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 Active Interest Media Report Authors:
CEO & Lead Consultant Biblical Archaeology Society
Business & Legal Resources Don Nicholas
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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
 ............................................................................
6   3
 
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
.   ..............................................................................
9   6
 
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
 ............................................................................................
1   22
 

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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. We’ll 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. She’s there, she thinks you’re smart, you have a solution to
her problem, and she’ll 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 it’s 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 don’t give away hundreds of
thousands of words for fun. We do it so that we can build lists of loyal customers,
who we’ll continue to serve free content to in the hopes that one day they’ll buy
something. And they often do.

Audience Development Strategies

So, what is audience development, then? It’s how you build a group of loyal readers,
subscribers and buyers, specifically online. Often, it’s 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 that’s 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 you’re 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. Well-
written content that’s 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 you’ve SEO’d 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 you’ve 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; that’s
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 else’s
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 don’t 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 they’ve 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 you’ve been searching for
when it comes to selling more magazine subscriptions

If you’re looking for an easy answer to online publishing success, stop reading. We
don’t have one.

We know dozens of publishers who have made online publishing a large part of their
revenue stream.

But we don’t know one who’s 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 I’m going to tell you where our clients have found the money. It’s not where you
think: It’s not your website, it’s not social media, and it’s not the awesome gadget app
you just built.

The answer is one of the biggest secrets of online publishing. It’s 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 wouldn’t try to
launch a profitable direct mail campaign … and then refuse to buy any lists. You
wouldn’t try to sell more single copies at the newsstand without increasing your print
run.

Yet that’s 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, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email
newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s 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, they’re bound to subscribe to your magazine,
right?

Wrong.

Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t turn into
buyers. They simply remain … passing website visitors. They certainly don’t 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? That’s 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
you’re really good at is producing content? On the other hand, email newsletters
work incredibly well, and it’s what you’re good at anyway, so shelve the app ideas

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until you’re as big as, say, Condé Nast, and then you can afford to throw money at
apps just because it’s hip. Otherwise, put gadget apps wayyyy down on your priority
list.

Websites, social media and gadget apps simply don’t help you build the type of
relationship with your audience that keeps them truly engaged and loyal. Content-
driven email newsletters from a publisher, however, speak directly to the
audience. They’re 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 that’s 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 isn’t 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 who’ve 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 isn’t the
endgame. Rather, it’s the steppingstone to building a big, fat email list of engaged
customers who can’t 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). That’s impressions divided by searches. If
you’re not visible to Google on the Internet, you don’t 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 publisher’s control. Of the 110+ websites
we’ve 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 can’t make a lot of money – or if
you’re 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 you’d like to
improve your email capture rate, just keep reading this handbook because that’s
exactly what it’s 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 user’s email address.

In the next few chapters we’ll be reviewing the many elements of conversion
architecture that will get you the highest site-wide conversion rate. If you’re using all
of them, you’ll see a lift of 20-50% in your email capture rate.

Most publishers we’ve 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 (well-
intentioned) 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 we’ll review each of them in brief, while over the next few
chapters, we’ll 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

We’ll 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?

1 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 21
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.

2 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.

3 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 didn’t 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.

5 http://ceramicartsdaily.org/free-gifts/ 23

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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 opt-
in 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 who’s 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 we’re 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, you’ll 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, you’ll get an article.

On this article page, you’ll find an OFIE ad for the Multiplatform Publishing
Strategy handbook again at the top. In the middle of the article, you’ll 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, there’s a
related offer for our free handbook on the same topic. It’s consistent across our
entire multiplatform publishing channel — you will never read a post about
multiplatform publishing that doesn’t promote the handbook, unless you’re 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, they’re more likely to convert than if we gave them an ad for our Digital
Magazine Publishing handbook. That’s 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, you’ll see that they’re 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 Harvard’s 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 it’s 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,
“I’ve got a nice gift for you. It’s easy and free. Simply give me your email address, and
in return, I’ll give you a valuable piece of downloadable information. And if you want
to get off my email subscriber list at any time, I’ll 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 Belt’s RCLP for their guide about Samurai Weapons?

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Even Harvard’s 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: You’ve 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 doesn’t 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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That’s because Google inherently does not value a single page, no matter how well
it’s optimized for search. This is particularly true when the purpose of the page is to
extract someone’s 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 don’t think this offer of a free download is
important enough to link to, then we don’t think it’s 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.

It’s 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 portal’s 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 no-
brainer 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.

6 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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