ESPN the Magazine, like the industry leader in sports television that created it, is big, bold and brash like most of the athletes that it portrays and it uses its oversize format to show off very striking full page images and splashy sidebars. When we sell magazine subscriptions to ESPN through our online magazine subscription service we know that subscribers come from a variety of backgrounds like libraries, students, consumers, professionals and teachers.
We’ve started including more details about our magazines so that our corporate customers who buy subscriptions for their reception areas or waiting rooms will be more informed. We don’t just want to save you money by offering cheap discount prices, we want you to choose the right magazines.
Contributors to the magazines include familiar on-air talent such as Dan Patrick, Chris Berman, Stuart Scott, Rich Eisen, Linda Cohn, Peter Gammons, John Clayton and many others (including the athletes themselves).
In comparison to other sports magazines, ESPN gives you broader features such as playoff previews, personality profiles, photo spreads with a major emphasis on basketball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer and some newer extreme sports. ESPN mainly targets young, active men whose lifestyles include watching sports, attending games and participating in different types of athletics. The editorial focus of ESPN Magazine plays off the news and includes what happens in sports and which match-ups and young players to look out for. Also, ESPN emphasizes both the humor and fun of both mainstream and off-beat sports.
Being a worthy competitor towards both The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine’s large and colorful format would make the biggest splash towards the late teen and early adult age groups (not that older adults wouldn’t also love their complex coverage of the college football and basketball brackets). Remember that a one year, twenty-six issues subscription to ESPN Magazine is only $14.97 through our wonderful website.
We covered a lot of ground on magazine subscription services in the last few weeks and spent a good amount of time describing how we sell magazines to different customers like libraries, students, individual consumers and businesses. The cool part about selling magazines - even corporate subscriptions - is that not only can we help subscribers save money because we’ve got cheap discount magazines, but we get to offer a wide variety of popular titles at the same time.
One of the more popular titles is ESPN (the magazine), formerly an abbreviation of Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, is published bi-weekly and owned by an American cable television network dedicated to broadcasting mostly sports-related programming twenty-four hours a day. The company was founded by Scott Rasmussen and his father Bill Rasmussen, along with Donny Stanley and his son Cardell and was first launched on September 7, 1979 with the show SportsCenter (which aired its 25,000th episode on August 25, 2002).
ESPN was originally owned by a prestigious joint venture between the Getty Oil Company (which was purchased by Texaco later on) and Nabisco. As of 1984, the entire family of ESPN networks and franchises are owned by ABC and the Hearst Corporation. ESPN was started as an alternative to standard television news broadcasts and the information that is usually found in the “Sports” sections of newspapers. It was begun as a fairly small-fry operation at first and they had to broadcast unorthodox sporting events such as the World’s Strongest Man Competition, the short-lived United States Football League (USFL) before ESPN landed a contract to show National Football league games on Sunday evenings in 1987.
To subscribe to ESPN Magazine, just visit MagMall and see what discount offers are available online. Remember that all gift subscriptions to a USA address include a free gift with your personal message.
one of the first strategies is to contact other sites requesting a link to our site but we would have to be kidding ourselves to think that a magazine subscription site would link to us. It would make no sense. So what we need to do is find relevant sites which are not competitive and we need to contact them directly to link back to us. And this gives us a wealth of choices because of the fact that we sell magazines to libraries, corporate and business subscriptions customers, students, teachers and individual subscribers. Besides this, we also sell gift and renewal subscriptions, not just new ones.
Timetable: You can expect to spend each day or once a week depending on your interest contacting other sites.
There are a variety of ways to find these “linking partners”. The rule of thumb has two rules of thumb. The more personal your relationship with the linking “prospect” the more likely the prospect will become a linking “partner”. The 2nd rule is that the more prospects you contact, the more partners you will produce. Basically, you will have a constant tension between the amount of time it takes to find and reach each prospect and the amount of prospects that turn into partners. It goes without saying as well that just having a linking partner is not enough. You need the right linking partner – that means a relevant link from a valued, authoritative site.
There are 4 ways to find and contact other sites: Do it yourself one by one, use software to automate the task, by links from 3rd parties or participate in link exchanges.
If you go the manual route, it’s just time consuming but practically the most rewarding. Quite simply, just go to Google or Yahoo or MSN and type in some keyword searches for sites similar to yours. Then visit the sites and either call (preferred) or email them with a request to link to your site.
Now that I’ve decided to sell magazine subscription services to different target markets and I’ve created a product package that has been proven to have great demand, I’ve got have a salesletter that has a sky-high conversion rate. All my efforts would be futile and yours would be too if you don’t have a single soul passing by your website since you will have no one to sell to! It won’t matter whether I’m trying to sell an individual a subscription to buy as a gift for a birthday or a company looking to order subscriptions for its employees or customers. It’s all about driving the right traffic to my specific offers.
This is why search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are such a big deal that anyone can try. You might be a total beginner and therefore do not have a massive mailing list to sell to, and your website is on the 103th page of search engine results pages. You can change all that with a few tried-and-tested traffic generation techniques.
First and foremost, let me make it clear to you that search engine optimization is not the only way to gain massive amounts of traffic! You see, search engine result pages are in a sense just web pages – similar to regular websites around the web. It is only so lucrative to have your website listed on the top of search engine results because many people use the search engine to search for information and arrive on the search engine results page. Hence, loads of people see your site’s link and you attract loads of traffic. But you don’t always see sales from the traffic that visits your site. If I told you how many people are searching for Maxim magazine or Cosmopolitan magazine on a daily basis and compare it to the number of orders we receive it would depress you to no end.
Here’s a story that relates this idea in a more contextual way. It is not connected to our magazine subscription service but it makes the point quite well and if you connect it to our previous post then it will all start to make sense. I read this in a letter previously.
One evening, a fellow marketer in my MSN Messenger list messaged me to check out his newest salesletter for his product, an ebook on earning revenue with contextual advertisement. I logged on to his website and was drawn right into his sales copy! The reason was the sales letter dived right into my desires and promised that “everything I have ever wanted” can be obtained just by purchasing the said ebook and executing whatever is inside. The sales letter also made it seem that the author owns fleets of Mercedez Benz cars, luxurious mansions and private yachts.
The problem was I know this particular marketer personally. He is actually a 17 year old high school graduate looking for a few quick bucks by selling a little ebook he compiled with information collected from various sources from the Internet. My emergency alarm immediately kicked in and I can just imagine how many naïve newbies can be fooled with the deceptive sales copy.
The sad but very real fact is that there are many scam artists online, waiting to rip you off your hard-earned money. Hence, remember that the usual advice for consumers still apply online: use your common sense. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.
Remember, when you intend to purchase something from the Internet, do a basic check-up on the merchant website. First and foremost, if you have even the slightest question on any of the features of the product mentioned, email the merchant regarding it and observe the attitude with which he/she replies. Customer support reveals a lot about the integrity of a business.
Finally, if you can’t even find support email on their website, click the “Back” button and run away from the site at once! I’m not sure why I shared this whole story with you other than the idea that selling online isn’t easy and you have a lot of choices to make. Some will be good and some will be not so good. Just try to make sure that you offer what you can deliver and if you can over-deliver that is great but don’t do the reverse.
We try to over deliver to our corporate magazine subscribers for sure because for them it is less about price and more about service and support. So our account managers give out their cell numbers so that for any reason if they cannot be reached - by our library customers or small businesses or even large companies - through normal communication channels then there is a secondary way.
In the previous blog posting I talked about creating content around hungarian ghoulash as a way of delivering something that someone wants because they have told you they want it. I suppose in our business we could have written an article about how to subscribe to a magazine and buy a magazine subscription for a cheap price. But no one would buy such a product because they would rather just go right to the magazine subscription service online and just subscribe at a discount right on the site. They don’t need an intermediate step.
To sell a product well – even something like a simple magazine subscription to something as ubiquitious as Cosmopolitan magazine, it is very important to use powerful selling words to really convey each and every little benefit that your product has to convince the prospect to turn into a customer. It is not uncommon to see words like “unbelievable” and “phenomenal” and something along those lines in really great sales letters but this does not mean that those words are the magic elixir for every sales effort.
At MagMall it would be kind of silly to try to convince a librarian to use our library subscription services by telling her our service is fantastic or incredible. The hyperbole will go in one ear and right out the other. What I need are some hard convincing and credible facts or claims which I can back up to support the prospect’s decision to even consider using our subscription service. Even if I offer cheap prices and crazy discounts that may not be enough even for the most price conscious customer.
There are some marketers who intentionally use hyped-up descriptions to sell their products. These marketers mislead customers into thinking that their products offer benefits that do not really exist in reality.
Your final goal is to deliver the product to your customer and collect his or her money. In order to do this, you must make sure your customer wants to buy your product in the first place. Whether you are selling magazine subscription services to individuals or business subscribers the question remains the same - no matter how cheap or discounted or even premium priced your product is.
How do you find out if they want your product? Simple. Just ask! Ask in forums related to your niche. Hold a survey or public poll. The Internet is a flat playing field, and you have the power to reach just about anyone in the world who has an Internet connection. An interesting side effect from doing this kind of “surveying” is that every time you post something on a 3rd party site with a link back to your site this helps your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and should provide you increase rankings for your magazine subscription related terms as long as you include some keyword rich content in your anchor text and your postings.
Let’s say you have this brilliant idea on creating a step-by-step instruction on how to cook Hungarian goulash. First, you must find out if anyone is interested (or even heard of) Hungarian type food. To do this, go to a food-related forum and ask tactfully if anyone would be interested in learning Hungarian cuisine. Do not ask blatantly whether anyone would like to buy an ebook with instructions on how to cook Hungarian food, or you might be in danger of being accused of spamming.
On the other hand, you can give out a few samples of your goulash recipes to test the waters – see how the forum members react to them. If they show enthusiasm for learning more, then you definitely have a market in this. If they show no interest, then it is time to look for a new idea to market. You save time in the long run because you don’t have to find out the low demand for your product the hard way.
If your idea is welcomed by the forum members you surveyed, you can go ahead and compile your extensive ebook on cooking Hungarian goulash because there is interest in the information you possess. Where there is interest, you can easily build up desire for your product, and with desire (plus good marketing), your purchases will arrive naturally! And then if you become an affiliate of MagMall.com you can earn 20% commissions just referring your new ebook customers to MagMall to buy food and wine type of magazines. These offers may not go over well for our public school library subscription service customers but for sure they would do well with stay at home moms. How’s this for some shameless self-promotion.
Many marketers have created or acquired products that they thought would sell well and, in their enthusiasm, set up everything from sales letters to websites to getting traffic. The cool part about selling magazine subscription services is that we don’t own the inventory. We are truly a middle man whether we sell a gift subscription to an individual consumer or a renewal subscription to a corporate subscribers.
To us, there are no inventory costs or holding costs unless we extend credit on a corporate subscription to a company client. With that said though however, a lot of these marketers have forgotten the single most important factor that will affect their product sales – the “sellability” of the product and the distribution channels to reach your targeted customers.
When you begin creating products or buying rights to a certain product to sell, the most important factor you must take into account is the demand of the product. Do people want your product?
It is simply stupid to waste a month’s time preparing a product, setting up the website and required sales techniques only to find that people do not even flick an eyebrow at your product! It would be like us preparing this huge promotion to sell Newsweek magazine only to find out that people are just interested in In Touch Weekly because news is passé and culture is what’s hot.
For us, we are lucky because everyone subscribes to magazines so we know the demand is there. The question is whether they want to use our service or not when they make the decision to subscribe so for us our challenge is more about getting the offer in front of the potential subscriber rather than worrying if that person exists. Perhaps it may come down to just offering a cheap discounted subscription or it may be just right place right time.
