Vacation Insider
(their free email newsletter) for
free anyway, even though they
decided not to opt into the trial.
Within 30 days, publishers using
this strategy will see an extra 10%
of users convert to the paid
product in addition to those who
converted on the initial sales
letter.

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Are you convinced that capturing someone's email is crucial to your long-term
strategy? Remember, someone whos already spent money with you is likely to buy
more, so why not add them to a communication channel where you can contact them
a few times per week? You'll sell them just by promoting your good, thoughtful
content every day.

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3C Zone Conversion Architecture

If you feel like your email capture rates are low, then they
probably are
The examples we just explored showed you all the different ways most publishers
collect email addresses.
What were getting into now, is how hugely successful Mequoda publishers are when
they use several of them as part of a sitewide content strategy.
Consistent channel conversion zone architecture (3c), when applied to a publishing
website, is a fancy way of saying that every channel (or blog topic) consistently aligns
with a product that converts the user into a subscriber or paid user of your website.
Together, they create what we call a zone. Using this zone to increase website to
email conversion rates can be easy, if you let it. This metric is called your email
capture rate.
As mentioned before the industry average email capture rate is less than .1 percent.
For Mequoda Publishers 2.1% of visitors who visit a site designed with 3C zone
architecture in mind will submit their email address.
Why?
We make it a rule to always give something back in return, like an ebook, white
paper, video or even a free knitting pattern (the same architecture without
incentives sees a 50 percent drop in capture rate from 2 down to 1 percent).
We promote these freebies contextually.
Let me explain, using Mequoda.com as an example.

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A channel for us is a blog category, like Multiplatform Publishing Strategy. When you
look at the blog category page that lists all of our multiplatform publishing strategy
blog posts, youll find an ad (we call it an OFIE) for a handbook with the same name,
our Multiplatform Publishing Strategy handbook.
And if you click on any article links on the category page above, youll get an article.
On this article page, youll find an OFIE ad for the Multiplatform Publishing
Strategy handbook again at the top. In the middle of the article, youll find an inline
text ad for the Multiplatform Publishing Strategy handbook again.

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On every page that we write specifically about multiplatform publishing, theres a

related offer for our free handbook on the same topic. Its consistent across our
entire multiplatform publishing channel you will never read a post about
multiplatform publishing that doesnt promote the handbook, unless youre logged
out.
Since these OFIE ads are meant to convert search and social website visitors into
email subscribers, when someone comes to our site on a keyword like multiplatform
publishing, theyre more likely to convert than if we gave them an ad for our Digital
Magazine Publishing handbook. Thats why we define each blog topic as a channel and
make sure that we create a related product for each channel. Then we consistently
promote that product in the channel. This results in higher conversions; about 21X
better conversions.
All of our channels (blog categories) are set up exactly the same. We have five
categories on our website, and five freebies.
Multiplatform Publishing Strategy articles promote our Multiplatform Publishing

Strategy handbook.

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Digital Magazine Publishing articles promote our Digital Magazine Publishing

handbook.
Subscription Website Publishing articles promote our Subscription Website

Publishing handbook.
Audience Development Strategy articles promote our Organic Audience Development

Strategy handbook.
Digital Publishing Trends articles promote our annual Mequoda Digital Magazine
Market Study.
If you look at any of our clients, youll see that theyre using the same system to
convert visitors into subscribers.
At Remonsy, the category Vanguard ETF Funds, and articles in it, like How to
Have a Happy Successful Vanguard Retirement, promote their free report Vanguard
ETFs: The Complete Vanguard ETF List of Vanguard Funds.
At Natural Health Advisory, the category Depression and Anxiety, and articles in
it like Serotonin Deficiency A Root Cause of Your Depression Symptoms? promote their
free How to Treat Depression Without Medication report.
At Harvards Program on Negotiation, the category Conflict Management, and

articles in it, like Conflict Management at the Office, promote their free New Conflict
Management: Effective Conflict Resolution Strategies to Avoid Litigation free report.
The final stage of this zone conversion architecture is a Rapid Conversion Landing
Page. This is the page where the user finally submits their email address, and every
free report has one. All text ads link to a RCLP.
Consistent. Channel. Conversion. You will convert more visitors to your website by
promoting related products and giving them away for free in exchange for an email

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address. Email is still the currency of the web. Treat your subscribers well and they
are more likely to convert into buyers than from any other source.

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The Anatomy of an RCLP

Search-optimized, content-heavy landing pages are the
perfect places to build email circulation
We once did an interview with a publisher who, when asked about his success, gave
all the credit to his team. In fact, he asked that we used their names in place of his
whenever credit was due just like a star football running back who, when asked
about his success, gives credit to the linemen.
They open up a hole, and I simply run through it, he explains modestly. Without
the other members of the team, running backs alone are not very effective.
Like those modest individuals, a Rapid Conversion Landing Page (a.k.a. name
squeeze page) is essential to building a database of free email newsletter subscribers.
It, along with other landing pages on a website, act as the team that builds an email
list. However, the RCLP is extra special in that its main purpose in life is to drive a
ton of traffic from search in order to build your email list.
The premise is simple. Create a valuable free report, white paper, or other product
and offer it free with a simple sales letter. We call it a Rapid Conversion Landing Page
because its designed to rapidly convert the reader to a free email newsletter
subscriber.
After all, the RCLP offers a low-risk, low-friction proposition: It essentially says,
Ive got a nice gift for you. Its easy and free. Simply give me your email address, and
in return, Ill give you a valuable piece of downloadable information. And if you want
to get off my email subscriber list at any time, Ill make that easy, too.
The offer is certainly attractive free is a price that meets with very little
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resistance. The challenge, as with marketing any product, is getting the word out to
your intended audience.
A few examples of Rapid Conversion Landing Pages (RCLP):
Again, here is a great example from Bible History Daily promoting their Top 10 Biblical
Archaeology Discoveries e-book:

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Or how about Black Belts RCLP for their guide about Samurai Weapons?

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Even Harvards Program on Negotiation has RCLPs set up for their special reports,
like this one on Team Building.

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Write a well-crafted Rapid Conversion Landing Page, pepper it liberally with keyword
phrases that you know are popular search terms with your target market, add an email
capture box, turn the whole message into HTML, and upload it to your website.
Presto: Youve got a Rapid Conversion Landing Page that should be easy for Google
to find, and irresistible to your target audience. Collecting hundreds of email
addresses should be automatic now, right?
Well, not so fast.
Because eventually the Google crawlers are going to find your nifty little RCLP, read
it, and ignore it.
Ignore it? Why?
Because without a supporting cast of incoming hyperlinks, Google doesnt consider
your RCLP to be of much importance.
A Rapid Conversion Landing Page without article pages is virtually worthless. It
requires dozens of blog posts, all pointing to it using hyperlinks that include the name
of the free report or download. Each RCLP requires a press release, a few email
newsletters to spread the news, and a ton of social media posts about it.

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Thats because Google inherently does not value a single page, no matter how well
its optimized for search. This is particularly true when the purpose of the page is to
extract someones email address.
Google wants the RCLP to have supporting pages, like the linemen on the football
team. Important internal links from blog posts should contain well-written content on
a topic similar to the Rapid Conversion Landing Page that reference your free
download.
Google is effectively saying, If you dont think this offer of a free download is
important enough to link to, then we dont think its important enough to rank
highly.
As a periodical or reference website publisher, you can publish innumerable article
pages. Legacy publishers have a wealth of content that can be repurposed as article
pages that point to an RCLP.

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The final piece in this marketing effort is getting other publishers to link to your
RCLP. When Google determines that your offer of a free download is recommended
by lots of website colleagues and friendly competitors as demonstrated by
incoming hypertext links from these external websites your Google rank is
virtually certain to soar.
Offering free premium downloadable content on a Rapid Conversion Landing Page
one element of a properly architected website is a win/win for all concerned:
Google, the user, your publishing colleagues, and you.
Its also the best circ-building strategy ever devised.

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The Anatomy of an OFIE

How to collect emails on your website in style -- give me an
O, an F, an I, and an E!
Around here, using OFIE in a sentence (pronounced OH FEE) is as common as
saying the words "website" or "conversion." Say it with me, OHHHHH
FEEEEEEEE. Or you could spell it out... oh, eff, aye, eee!
Or, you could say what it really means: Order Form in Editorial. Nobody says that
though.
An OFIE is an order form tucked at the top, bottom or in the middle of your
editorial, and sometimes your advertorial and promotional content. We've had a few
best practice versions over the years, but they all do the same thing: collect an email
address.
The Anatomy of an OFIE
The OFIE usually includes four necessary elements:
An image of the product being given away, with the title font of the image
large enough to read
A boastful headline that includes the title of the product, letting the reader
know it's FREE
An email capture form and a button to submit (ideally), or a button that
leads to the landing page where it will be collected
A notice about whether or not you'll sell their email address (people don't
like that much)
Optional: When the OFIE is on a landing page, some publishers choose to
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add a description of the report into the OFIE. We try not to do that on
other pages, because it typically pushes too much other content below the
fold.
Where the OFIE Belongs
Article Pages
Article pages make the best places to use OFIEs. Since most of your search traffic
goes to article pages, which accounts typically for 65-85% of your web traffic, this is
the placement that procures the most number of email addresses.
We don't just stick it up there and let it go wild (or even sit around like a wallflower),
though. On all Mequoda sites, every one of the portals categories has an associated
free download -- and we recommend you set your site up the same way!
This way, when we write a post about email marketing, the reader gets an OFIE that
offers a free white paper about email marketing. If we gave them an ad for a white

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paper about social media, or, say, mobile website design, the conversion rates would
be dramatically reduced. It's all about alignment.
Category Pages
Category pages get a lot of traction too, which is why we recommend it as a nobrainer to add them to the top of those. This page is especially targeted because the
person looking at your category page is seriously honing in on a single topic.
And if you really want to collect their email address and convert them into a
subscriber, a white paper or other free download that saves them the trouble of
parsing through all your articles will offer a better answer that they might even thank
you for. Black Belt is promoting a self-defense guide on their Self Defense Training6
page.
http://www.blackbeltmag.com/category/daily/self-defense-training/?topicid=2561
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Home Page
You'd think we'd have put this placement first, but most websites don't have the
capability to really target those ads according to the reader, or whatever search term
the reader came in on. So for that reason, the portal home page is not the highest
conversion point for an OFIE. In fact, a floater is the highest converting piece of
website architecture for a home page (more on the floater later).
Typically, a publisher chooses his top five performing downloads and promotes them
on the portal home page. On NaturalHealthAdvisory.com they feature two OFIEs,
one that promotes all the free special reports, and one that rotates through each of
them one at a time (in the upper right corner of the screen).

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Landing Page
Maybe this is obvious, but the OFIE also belongs on your landing page. It's
consistent with the design of your white paper proposal that they came from and
offers an easy transition from the article / home / category page to the landing page
where they'll make the final decision to download it and sign up for your email list.
You might be noticing now that, hey, I'm seen those before, you didn't invent them!
Nope, we didn't! We just popularized the acronym. And although you've seen them
become popular in the past few years, we have been telling publishers to do this for a
decade.

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Turning OFIEs into Emails

According to studies about email capture rates, from past and present, most websites
see an email conversion rate less than 1%. For publishers who use OFIEs and other
key ingredients of a proper website conversion pie, they can expect to see 12% or
more.
We can confidently guarantee that by adding OFIEs to your site, on these pages,
aligned with the page content, you'll see a drastic increase in email conversions.

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The Anatomy of a Floater

The case for testing website floaters to increase conversion
rates and build your email list
When website users are asked whether they like pop-ups, they say no. They'll say they
hate them. They'll tell you they're the most annoying things on the Internet. They
might even tell you they never fill them out.
Well, I'll politely call them fibbers, because every A/B test I've ever run and
researched disagrees.
But we don't like pop-ups either. They "pop up," can ruin the user experience, and
they can be blocked by pop-up blockers. What's the fun in all that?
Floaters, however, don't do any of those things. And when publishers test them,
along with OFIEs, text ads and other elements of website conversion architecture,
they see a 20-50% lift in website conversions; in some cases, even more. For many

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Mequoda System clients, we find that more than 60% of those extra website
conversions come through the floater.
Benefits of Website Floaters
Floaters have mostly replaced pop-ups and pop-unders.
Floaters are not affected by pop-up blockers.
Floaters can be deployed contextually on a site-wide basis, to make different
offers in different zones of a website.
Floaters can be configured to stop bothering frequent guests.
Although a floater looks like a separate document floating on top of a website
page, it's really just a layer in the HTML code. To the user, it looks a lot like a
magazine blow-in card.
There are paid floaters, like the ones on Better Homes and Gardens' BHG.com:
But we prefer ones that promote free products (freemiums) so we can build our email
list and sell them a magazine, newsletter, event or other information product later on.
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We especially like it when they darken the background, which we refer to as the
Death Star Floater.
If you're thinking that this is a recurring usability nightmare, don't worry. The codes
for floaters are designed to recognize users who have subscribed and spare them
from having to see the floater again.
This provides all the benefits of a pop-up's high conversion rate without the negative
effects on the users' experience with your website.
Best Practices for Effective Website Floaters
Except for the home page, floaters must promote a contextual free product.
Floaters must not appear to existing email subscribers who are already logged
in.
Floaters must take a hiatus from appearing after a reader has seen the floater
X number of times and has not converted (also known as not annoying your
readers).
Floaters must be mobile-friendly so they can be easily closed on a mobile
device.

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While printing blow-in cards and inserting them into print products is cheap, floaters,
like their pop-up predecessors, are virtually cost-free. Like blow-ins and pop-ups,
floaters can irritate users if over used or used to promote offers that seem out of
context to website users.
That's why every good Mequoda System is designed to offer contextual floaters.
We use floaters primarily to build email lists by offering freemiums (like a free white
paper). So in order to make our floater contextual, that means we must have one
freemium for every blog category on our website. This way, when someone reads an
article about, say, "baking an apple pie," we can promote a freemium about "XX 30Minute Baking Recipes" or "XX Best Pie Recipes."
As anyone who reads their analytics knows, most users dont enter their website via
the homepage. By design, most users enter through content pages one or more levels
down from the homepage. This makes floaters ideal for site-wide use to entice users

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to download a freemium and build your email circulation.

How Online Publishers Use Floaters
There was a very long period when the social media folksthe anarchists of the
online marketing industryrefused to use floaters. They relied on their intuition
instead of testing. They shamed companies for annoying people with marketing. Just
talk to them, they said. Write good content, they said. Then the social media folks
started actually testing.
The fact is, you cant talk to everyone when theyre visiting your website. However, if
you can get them on your email list, youll have a chance to talk to them later.
Several years ago, we covered an interesting case study by Darren Rowse of
ProBlogger who added a floater to his site Digital Photography School.
He admitted that it took him so long because he was afraid his users would hate him
for it. The social media peeps would judge him!
"My fear was that theyd annoy readers, page views per visit would drop and that Id
end up with a lot of angry emails from readers," said Rowse at the time.
But he went for it anyway. Instead of getting an inbox full of angry emails (he only
got two), he went from harvesting 41 new email subscribers per day, to 350 new
email subscribers per day -- more than 127,000 new email subscribers per year.
At the time, I had calculated that he was getting an 18% conversion rate on that
floater, circa 2008.

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Six years later and he's still using floaters, but they've gotten quite the upgrade, along
with his very successful website. Certainly this blogger has changed his mind about
them!
Speaker and savvy marketer Chris Penn is another smart marketer who tried them
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out and saw a 733% increase in email subscribers. Smart marketers test, test, test.
All of our Mequoda Systems go live with floaters right off the bat, and the floaters are
responsible for the majority of their email conversions.
People who continually close a floater and don't subscribe aren't our target customers
if they don't require our information on a daily basis to do their jobs, then they're
also highly unlikely to buy a product or attend an event.
So, who would we rather please? Our potential customers who we can make happy
by writing useful content every day or our non-customers? We don't worry about
the people who might not subscribe and instead spend our efforts making sure that
we're making new subscribers happy by publishing valuable freemiums that align with
the content that's being read, and by sending email newsletters packed with original,
helpful content that always gives a take-away.
If you didn't absorb the take-away yet, its this: Test floaters!

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The Anatomy of a Text Ad

Turning blog readers into email subscribers
For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

This short story, allegedly written by Ernest Hemingway to settle a bet, is the soul of
brevity, yet is has the power to evoke curiosity and emotion.
It should serve to inspire every modern direct response copywriter.
Why? Because at no other time in history has the ability to write very short, succinct
copy been more valuable.
Melts in Your MouthNot in Your Hand
This headline, written more than 50 years ago by the legendary Rosser Reeves,
created so much appetite for M&Ms chocolate candy that they had to build a new
factory to meet demand.
Fast forward to today: Billions of dollars are being generated on the Internet with
small text ads perhaps as much as $100 billion annually. The type of text ads I
refer to now are the ones paid for in Pay-Per-Click, but the ones we use on our own
websites for audience development are just as important and the focus of this
article.
Its true. In the new world of digital marketing, text ads have now surpassed display
ads as the most effective and widely used online advertising medium.
High-design, long-text, hard-to-produce display ads are dead. Less is more. Shortattention-span text ads work.
Text ads are the new control.

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The result: Copywriting now reigns supreme. If you want a click, or if you want
someone to download a product in exchange for their email address, even if its free,
you have to work for it.
How We Use Text Ads Online
Although a text ad could refer to any ad consisting of text, were currently referring to
those that are part of your conversion architecture. These ads are placed in the dead
center of all your articles and invite your website visitors to download a free product
that will get them on your email list.
All Mequoda Systems incorporate inline text ads in their posts, which point readers to
a free downloadable product that is aligned with the topic of the post.
To save time in writing new text ads every day, Mequoda Systems clients have a plugin we developed called the Mequoda Text Include Manager, which allows operators a
one-time set up of text ads to use in multiple posts.
Since most reading this arent Mequoda clients, you can ask your own developers to
come up with a plug-in or workaround that builds in this same functionality.
The key is to have a free downloadable product for each category of your blog. That
way, your text ads will always promote a free download thats on a similar topic to the
blog post theyre reading.
The Art of Writing Text Ads
If youre selling anything online, or trying to build an email list, or just expecting
people to click on your social media links, you must become an expert at writing text
ads that attract reader attention, communicate a succinct message, and persuade the
user to take immediate action.
And you must do all that in a very limited number of words. The harsh discipline of
writing for a very constrained space forces you to produce the best work youve ever
created.

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Writing text ads is not particularly difficult. But it is different from what you may
think and it is a rare skill.
If youve been trained in a traditional ad agency, where display advertising was the
norm where copywriters reported to art directors youre in for a surprise.
If you were trained in long-form direct response copywriting, you have a new skill set
to master.
The inline ads that drive millions of dollars in product sales are text ads. Theyre
generally a captivating headline, a couple of lines of benefit-laden body copy, and a
call to action the same as Google AdWords.
The same goes for building an email list. The text ads that drive millions of email
subscribes are also text ads, in the same format.
The same skills needed to write an inline text ad in an email newsletter or blog post
are those you need to write a 95-character Google AdWords text ad, or a 140character Twitter message, or an effective, 55-character email subject line.
As with any online ad that you want someone to click, there are three basic rules:
1. Dont give everything away in the ad. Is your text ad sufficiently intriguing to
prompt the recipient to click your link? Or do you give away the entire take-away in
the text ad, diminishing the subscribers incentive to download your free product?
2. Dont trick subscribers into clicking your link. Mystery is a good thing, but
make sure not to cross the line of tricking your readers into clicking your ad for a
download thats not in line with what youre promising them. The email text ad is not
creative if it prompts the recipient to click your ad, but subsequently disappoints,
confuses, or worse, alienates the user.
3. Keep the download relevant to the category youre publishing in. If your free
download is about kayaking, dont publish a text ad with copy solely about fishing,
even if the download is about using the kayak to get to the fishing venue.

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Publishers Using Text Ads

Heres an example of a text ad on Nutrition Actions daily blog.
The target audience for a person reading this post is most likely someone who needs
to reduce their sodium intake. Therefore, Nutrition Action pairs a text ad with this
article that promotes their free Salt in Food: Replacing the Salt Shaker eBook download.

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You can see how someone reading this article would be more inclined to download
their report and sign up for their email newsletter than if they promoted a free
download about curing head lice, or reducing wrinkles naturally. Alignment is key.
As part of our basic SEO best practices, we tell publishers to create a new text
include ad for every free download they produce. The secret to writing them is that
there isnt any one secret: test, test and test again.
Some sources for your text ad may come from copy thats already in your landing
page. For example, when we published Subscription Website Publishing handbook, we
used the copy on the landing page come up with these five text ads:
Claim your FREE digital copy of Subscription Website Publishing: The 9 Most
Profitable Subscription Website Business Models now.
The only complete guide to subscription website publishing is now available.
Download now.
Find out whats wrong with some of the biggest subscription based websites
and learn how you can always make more money, no matter how
successful you already are. Download Subscription Website Publishing for FREE.
Ready for the next step? Download our complete, exhaustive guide to
starting a subscription website.
Our clients pay handsomely to gain access to the Mequoda consulting teams
expertise. Download Subscription Website Publishing: The 9 Most Profitable Subscription
Website Business Models, and get the complete outline of our best practices all in
one place, to read and reference any time you need it.
There are no formulas or special tricks other than playing with your copywriting
technique and seeing which one gets the most clicks and downloads. For every free
download you create, come up with five different text ads you can use in your articles
to provoke downloads. Use tracking codes on each of them and rotate through them
until you know which reigns supreme and then stick with that one.
If nothing else, the four pieces of conversion architecture we just discussed in depth,
RCLPs, OFIEs, floaters and text ads, are your first priority when developing or
redesigning a website. Youll see them over and over again throughout the rest of this
book!
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Optimizing a Site For Search
How to turn every page of your website into a landing page

for search visitors

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Picking SEO Keyword Fights You Can Win

All SEO keywords are not created equallyvolume and
competition matter!
But everything you just learned will be for nothing, if youre not using SEO to
develop content for your site that attracts website visitors.
True or false?
The most effective SEO keyword strategy is to compete vigorously for top placement
for the most popular keyword suggestions returned by the Google Keyword
Planner (see: https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home) for a given
root keyword phrase (Primary Keyword Phrase).
If you answered true, you might want to reconsider.
On the surface, aiming for the most popular SEO keywords seems like a good
strategy. But in reality, it can be like trying to slay a dragon with a peashooter. The big
guys with the bazookas may have you outgunned.
The little-known fact is, if your SEO keyword strategy is targeting only highly popular
terms, your odds of SEO success are minimal. Alternatively, you might want to settle
for aiming at smaller targets and succeeding.
Heres how to decide on the best SEO keyword strategy for
your website
An effective SEO strategy begins with extensive research. Sure, you need to know
which keyword phrases are searched most frequently by customers in your market. However,

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that information alone is not enough to guide your SEO efforts and create the right
keyword-rich editorial content.
Beyond simply searched most frequently, you need to know a number: how many
searches are done each month on each individual keyword phrase in your keyword
universe.
Finally, you also need to know what the competition is for those phrases: how many
pages currently serve up those phrases.
The simple but often overlooked truth is this: Theres a popularity contest going on
within your keyword universe, and some keyword phrases are used much more often
than others. That can create an intense competition and often your website wont
have the gravitas to win.
Pick keyword fights you can win
If you do the math, youll realize that theres a keyword risk ranking inside each
keyword cluster in your keyword universe, and this information can help prioritize
your choices. You may discover that its unwise to target the most popular keyword
phrases, especially if theres a lot of competition for those phrases.
The best SEO keyword strategy is to target keyword phrases that are more modest in
popularity, and for which there is little competition.
To use an economic metaphor, youre looking for modest demand and low supply.
The Google Keyword Planner can tell you the demand.

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Googling the keyword in quotes at Google.com will tell you the exact match search
results the competition.
And the Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) reveals the relationship of demand to
competition.
The KCI is the estimated annual search impressions (global monthly searches taken
from the GKP multiplied by 12 months) divided by the number of exact match
search engine results (the competition) at a point in time. Read more about using the
Google Search Phrase Match command to find exact match search results.
Using the Keyword Competitive Index (KCI)
The sweet spot for your SEO efforts is often a keyword phrase with a high KCI.
At Mequoda Daily, we generally consider any keyword phrase with a KCI of .5 or
better to be a high value, low-risk target. A keyword phrase with a KCI of .1 to .49 is
a B-grade target. Anything with a lower KCI is not generally a reasonable target
for Mequoda Daily, and most of our consulting clients unless the competition is
practically non-existent, making it a shoo-in for page-one ranking.
Heres an example from Mequoda Daily.

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One of our old primary keyword clusters was website homepage ideas. We
published a free report, Website Homepage Ideas, on a Rapid Conversion Landing
Page (RCLP).
On a simple broad match search (the type of search most users do), Google ranked
Mequoda Daily first among the 305 million matches it has indexed for the phrase
website homepage ideas.
Google ranked Mequoda Daily second among the 477 million pages indexed for the
singular phrase website homepage idea.

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Both phrases were successfully targeted at the time based on a great KCI between .5
and 1.
The subtle power of how to
Heres a tip that every online editor and copywriter should know.
Many people start their search by typing the words how to and a verb in the query
box. Adding how to and verbs to your primary keyword phrases can result in
optimal rankings. Test it out with the GKP and see for yourself.
Takeaway: If you dont consider volume and competition, your SEO success will be
random.
Mequoda supplies all its clients with something we call the Google Visibility Report, a
spreadsheet that displays competitive data for all keywords, The GVR enables them
to target, track and manage their SEO efforts and results. Over time, it will reveal
whether theyve correctly evaluated the risk of a particular SEO keyword target.

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Perhaps most important, a GVR enables them to discover the best SEO keyword
phrases to target for attracting the most high-quality organic traffic to their websites.
We use these tools to optimize every page of our websites. Youll learn how to build a
Google Visibility Report in a few chapters.

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Writing Content with an Optimal Keyword Density

Get more page one rankings in Google by being a better
keyword density checker for your business
In the online marketing circles you might be hearing density is dead but that
couldnt be further from the truth. And any SEO guru worth their salt wont tell you
density is dead, either. All testing confirms its alive and well.
As we all know, where you rank in search engine results wont be based entirely on
keyword densitythere are many other factors like site reputation, social media
signals, etc. Your goal is to not let keyword density preclude you from getting on
page one it might not get you there, but it wont exclude you.
Our SEO process has several layers that starts with keyword research and ends with
content marketing and an accompanying freemium. Somewhere in the middle of this
process we take what we see as a great keyword and drop it into the article or landing
page that were writing.
Typically when were writing a 500-word article, the keyword or keyword phrase is
included in the:
Title
Subhead
Body of the article
Weve always been advocates of using your keywords within body copy, but there was
a period when all it really took was a great keyword in the title and meta description

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to get ranked. This isnt the case anymore. Google wants it in your copy, but they also
want variations.
Google has begun creating their own meta descriptions to show up in search results,
sometimes instead of using the carefully optimized ones that you write. This makes
including your targeted keyword in the body copy of your article even more
important.
The reason Google is creating its own meta descriptions (those little blurbs that show
up in the Google search page) is for user experience to prove the article will help
serve their search. Google pulls in a sentence from the article that uses the keyword
the user was searching for.
The lesson here is that if you only use your primary keyword in the title, Google
wont have anything to pull into that meta description when they need it, and theyll
be less likely to show you as a top result.
Optimizing your body content
This is a lesson that we teach our clients magazine and blog editors when we train
them on search engine optimization.
Write a blog title that includes your keyword or keyword phrase, preferably including
it at the beginning of the title.
Write a subtitle that includes the keyword, again, as close to the beginning as you can.
Write an 800 word article (could be longer, depending on the publication) and include
the keyword several* times.

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*When we say several times here, its completely dependent on the

keyword. Keep reading.
In order to keep Google happy, but avoid any keyword-stuffing, we like to see a
keyword density of between 1 and 3.
Back in the day, we looked for a density of between 3 and 5, but weve recently
lowered after testing what works, and what Google appears to be happy with.
For a less manual approach to keyword density, install the SEO Tool Keyword
Density Checker for WordPress.
Or, if your page is live, try the Keyword Density Checker from SEOBook.
To do it manually, heres the equation we use to manually determine the keyword
density of an article:
Keyword Density = # of times used divided by number of words in
article multiplied by # of words in keyword phrase.
For example, Ive used the keyword phrase keyword density checker five times in
this chapter once in the title, once in the subtitle, and three times in the article.
Lets say the number of words in the chapter is 500, and the number of words in the
keyword phase is three: keyword-density-checker.
(5/500)*3 = .03 which is equal to 3%. A three-word keyword phrase needs to be
inserted five times to reach 3% keyword density.

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If the keyword phrase only had one word in it, Id have to use it a few more time to
increase the density of the article, for example:
(15/500)*1 = 3% A one-word keyword would need to be inserted 15 times in an
article to reach 3% keyword density.
Even though this chapter is truthfully about 700 words long, the density is still steady
at 2.1 because a long keyword phrase was chosen. Not bad, right?
Want to do a little test?
Pick a phrase from your website and find out who ranks for it (that you also rank for)
Then check the keyword density of the top ten pages.
Whats the density of your page?
Whats the density of theirs?
Analyze and ponder to see if theres any improvement opportunity.
Now, find a keyword you want to rank for. Go through the same process to see how
you might get your page five post onto page one.
Its one solid check on the checklist of SEO.

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Proven Strategies for SEO Campaign Management

The keys to SEO campaign management can be mastered
in 35 steps
Search is the most fundamental element of content marketing. If you thought social
media was the silver bullet, you were wrong. Its at least a bronze bullet, but social
media is just one stepping-stone towards search optimization. More likes and Tweets
equal better rank. Better rank means youll keep getting website traffic to articles
without even promoting them.
As I noted earlier, one major asset to any Mequoda System is a freemium, or a free
product download. These are the 34 steps for creating, recycling and promoting an
SEO campaign with a freemium.
SEO campaign management part #1:
Choose keywords
Theres no SEO without keyword optimization. If you want people to find you, you must first find
out what theyre looking for.
1. Research audience interest and keywords using the Google Keyword Planner.
2. Choose two keyword phrases from the GKP, make sure theyre the best ones you
can find. Remember, these phrases have high search and a comparably low number
of competing pages.
Decide which content will be most useful

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Google has come to appreciate quality content in order to scare spammy SEOs away. Its more
important than ever to optimize your best pages and create the content that has already proven itself.
3. Review the most frequently asked questions posted to your online forum.
4. Determine which of your paid products are the best sellers.
5. Examine your magazine cover stories to determine which have the best sellthrough.
6. Determine which sessions at your live events are the most popular.
7. Review your direct mail results to determine which teaser lines create the most
sales.
8. Review the subject lines of your most successful email marketing campaigns to
determine which create the highest open rates.
Create your freemium
Your freemium needs not only to be written, but optimized for search too. After all, its the title and
subhead that will be repeated throughout the copy on your landing page. Injecting keywords in your
title makes it easy to optimize a page naturally.
9. Write a title that is eight to 12 words.
10. Use your primary keyword (the best phrase you could find) in the title.

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11. Add the secondary keyword (the second-best phrase you could find) in the
subtitle after a colon.
12. Feel free to repurpose content from your website. Some of the best freemiums
are simply mash-ups of five epic blog articles.
13. Edit and make sure you dont make these mistakes.*
14. Include a call to action at the back of the freemium, like an up-sell to a premium
product.
15. Include a URL in the footer that links back to the site (or freemium archive).
16. Write the freemium in clear, non-technical language.
17. Design the freemium to be clean and uncluttered.
18. Lay out the freemium to be printed on 8.5 x 11 paper.
Write your RCLP
Your RCLP is what will be found in search engines, so make it count. By repeating the name of the
freemium, which has been optimized, youll have a search-friendly page, but try injecting them
naturally into copy, too.
19. Write around 1,500-2,500 words worth of interesting copy about the freemium so
that Google reads it as a valuable, information-packed page.

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20. Repurpose copy from the freemium into the RCLP. Use it to construct a list of
takeaways from the freemium.
21. Use your keywords several times in the copy, but dont stuff them in there. We
usually aim for a keyword density of 1-3% (more on that next).
22. Create an order form in editorial (OFIE) for the top of the page so that a reader
can submit their email address immediately. Include the keyword-optimized title of
the freemium in every OFIE.
23. Repeat the OFIE throughout the page so that every time you scroll, theres always
one above the fold.
24. Design the cover of the freemium so the title is large enough to be read in a small
image/thumbnail on the page. Include the cover image in all the OFIEs on your
page.
25. Allow comments on your RCLP and encourage people to use them to write
testimonials.
26. Enable social sharing buttons to boost inbound links and social cred.
Link everything to your RCLP
Search engines appreciate pages with links, and when many internal pages link to your RCLP, it
tells Google that you find this page to be very important. And whats more important than conversion
pages?

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27. Create a press release and submit it to the best free press release sites, and paid
ones if you want.
28. Add the OFIE to the top of your category page (using an ad server like OpenX).
29. Add the OFIE to the top of every article in that category (again, something like
OpenX).
30. Add a text ad into every article in the related category. The copy promotes the
freemium and links to the RCLP.
31. Send out an email to your own list promoting the new freemium.
32. Work out an arrangement with your partners for them to promote the freemium
and RCLP to their lists.
33. Send out Tweets and post to Facebook about the new freemium.
34. Get in touch with industry bloggers and send them the PDF of your freemium.
Include a link to the RCLP and a short bulleted list of takeaways to make their job
easier.
35. Keep track of everywhere you posted your press release, and all of the sites who
wrote about your freemium. Create an ongoing press list from this so that you can
focus your efforts more effectively the next time.

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Building a Keyword Universe

Instead of researching new keywords every time you write a post or create a new
freemium for your SEO campaign, you might want to consider creating a keyword
universe. It will make steps 1, 2, 9, 10, 11 and 21 much less time consuming.
Your Keyword Universe is the total number of keyword phrases you are tracking for
your website. Its the total number of keyword phrases your potential audience is
searching for that your content could potentially answer.
Your keyword universe consists of primary keyword phrases and secondary keyword
phrases.
Your primary keyword phrases, or clusters, will generally be your most broad
keyword phrases, usually your website topics or categories. Within your primary
keyword phrases, or clusters, you will have hundreds to thousands of related
secondary keyword phrases.
The secondary keyword phrases are usually 3-5 words long and may be very specific.
You use these phrases in articles, free report titles and anywhere else youre looking
to build traffic. The more specific the term is, the more likely you are to be ranked.
You can build your keyword universe by using the free AdWords Keyword Planner
and exporting the list of keywords you discover into a categorized spreadsheet. From
there, you can use tools like Advanced Web Ranking to find out where you rank on
the keywords, and track your progress month to month. You can manually check the
competition on keywords also, so that when you choose a keyword, youre picking a

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keyword fight you can win. When we produce these for our clients, its a 20- to 40hour process in total.
Picking Out Desirable Keywords
Mary Van Doren is our lead copywriter and we love her insights on SEO. Shes a
trained wordsmith, so if anyone can squash a keyword into a sentence and make it
sound like theyre not even trying, its Mary. Heres what she suggests:
Seek out keywords with other desirable traits besides their keyword
competitive index (KCI). Its easy to nail the SEO without even trying, or at
least without writing the often dull copy you wind up with when you have to
manipulate your text awkwardly to include less targeted keywords.
Look for nouns that score well in both singular and plural, since its always a
challenge to use one or the other only. We just write naturally that way using
both.
Keep your eyes peeled for keyword phrases that consist of how to plus a
verb. They rank well, and imagine how easy it is to write how to in a variety
of sentences.
Youre in luck if you can locate keyword phrases in which the last word of
keyword phrase 1 is the same as the first word in keyword phrase 2. If clinical
laboratory and laboratory business are both in your universe, youll get
double the pleasure every time you write clinical laboratory business.
SEO campaign management is a bit of an artform, isnt it? And were not ashamed to
admit that researching keywords can be considered an actual hobby of ours. First,
you get to analyze the data in front of you, then you create a product that uses the
data, then you see if your data and product produce the results you hypothesized. If

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they dont, try again; And if they do, try, try again! Long-time Mequoda operators
have 30 or more RCLPs and freemiums in their arsenal; how many are in yours?
Recycling Freemiums During an SEO Slump
Freemiums with RCLPs that are optimized for search and any good blockbuster
RCLP, one that ranks in the No. 1 position for a good keyword phrase, can bring in
60% or more email subscribers. And if youre wondering why we love email
subscribers, its because email gives us the chance to court potential buyers and
subscribers with good content before we ask them to buy anything.
With all of this in mind, sometimes a very effective freemium can drop in search.
This means that a funnel of new email leads can suddenly come to a halt. While
theres no magic way to know why Google would drop a first page ranking article
onto the second page or below, these are a few factors:
Too many people found it in search and clicked the back button quickly,
signifying that the content isnt what they were looking for. This is an
indicator that the keyword youre targeting doesnt match what youre actually
offering on the page.
You bought backlinks at one point, and Google is catching up with your black
hat practices.
Other pages targeting the same keywords have more social media backlinks
than yours does.
You keyword-stuffed the post with an astronomical keyword density and
Google is now punishing you.
The page hasnt been updated in a long time, and Google is considering it
outdated.

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Since our clients are all trained the white hat way, the most common reason for a
drop on an RCLP is that last bullet; the page has simply gotten stale. Perhaps it hasnt
been updated in a while, or nobody is sharing it in social media anymore. In any case,
nobody has given it a good hug in a while and Google has begun to pick the cooler
pages over yours. When is life not like high school, right?
The Second Life of your Freemium Strategy

This is the point where its time to recycle, refresh, and re-promote. Its time to get a
makeover! If you want to refresh one that has begun to lose rank and needs a boost,
follow the next steps:
1. Review the comments youve gotten on your freemium thus far in email, social
media, or on the RCLP itself if your RCLP allows comments (we suggest it does).
Use this feedback to create a better report, but also to write better bullet points (pain
points!) for the description of your freemium.
2. Once your report has been updated, update your RCLP that updates the content
and makes it more current, like an updated for 2016 sticker.
3. Create a new press release touting the update and submit it to the best free press
release sites, and paid ones if you want.
4. Refresh your text ads and OFIEs with new copy. The copy promotes the
freemium and links to the RCLP.

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5. Write a blog post announcing the updated freemium. Write at least three new blog
posts over the next several weeks and months that recycle content from the
freemium and promotes it at the same time.
6. Send out a circ builder email to your own list promoting the updated freemium. If
you are able to tell who downloaded the report previously, consider sending them an
email letting them know the report has been updated.
7. Work out an arrangement with your partners for them to promote the freemium
and RCLP to their lists.
8. Send out Tweets and post to Facebook about the new freemium. Schedule Tweets
out for the next few weeks and for the next 12 months so that its always being
refreshed.
9. Get in touch with industry bloggers and send them the PDF of your freemium.
Include a link to the RCLP and a short bulleted list of take-aways to make their job
easier.
10. Keep track of everywhere you posted your press release, and all of the sites that
wrote about your freemium. Create an ongoing press list from this so that you can
focus your efforts more effectively the next time.
Bonus: As mentioned, one of our best practices is to allow comments on RCLPs.
This is because you can use it as an area for people to say nice things about your
download. It also helps with SEO, because Google likes pages with comments on
them.

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A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Google Visibility

Report
Five steps to building a blueprint for a well-optimized website
Our clients publish in many different niches: food, investing, archaeology, martial
arts, natural health, golf among others, and that doesnt even include any of our B2B
clients. When they first come to us, they have nothing in common with one another,
but after working with us for six months to a year, they all have one thing in
common: a Google Visibility Report (GVR).
The Google Visibility Report (GVR) enables you to target, track and manage your
SEO efforts and results. Over time, it will reveal whether youve correctly evaluated
the risk of a particular SEO keyword target.
Perhaps most important, the GVR will enable you and your online publishing team to
discover the best SEO keyword phrases to target for attracting the most high quality
organic traffic to your website.
Every time you write a new blog post or name a new free report, you can use the
GVR to pick a title based on a keyword that your audience has proven to be looking
for. Because why would you title it otherwise?
Theres a very important metric in every GVR we call the Keyword Competitive
Index (KCI). The KCI is a simple formula that takes the annual search volume for a
keyword phrase and divides it by the amount of exact Google listings for that
keyword: Annual Search Volume/Exact Google Listings.
The higher the KCI, the better chance you have of ranking on the term. If you can
find keyword phrases with a KCI of 1 or higher, it means theres more search volume
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than exact Google listings. These are the type of keyword phrases worth targeting,
especially if theyre highly relevant to your audience and have high search volume.
How to Build a Google Visibility Report
To answer right up front a common question: Creating Google Visibility Reports is
one of the services we provides to our clients, so you might be wondering why were
telling you how to build a GVR. The reason is that it takes between 40-80 hours to
build if you want to build it on your own, more power to you!
In order to get the true process for the GVR, I interviewed our analytics director,
Norann Oleson who broke down the process into these steps:
Step 1: Brainstorming
The first step in the GVR process is looking at what you publish, what you sell, and
how closely the two are tied together. In a perfect Mequoda System, every free piece
of content is related to a paid product or an aligned sponsor. Therefore, for every
blog category, there should be a free download in that category that leads to a paid or
sponsored product in the same category.
To see how far along you are with this alignment, we begin with a brainstorm. Part of
this brainstorm may include re-categorizing your website with new topics that you
arent currently covering or eliminating ones that you are. We often do a content
audit to help us figure out what topics to focus on, says Oleson. I always research
more topics than needed because we will also look at search volume to help narrow
down the topics to focus on.

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Step 2: Search Volume Research

Where else to start but the worlds most popular search engine? As mentioned
before, we use Googles Keyword Planner (GKP) to determine what search phrases
people are looking for. You must create and sign into a Google account to use this
tool even though its free. The GKP was designed specifically to run AdWords
campaigns, so it has many more functions that we dont need for simple keyword
research. This is the process:
Choose Search for new keyword and ad group ideas.
Enter a word or phrase into the search box (ex. azaleas)

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Targeting: The default setting is All Languages/Google depending on the

audience you can customize the GKP provides a high level of geo-targeting that the
old Keyword Tool did not, which can be critically important for regional
publications.

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Hit Get Ideas and select the tab that says Keyword Ideas.
The GKP will suggest up to 800 proximity phrases (phrases that occur in close
physical proximity on a webpage to the original seed phrase).
Download the results. The only data needed is Keyword and Avg. Monthly
Searches. All other columns can be deleted. Save to Excel.

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Important note: There is a column that says Competition. This is the bidding
competition for Adwords campaigns, not webpage competition.
Step 3: Research the Competition
At this point, we might look at the spreadsheet and see phrases that make no sense or
are misspelled and need to be removed.
Next, we Google each phrase in quotes either manually or with a program.

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Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) is a program which can process large lists of phrases
but it has an important limitation phrases with no exact match will come back with
broad match data. Be careful not to confuse the two.
Step 4: Organize the Data

Start with your GKP file. These will be your first columns, columns A and B of the
GVR that youre now beginning to build.
Next, create columns for Annual Searches, Google Listings and Google KCI.
Annual searches = Monthly search volume (from GKP) x 12
Google Listings (competition) = Google the phrase in quotes to get this
number (from Step 3)

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Google Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) = Annual search / Google

listings
Mequodas KCI Grading Scale

Not sure which keywords to go after? Use the KCI as your guide. The sweet spot
for your SEO efforts is often a keyword phrase with a high KCI. At Mequoda we
generally consider any keyword phrase with a KCI of .5 or better to be a high value,
low-risk target. A keyword phrase with a KCI of .1 to .49 is a B-grade target.
Anything with a lower KCI is not generally a good target for Mequoda and most of
our consulting clients. However, keep competition in mind, too, because theres little
point in targeting a word with a high KCI and 50 million competing pages. On that
note, feel free to target keywords that have competition under 100,000 competing

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pages. Even though the traffic may be low, these keyword phrases are often a shoo-in
for page-one ranking and an easy win. To quote the old John Wayne line Im not
looking for a fair fight, Im looking for a fight I can win.
Step 5: Benchmark
Create columns for Google Position, Google Visibility Index (GVI) and Annual
Impressions.
If you have multiple topics/clusters then you can add a column for a Primary
Keyword Cluster. This is usually the name of the category an article will publish into
on your blog. We can use the GVR to determine the name of the Primary Keyword
Cluster.
Google Position: This column tells us whether or not we rank on a keyword already.
We use AWR to automatically Google all phrases against any URL provided. It will
look at the first 50 positions and provide the ranking URL strings.

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Google Visibility Index (GVI): The GVI is based on Google position. This is
the percentage of search traffic that will see your post headline and description in
their search results, based on which page it shows up on. For example, if your article
shows up on page 1 in Google, we assume that 100% of searchers looking for that
term will see your article in their results. If it shows up on page two, only 5% will see
it because most people dont visit page 2 for a search result.
Page 1: GVI = 100%
Page 2: GVI = 5%
Page 3: GVI = 1%
Pages 4 & 5: GVI = 0
Annual Impressions: This is how many annual impressions we estimate youll get
based on your GVI. For example, if the term gets 2000 searches per year and youre
on page one, we expect you will get up to 2000 impressions on that Google results
page in a year. Users will then choose if they want to click it to read more. The
formula for this column is Annual Searches x GVI.

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Building Your Cluster Summary

As I mentioned previously, you can categorize your keywords into different
clusters.
Google places high value on publishers that they consider authoritative so its
important not just to focus on individual phrases but also on clusters of phrases. The
ultimate goal is to have a depth of posts on the same topic. If there is one post for
each keyword, a cluster with 300-400 phrases might have several hundred posts.
To simplify the jargon, think of the clusters as your website categories and each
keyword in that cluster as a blog post. With this in mind, the GVR becomes an index
of current and potential content on your website, an SEO roadmap you can use to
plan new content and track existing content.
This content should be updated and monitored regularly.
Annually update search volume, Google listings, perform new keyword
research.
Monthly update Google position to see if you have gained or lost rank.
Daily editors should always double-check search volume and Google
Listings (competition) before choosing keywords.
Weve been building GVRs at Mequoda for some time now, and its an ever-evolving
process as Google changes their tools, APIs and datasets. So far weve been able to
work with the data they provide to create extremely valuable and optimized websites
using the GVR.

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Some of the Adjustments Weve Made Recently

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) isnt perfect and can serve up to 20% of inaccurate
results. One of the biggest weaknesses is revealed when you have certain phrases that
are 3, 4, 5 or more words long. Theyll often show up with unusually high Google
listings (several million).
When Norann performed the exercise manually, she discovered that many of these
phrases actually had no exact match results, so the tool was giving broad match data.
To compensate for this type of error, weve been scanning the results to identify
longer phrases that we would expect to have low competition and checking them
manually by going to Google.com and searching for the phrase in quotes, as
explained above.
NOTE: Its important to be logged out of your account when you do this, otherwise
the results may be personalized to you and the numbers skewed.

Weve also updated our own plugin to check and detect errors with AWR that we
discover. Its not a perfect process, but were dedicated to working on the behalf of
our clients to always be updating and improving because the GVR is the single most
useful tool a publisher can have in their online marketing arsenal.

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Social Media Optimization

How to drive more traffic to your website and build a larger
email list through social media

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Using Social Media to Drive Email Circulation

Social media is not the enemy of email.
In fact, it can be used to build email circulation.
Most publishers weve talked to say social media isnt a huge sales driver for them.
Sure, theyve made a few bucks here, but theyre not making Dell money or anything
(Dell makes millions of dollars per year through Twitter alone).
However, social media is more often than not, a big traffic driver, and more
importantly, an SEO-supporter. And if youve gotten this far, then you know that
both of these components result in revenue. Every Tweet, reTweet, like and
comment is a social signal that tells Google youre part of the cool club and that
people like you.
I read a Tweet once that said, I like to say that Twitter is like a bar, Facebook is your
living room and LinkedIn is the local chamber of commerce. I dont know the
woman who wrote it, Brenda S. Stoltz from Ariad Partners, but the idea is so
relatable that I couldnt just try to make up my own version; I decided to elaborate
instead.
Twitter is the bar. You talk to everyone and anyone. You have a few too many and
youre telling people your life story. More importantly, other people are there, like
you, to meet people and build new relationships. Some people talk too much and
dont listen, others listen well but might not talk as much. Either way, theres a
revolving captive audience and there are relationships developing in the bar. As a
business, you should know that theres a lot of chatter to keep up with, but so many
different ways to become everyones best friend.
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Facebook is indeed like your living room. You dont invite everyone from the bar to
your living room, but you might have hung out with a couple of your new bar friends
at a more sobering place and have become comfortable with inviting them to your
living room. When youre a business on Facebook, you need to remember that youre
still kind of that bar personthe one they dont necessarily invite into their living
room. However, if you brought some good brownies (a sale) or beer (discounts) they
might let you in to stay as long as you dont creep out everyone else.
LinkedIn is sort of like the local chamber of commerce; however I like to think of it
more like a conference too. Everyone on LinkedIn is on it for a professional reason,
whether theyre looking for a job, trying to establish themselves as an expert in
LinkedIn Answers, or build a bigger network. As businesses, we should recognize
that the bulk of people on LinkedIn are business people and dont go to LinkedIn to
find deals like they do Twitter and Facebook. If youre a B2B publisher, this is great
news and makes your updates and group interactions very easy. If youre a consumer
magazine it just means that your best efforts are likely spent elsewhere.
But there are other social networks to think about now too, like Pinterest and
YouTube. Even Google+.
Google+ is like the party you got invited to, but youre pretty much the only one that
showed up. Youre there for the good karma (SEO) and because you cant really leave
(Google is watching you!) Its awkward, and nobody laughs at your
jokes. And everybody is wondering why they came and how they can figure out an
excuse to run out the front door without looking like a jerk.

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Pinterest is a like a baby shower, and thats fairly accurate because 92% of pins on
Pinterest are created or shared by women. This is where people come together to
display their craft projects and recipes. Everybody oggles each others fun ideas and
relentlessly share them with one another.
YouTube is like a night out at karaoke. The person on stage is the star and you cant
look away even if you want to. YouTube videos offer instant authority, regardless of
the quality of the video. In the same respect, you have to love a person who gets up
and sings, regardless of whether theyre a Whitney Houston or a Rebecca Black. Song
choice is what counts everyone loves to sing along. The same goes for content its
what you say that matters.
So What About Email?
Some might argue that email is more personal than social media because an email gets
delivered to your inbox, whereas you need to log into Facebook or Twitter to read a
message or post. What cant be argued is that email still drives the highest profits and
typically touches the most number of people per promotion.
There was a time when publishers feared social media a little bit. And thats not
without merit, either. Savvy folks often unsubscribe from emails and like a
Facebook page instead. This isnt the worst thing in the world; it just means that a
subscriber wants to hear from you less often. And as we all know, Facebook knows
how to limit your exposure.
Thats why its becoming more important to build your social media back up list. If
you cant keep people subscribed through email, your social media lists can come in
handy.

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Since all of our email subscribers become subscribed by downloading a free white
paper, weve added like us and follow us buttons to our thank-you pages. That
way, right after a user has felt comfortable enough to give us their email address, they
might also be warmed up enough to click like or follow too. By doing this, our
monthly likes and follows have skyrocketed tenfold.
Now, how can you use those social media lists to build your email list to the newbies?
Easy. Here are a few things we do at Mequoda and lessons weve learned from our
clients. As you might already know, a good Mequoda system relies on a robust
collection of excellent ebooks, special reports and white papers to give away. So
naturally, all of our tips include giving something away!
Twitter
Obviously there are a million ways to send out links to your landing pages, but heres
one strategy.
Every week we have Free Report Friday. Weve even done White Paper
Wednesday on our @Mequoda account, and wed recommend you do the same.
You dont want to commercialize your Twitter feed too much, but you can quickly
convert Twitter followers to email subscribers by tossing around a freemium here and
there. Weve found that Twitter users convert 200% better than visitors from search
likely because theyre highly qualified leads. After all, they were already
subscribed to your content through Twitter!

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Facebook
You can always promote
your free white papers on
Facebook. You can even
promote those posts so
that they get more reach
beyond the usual measly
percent that Facebook
allows to see it. But you
can also create a custom
tab that shows up on your main page, like Natural Health Advisory.
This leads to a full landing

page that asks the user to
like the page and also
collects their email address.

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LinkedIn
Same idea here. If you can get your editorial staff and anyone engaged in the
production of your freemiums involved in promoting them, youll have a bigger
network of people to promote them to! Your brand page can also be used for
promotion and you can add them into your products section, too.
Google+
Google+ acts much like Facebook in the way posts are made, so go ahead and post
your free white paper on your brand page. Heck, ask your editors to post it too.
When weve talked to publishers about using Google+, they swear it boosts the rank
of their posts (even if Google swears it doesnt!)
Bonus points if you host a Google Hangout every time you launch a new freemium.
You can set up the Hangout with a few of your editors, review the key takeaways and
ask attendees to download it too. You can then do a Q&A about the freemium, or,
depending on your niche, have a group discussion about the topic.
YouTube
Think you cant collect an email address through video? Well, publishers like Knitting
Daily create short clips of how-to projects and then give viewers links to download
the patterns online. In some cases, they might ask for an email address, but theres an
email-collection floater that theyll see when they visit, and each page is designed to
have a related free report promoted as well. Basically, if someone comes to the site
from this video, theyll have no trouble discovering a call to action.

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Pinterest
Our friends at FaveCrafts are circ-building geniuses on Pinterest. Then again, if any
publisher were going to thrive on Pinterest, it would certainly be a craft publisher!
Search craft ebook and youll get pages of pins of their ebooks, pinned by users
everywhere. But how do you think that might have happened? Well, FaveCrafts has
their own Pinterest account where they have a whole board dedicated to their ebooks.
And judging by the number of repins they get on each project, nobody cares that
theyre self-promoting. Not all of their ebooks require an email to download, but they
do all have a giant floater that pops up to capture their email address.
YouTube
Think you cant collect an email address through video? Well, publishers like Knitting
Daily create short clips of how-to projects and then give viewers links to download
the patterns online. In order to download most of the patterns, the user must submit
their email address.

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What is Social Media Optimization?

Develop your social media strategy in eight steps
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is what we call the process of optimizing your
content and your business, for social media.
In Audience Development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes first because
content comes first. Youre creating content that has been optimized for some set of
keywords that our target audience is looking for.
SMO is what we do with that content after it has been produced, and its not easy. If
you want to be successful in social media, and you want your content to be read,
clicked and shared, then it takes as much work as any other task. To get the most out
of your social media efforts, keep reading.
1. Create a social media style guide.
Before anything, pull down your editorial style guide and highlight anything that
might apply to social. For example, dont just look at, say, how you capitalize words,
but also look at how you handle competitors. Some brands are happy to ReTweet
and comment on the Tweets of their competitors, or share a recipe from an unknown
blogger on their Facebook wall. And some simply are not OK with that one bit.
2. Pick a platform.
Were hot for CoSchedule. Its a WordPress plugin that allows you to schedule
Tweets directly in WordPress, on the same page as the article itself. If youre a
Mequoda Gold Member, you either have, or will soon have Haven Social, which is
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powered by CoSchedule. Hootsuite is another option which works great for

businesses because they offer reporting and it allows you to assign different tasks to
team members.
3. Assign responsibilities.
As you know, the age of the Internet has turned editors into marketers who are
responsible for their content. This applies to social media too. Unless you are a power
house publisher that can afford a room full of social media specialists, like the
Chicago Tribune (@ColonelTribune is totally worth it, FYI), then your editors will
most likely be running your social media. First of all they know the content best,
second of all, theyre already grammar savvy and probably wont let out any typos.
If you have an online marketing team though, they might have secure jobs in social
media. For example, maybe your Managing Editor just writes the Tweets, and your
marketing team is responsible for editing the Tweets, scheduling them, sending out
promotional Tweets, and brand building beyond just content marketing. Or maybe
your Managing Editor does it all. Anyway, use this step to determine who does what,
and especially, who hits the send and schedule buttons.
4. Create social media formulas.
What is SMO without structure, right? Over the next few chapters youll learn how to
use the 12x12x12 content recycling method. Youll write twelve unique Tweets for
each article. Youll schedule them for 12 days. Then youll schedule them for 12
months. For an entire year, your article will be promoted and you only have to do it
once. For Facebook, LinkedIn and G+, write two unique posts. Schedule on the first
day, then again in six months.

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5. Create a series of non-promotional posts.
What else will you publish as part of your SMO strategy? For example, on
Throwback Thursdays, People posts old covers of their magazines. Martha
Stewart sources ideas from their Facebook fans for future issues. Be creative and
come up with a series of images you can share, that will provoke comments, likes,
and more shares. This strategy in particular will be the key to increasing
your Facebook visibility.
6. Decide what to do with premium content.
Does your content sit behind a paywall? Thats cool, youre already used to forgoing
search traffic anyway. But if you decide that you want to drip out tips with links back
to some kind of access challenge page (see below), just be clear on that strategy out of
the gate. Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz) allows social users to read five
articles for free, then they get this paywall. And its OK because theyre not getting it
the first time.
7. Integrate social media into your advertising packages.
Another use for social media is advertising. Publishers are beginning to include sets
of social media posts, or co-sponsored posts as a part of their ad packages. If you
decide to do this, remember that advertorial guidelines still apply and you must add
#ad or #sponsored to your post or make it abundantly obvious that the post was
paid for.
8. Create a social media calendar.
Once all of the above is figured out, its time to create your social media calendar.

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This will be your structure and it will look a lot like your editorial and email calendars
combined.
Editorial posts get posted on the same day theyre published (plus scheduled
out into the future)
Promotional posts get posted on the same day theyre emailed out to your
email list
Branded posts will get posts on the days you determine.
Ad posts will also get posted on the days you determine.
Set your editorial and marketing teams up for success by creating this calendar. It will
give them a checklist of sorts, so that they know exactly whats going out and when.
There are a lot of balls in the air at all times when it comes to social media, so
structure will turn it into a more enjoyable process. One where your editors and
marketers look forward to creating social posts that get clicked, rather than just trying
to get social off their plate while they attend to other duties.
In fact, set your team up for success by following this entire list in order. Social media
optimization gets a bad rap for being easy, which is a joke to anyone who has ever
done it. Its only easy if youre doing it wrong. Do it right instead.

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Recycling Content on Social Media for Improved SEO

One of the best ways to recycle old content is to re-promote it
in social media
Posting on Facebook feels like traveling to the Emerald City to visit the Great Oz.
You post a blockbuster article, or a hilarious behind-the-scenes photo, yet its
some man behind the curtain that determines who sees it. What determines your
reach on Facebook has little to do with variables that you control.
In contrast, Twitter is straightforward enough to let you maintain control of the
factors that determine your visibility. This makes you responsible for its reach.
When using Twitter for content marketing, these are the variables you control, and
the ways that you can improve each element:
You control the copy: You have the ability to adjust your copy again and
again to promote the same article. Test the title versus a quote versus pulling a
snippet. Keep testing different clickable Tweet formulas to get different
results.
You control when the Tweet is delivered (and re-delivered): Whether you
live-Tweet or schedule posts, its in your power to decide when people read
Tweets. Rather than testing times by exhausting your followers with duplicate
Tweets, switch up your Tweet copy each time you promote the article in the
same day.
You control how a Tweet gets shared: There are external factors at work
here, but you have the ability to set up a Tweet for success. The combination

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of great copy, room for comment, an @ with your name on it and even
a please reTweet increases your odds.
You control the visibility: Instead of shouting your content aimlessly into
the wind, you can use hashtags to define your content and inject it into
existing conversations on relevant subjects. Use any opportunity you have to
@ someone in your Tweet, because it gets the Tweet in front of them and in
front of their followers if they decide to reTweet.
Promoted Tweets: If your ad budget includes room for Twitter ads, you can
give your Tweets preferential treatment to people with the demographics and
interests that relate most to your content.
Tweeting sounds a whole lot like email marketing, doesnt it?
The main difference is you can recycle content over and over again on Twitter. In
fact, since nobody is monitoring their feed 24 hours a day, you could get away with
promoting the same article five times in a day using a variation of these tips and a
little creativity.
Why You Should Recycle Content on Twitter
Twitter isnt just about the here and now. You could post the same article 10 times a
day, but your traffic would only be driving traffic to that one page. Thats why its
always a smart idea to recycle your articles so that blog posts from a month ago, six
months ago, and a year ago get a new life.

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When we talk about recycling Tweets, we mean that in the same breath that youre
posting a Tweet today, you should be scheduling it to reappear next month, the
month after that, six months after that, and a year after that. As long as the content is
evergreen, you have every opportunity to stick it in your future feed.
And if youre wondering whether this effort is worth the return, here are five good
reasons you should recycle your content on Twitter:
1. More Visibility: If every single person in your target audience took a vacation
today, none of them would see your Tweet. Essentially, it would be lost in a sea of
Tweets, and the people who would see it and click your link wouldnt be those most
likely to complete a sale. If you only post your articles once, they may never be seen
again.
2. More SEO Benefit: If you title your posts with brilliant SEO keywords, Google is
taking notice. In fact, Google associates the words in your Tweets with the URL you
are Tweeting about, so the more you post it, or people re-Tweet it, the better youll
rank on your targeted keyword.
3. More Opportunity for Clicks: Obviously the more times you post a Tweet, the
more traffic its going to bring in. However, if its a holiday, or even holiday season,
you probably arent going to see the results youre looking for. Or, if you posted at
the wrong times of day, or a natural disaster occurred, youre obviously going to see a
drop. Instead of calling it a loss, you have the next two reasons to consider.
4. Diversity of Timing: Recycling posts means that you can schedule them at
different times in the upcoming days and months. Perhaps today you schedule your
Tweet for 10am and 3pm, and next month you schedule it at 9am and 5pm, and six

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months from now you might post it at 2am and 11pm for international readers. Then
you look back regularly to see which times brought in the most traffic and begin to
work on a more calculated schedule.
5. Experimenting with Headlines: Writing Twitter headlines takes practice,
because what works on a blog and what works as an email subject line doesnt always
work on Twitter. Folks on Twitter appreciate hashtags and call-outs to signify a more
human feel. The more you post an article, the more opportunities you have to
work with these types of elements to see which headlines pull better. Does a question
work better? A statement? The title of the post? The email subject line you used?
These are all different formulas to try.

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A Year in the Life of an Article on Twitter

A social media campaign for every article
What youre about to read is our secret sauce to social. Year over year, weve seen a
149% increase in traffic from using the social strategy that youre about to learn. Our
clients have begun to implement the same strategy in their businesses and we look
forward to reporting back their averages when we update this handbook next year.
By combining the elements of copy formulas, scheduling, hashtags and @s, you can
grow an entire ecosystem around each article you promote on Twitter.
Moving forward, lets discuss what this ecosystem looks like and how you can
repurpose one article into infinite promotional opportunities.
To start, pick the most recent article youve published on your blog. Hopefully its
SEOd for search and contains evergreen content (content that doesnt expire with the
direction of the wind) because this content performs best.
12 Twitter Formulas
Next, begin to think up different ways you can promote your article. Keep in mind,
that this is by no means an exhaustive list of every Twitter formula that could exist
and in fact we suggest that you test these out and create your own. The purpose of
using these formulas is to determine which ones your audience responds to best, and
then improve from there.
1. The title: Easy, just use the title.
2. The title & subhead: Or just the subhead, if its too long

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3. The excerpt: Interesting statement

4. The summary: What theyll learn by clicking the link
5. The shout-out: @ anybody mentioned.
6. The hashtag(s): Insert extra (related) trending hashtags
7. The quote: Find a relevant quote and use it
8. The quippy click-bait: Short and sweet
9. The friendly suggestion: First-person request to read/share
10. The question: Ask a related question
11. The engagement: Ask them to comment/give feedback
12. The takeaway(s): Subheads and major points
In our example, below were using a blog post titled How to Sanitize a Sponge: Are
Your Kitchen Sponges Safe? from our friends at CSPI / Nutrition Action
Healthletter.
1. The title: Easy, just use the title.

Goal: Find out if your title is click-worthy enough and which titles in your Tweets
end up performing best.

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2. The title & subhead: Or just the subhead, if its too long
Goal: Add more context to the Tweet, which is often lead to retweets if its catchy.
3. The excerpt: Interesting statement

Goal: Make a bold statement from the article to get more retweets.

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4. The summary: What theyll learn by clicking the link

Goal: Give them the facts, and challenge them to keep reading to find out why your
statement is so.
5. The shout-out: @ anybody mentioned.

Goal: Get your post in front of the people youve mentioned and hope for them to
retweet the post too.

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6. The hashtag(s): Insert extra (related) trending hashtags

Goal: Get your post in front of other link-minded readers who enjoy similar topics.
7. The quote: Find a relevant quote and use it

Goal: People love to retweet and favorite quotes, both of which send great social
signals to Google about your post.

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8. The quippy click-bait: Short and sweet

Goal: Forget the small talk, just get them to click and read.
9. The friendly suggestion: First-person request to read/share

Goal: This first-person request can garner more replies, retweets and favorites based
on the personal nature of the request.

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10. The question: Ask a related question

Goal: Inspire followers to engage with you. Ask them a question related to the article
and get them to read on.
11. The engagement: Ask them to comment/give feedback

Goal: Get followers to your site and boost its SEO with more post comments.

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12. The takeaway(s): Subheads and major points

Goal: Lay it all out there. Some people just want the facts, Jack. Bring on the
retweets.
Scheduling Your New Tweets

Now that youve written your Tweets, youll want to schedule them. This is the part
thats tricky only because you dont want to overlap. In Haven Social, our custom
CXMS, and in CoSchedule, you can tell the system to pick the best time to send out a
Tweet on the day you choose. But if youre using something like Hootsuite to
schedule social ahead, heres a basic twelve-day schedule for a publisher that posts
one article per day.
Daily Publishing Schedule
1. Title: January 1st, 9am (the first time the article is promoted)
2. Title & Subhead: January 2nd, 10:35am
3. Excerpt: January 3rd, 11:35am

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4. Summary: January 4th, 12:35pm

5. Shout-Out: January 5th, 1:35pm
6. Hashtag: January 6th, 2:35pm
7. Quote: January 7th, 3:35pm
8. Quippy Click: January 8th, 4:35pm
9. Friendly Suggestion: January 9th, 5:35pm
10. Question: January 10th, 6:35pm
11. Engagement: January 11th, 7:35pm
12. Takeaway: January 12th, 8:35pm
Of course, you can come up with your own timing system, but I find that
incorporating the goal of choosing different times for each of your formulas can also
help determining the best Tweet times for your followers. Next, these Tweets get
scheduled out for a year.
Monthly Publishing Schedule
1. Title: February 1st
2. Title & Subhead: March 1st
3. Excerpt: April 1st
4. Summary: May 1st
5. Shout-Out: June 1st
6. Hashtag: July 1st
7. Quote: August 1st
8. Quippy Click: September 1st
9. Friendly Suggestion: October 1st
10. Question: November 1st
11. Engagement:December 1st
12. Takeaway: January 1st

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Promotional Tweets
And according to your social calendar, dont forget promotional Tweets. If you
follow the Mequoda best practice of sending at least one spotlight (promotional)
email per week, and one circ-builder (freebie) per week set up promotional Tweets
for the same days. Feel free to use the formulas above, or make up your own!
What about other social networks?

On Twitter, no one user is going to see every Tweet you send out, because the
timeline moves so quickly in real-time. Less content is shared on platforms like
Facebook and LinkedIn (and G+ and Pinterest), so we recommend using the same
formulas above, except only once and then again six months later. Replace @ing for
tagging in the shout out. Everything else works the same, except you dont have 140character restrictions.
You can also try toying with images. Try switching up your featured image on posts
to see which ones work best.
If you follow all of the advice above for every post, especially the ones optimized for
search, youll find that they rank higher and longer. The ones that you dont do it for,
will simply dissolve into your online archives.
This method for recycled promotion has been working well for us and keeps bringing
in a steady stream of traffic by keeping our feed populated. It lets you focus on
promoting one article a day, but drive traffic for an unlimited amount of time. Every
day you move forward, youre adding more scheduled post to each day in the month,
leaving you with more time to write better headlines and less time thinking about old
articles.

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About Mequoda
Mequoda Group helps legacy publishers make the transition
to digital Can we help you make that transition?
If youre a publisher, content producer or content marketer searching for a simple yet comprehensive
way to create, build and maintain long, lasting and profitable audience and customer relationships,
your search may be complete.
Mequoda Group offers consulting services for publishers on content marketing, online publishing,
search engine optimization, email newsletter marketing, editorial management, landing page best
practices, social media optimization and online business management. For the right client, our
Consulting services can go on to include Keyword Research & Reporting, Website Systems Planning,
Business Plan Development and ultimately Website Design, Development and Support.
Mequoda Group supports publishers who use some variation of the Mequoda Content Marketing
System (Mequoda System). Our members include more than 36,000 individual marketers, editors,
writers, copywriters, graphic designers, webmasters, information architects, software developers,
project managers, usability engineers, media producers and publishers.
Mequoda Group members create and monetize content on hundreds of special-interest topics
ranging from investing to human resources, cooking to healthcare, and archery to zoology. Our
members serve audiences, users and customers who are both consumers and professionals with
content, communities and commerce that improve the quality of their lives.
Mequoda Group Mission
Were dedicated to helping content marketers, producers and publishers use the Internet and other
media to create, build and retain long, lasting and profitable audience and customer relationships.
Learn more at Mequoda.com.

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Website Architecture that Builds Email Lists ...................................................... 9

Optimizing a Site For Search ............................................................................ 63

Social Media Optimization ............................................................................... 96

About Mequoda ............................................................................................ 122

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