The eMedia Revenue Pipeline

I recently wrote and article for Min’s B2B called The eMedia Revenue Pipeline. There is a logical progression to developing online revenue consisting of six steps:

 

 

1. Content – The type of content you publish (editorial, user generated, advertiser content, etc.), the depth of content you provide, and how you publish it (editorial workflow, frequency, etc.)
2. Technology – How well you enable your content to be found, used, consumed, and shared with others in the community.
3. Audience Development – How well you reach your traditional audiences via print / email, how well you extend beyond your reach with SEO / SEM / SMO, how often you make people want to come back to your site, and how many pages of content you can get them to consume while on your site.
4. Marketing - This is not promotion! This is all about the kind of deliverables you create and how well you price and package them to get the most revenue out of the audience you’ve assembled and to deliver quantitative value to your customers
5. Sales – How well you have equipped your sellers with audience, product, competitive, and inventory info, how well you’ve trained them how to sell emedia (and what the distractions are), and how well you support them during and after the sale.
6. Production – Helping customers through the fulfillment process, making sure we deliver on our promises, and reporting back to the customer on the tangible results of their spend … whether it’s good news or bad.

Each of these steps build open the next and your online revenue is only as good as your weakest link. Any one of these steps can be a choke point that limits revenue potential.

I find that most publishers point to audience development (or lack thereof) as their weakest link. Yet more often than not, the weak link is actually marketing — the pricing and packaging of sales deliverables. I have seen web sites with as little as 30,000 page views per momth make over $500K annual revenue.

Here are the links to the two-part article on Min. They have graciously allowed free access to them.

Part 1 – http://www.minonline.com/news/5233.html
Part 2 – http://www.minonline.com/news/5293.html