These days everyone is looking to add incremental income to boost their budget to make up for short-falls in other areas. One tactic specialized publishers have turned to for increased revenue is to create one-shot products and offer them to current subscribers and prospects in their database. The process of repurposing content and offering it up as a new special report or a webinar sounds easy but there are pitfalls you must avoid and smart strategies out there you should use to get the most bang for your buck.
The faltering economy may offer challenges, but that doesn't mean you should stop marketing by direct mail, says Mary Lou Probka. And she should know about marketing in a tough economy - she is vice president of marketing and customer service at Inside Mortgage Finance Publications, Inc., a company that covers one of the hardest-hit fields in today's declining business scene.
In these days of economic uncertainty and tremendous political change, specialized-information publishers need to be flexible to be able to make sense of the changing times and to take full advantage of the opportunities provided by those upheavals. They have an excellent model to follow in the longest continually published newsletter in the country, The Kiplinger Washington Letter.
If you don't reach out and grab your reader in the first, or lead, paragraph in each story, all the excellent work you've done in collecting the information and writing that great story goes down the drain.
"Renewal rates are a function of the quality of the editorial" is common advice among specialized information publishers.
It's the truth. But it's not the whole truth. There are five factors affecting your renewal rates, and the quality of the publication is only one of them - albeit the most important one.
A working knowledge of mathematics has always been key to direct-marketing success - knowing how to calculate response rates, ROI, campaign half-lives and other key metrics is vital to using information from marketing campaigns to make decisions about continuing efforts.
But ... algebra?
Dear Colleague:
Are you thinking of starting an electronic or print publication-newsletter, online advisory, looseleaf service, directory or interactive database? Or maybe you already have a publication, and you're ready to catapult your operation to new heights.
In any case, I assume you aspire to success . . . and significant wealth.
I'm glad you found SIPA —-the Specialized Information Publishers Association —-and I hope you'll join us.
For 30 years, SIPA has helped thousands of people with entrepreneurial spark succeed —-by helping them build extraordinarily profitable publishing enterprises.
Over the years, I've come to know hundreds of SIPA publishers personally. A large number have sold their businesses at a tremendous profit and are now retired in luxury. Our established members continue to manage their publishing companies energetically and prosperously. Even most of our newest members display astounding inventiveness and are experiencing rapid growth.
This much I'll tell you: Specialized-information publishing is an exciting business. And it can be extremely lucrative —-high profit margins are the rule.
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See available session handouts and presentation slides here. |
