NOTE: This post isn’t written to you, dear publisher. It’s written to your advertisers. Please pass it along with my regards. It will help them be more successful with their online ads and get better return on investment (ROI) with limited budgets. In the end, it will help you, too: A happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser. “I’m canceling my campaign because I’m not getting any clicks.” Over my years in online media, I’ve lost count of how many conversations I’ve had like this. An advertiser didn’t get enough clicks, leads, downloads, sales...

Why are we still selling advertising the old way with print-frequency discounts? As modern publishers, we’re selling print, Web, e-mail, events, data and more, and our advertisers are shifting their dollars from print-only to a mix of media. But one look at most of our media kits and it’s obvious we’re stuck in a print-only mentality that only rewards advertisers when they increase their frequency in print. We Want More Money, Not More Print Is our goal really to get advertisers to buy more print from us? Our goal should be to get them to spend more money with us regardless of which...

Magazine publishers are still looking for that magic formula to really boost online revenue. What new strategy or technology will help us make up for what we’ve been losing in print? A couple of years ago, it was vertical search and online events that were hailed as the “next big thing.” Now it’s mobile devices and online video. Tomorrow it will be something else. Sorry to break it to you, but there is no silver bullet when it comes to online media. Time and again, I see publishers wondering which new online technology will give them something tantalizing to dangle in front of their...

“Digital magazines suck,” proclaimed a media executive friend of mine recently. “They’re not print, and they’re not Web. It seems like a lazy way to get online instead of investing in a really good Web site.” Perhaps he has a point. We’ve all seen those PDF/Flash/whatever-based replicas of print. Many are clunky to use, slow to load and have type so small that you’re constantly zooming in and out. No wonder some publishers haven’t seen their efforts pay off. I call them digital replicas, not digital magazines. Publishers often default to recreations of the print product since...

here are a myriad of sites and tools, both free and paid, that can help you track how well your Web site is performing versus your competitors. Here are a few of my favorite, free online competitive analysis tools. 1. Web Traffic Comparison—Compete.com We all know our own traffic numbers from our analytics system (and we at least hope that our IT staff set things up properly so that the data is accurate). But what we really want to know is how much traffic our competitors are generating and how we stack up against them. There are a host of free players in this space (Alexa, Quantcast,...