Magazine Subscription Services Linking Strategies
One of the most crucial ingredients of a successful optimization campaign is getting other contextually relevant sites to both link to your site and to use keyword rich anchor text links too when linking to your site. It’s not enough for our magazine site to just have incoming links from a variety of sites - they have to be sites which have related content. So we need links from library type sites to increase our rankings for our library subscription services. It is not like we are trying to fool Yahoo or Google. We sell magazines to libraries and therefore if someone is a librarian for example and they are looking for a company that can service their needs, we want to come up first in the engines and by rights we should. Same thing goes for our corporate magazine services or our school discounts for teachers and students.
This section describes a few DIRECT approaches to getting quality inbound links including:
1. Buying links
2. Trading links
3. Asking for links
4. Building a link exchange directory
A link exchange directory is where you host a directory of other web sites on your own web site and hopefully if your directory has any Google pagerank, other sites will do two things:
1. Register their site in your directory
2. Put a link to your site on their site (either a link directory or a web page)
It is worth noting that with reference to incoming links overall, some engines still work on a quantitative basis so that the more incoming links you have (whether contextually relevant or not) the more power they ascribe to your site. So the strategies outlined here can also work if you are just interested in obtaining massive amounts of incoming links.
So to put this contextually, we have to find sites that relate to the different types of offers we have - like gift subscriptions or renewal subscriptions. We can even get really limited and focus on individual titles like Cosmopolitan Magazine and find sites with women’s fashion related content. The list goes on of linking opportunities.
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.
If you don’t have great credibility one of the first steps to take is to build up a customer base — a group of people who trust you and will most likely buy a product that you offer to them. This will ensure that you have a recurring and consistent source of income. So as we have been involved in building out a magazine subscription service to individual subscribers as well as students, schools, libraries and businesses, the essential challenge has and continues to be to establish a core group of subscribers who will evangelize our services, our cheap discount prices and our selection of magazines.
When you release a product or make an endorsement, you have a group of people always ready to hear what you have to say. Plus, if you work in some viral marketing, you can even incentivize your customers to forward your offers to their friends. This is when the real magic happens.
There are several sources that you can tap into to start building a customer base. For example, you can participate in an online discussion forum and give advice and help for free. It won’t be long before people start to recognize your name and stop and listen every time you have something to say. You will become a valuable friend and teacher, and gain the trust of these people. Would you buy something your close friend recommends? And with some cool technology you can increase the chances that this happens again and again.
Another way to build a customer base is to build a mailing list. There are a variety of methods to collect subscribers, but when it’s boiled down to the very essence, it’s all about proving your value to the crowd and offering an incentive to make people become part of your mailing list. A typical example would be a website that offers freely available, helpful and quality articles on a certain subject plus a “special report” that can be downloaded for free provided you give your email address. The rich content provides value, and the “special report” is the extra incentive.
Yet another source for your customer base, which is often forgotten, is your existing customers. If you bought this product from this particular person and he answered patiently to your every question, would you buy from him again in the future? Definitely. When a customer has given you his money, that’s not the end of the affair because by keeping in touch with him and developing a flourishing relationship with him, you will have a lifetime source of income.
Imagine if 100, 1000 or even 10000 customers are waiting to grab your newest products even before they are released! Hence, it’s vital to build a customer base because it simply saves a lot of time and effort.
Here’s a starting question: do you think it is easier to sell a product or service like a magazine subscription to a complete stranger or to a person you have had contact before? The mechanism for delivering the sale approach could be an email conversation, a forum participation or even an existing customer relationship (i.e. He has bought something from you). In all cases, the question remains the same, which approach is easier to close the subscription sale? I suppose part of this question could take a diversion by asking in a parallel way whether it depends on the type of person or business being targeted with the offer. I mean would your answer vary if you were selling a discount subscription to a student who is mostly price conscious or you were selling a magazine subscription service to a business or corporate customer. Or what if you were selling to company library or a school library for a public high school. And this question really applies to any industry, product or service. Would it be easier if you had an existing relationship? Could this question be any more rhetorical? Of course it would be easier. Clearly, it would be harder to sell to a total stranger who does not know whether or not you are an honest seller, and whether or not they should trust your words and believe that your product or services will truly benefit them. This is one of the premier reasons that “credibility factors” are one of the key drivers of increasing sales conversion ratios. These factors can be awards you display on your site or other validation type icons – even credit card seals which let consumer and corporate (subscribers in our case) know that they can subscribe online with a credit card or even an echeck if you accept it, like Paypal.
Let’s imagine a situation where we have two Internet ecommerce oriented companies who know of each other. One has a great product that will sell very well but he has no mailing list, no affiliates, nothing. Let’s call this the magazine subscription service with killer prices and cheap disounts. This company knows it can sell magazines to corporate customers, students looking for educator discounts, businesses with reception areas and waiting rooms or even individual consumers who want gift subscriptions or just a way to renew subscriptions each year. But this company has a big problem.
The other company is more of a great marketer with tens of thousands of subscribers in his mailing list, but the problem is he has nothing to sell to them. The most obvious solution here is to make bridge between the first and second company like a Reese’ Pieces snack bar and give the product to the great marketer with lots of contacts, so that he can market the magazines to his list and split the profits with the magazine company according to some formula of profit sharing they work out. This bridge making is the very essence of Joint Ventures.
In our case, whether we are selling to school libraries or company reception rooms or waiting areas, anyone that can facilitate our ability to open the door to more business is someone we want to talk to. In the world of search engine optimization, you can think of these bridge type of relationships as incoming links into your main site. In an slightly indirect form affiliates are one form of joint venture marketing where you get not only a “lead” as a visitor is transported from the “list owner” to the product provider, but you also gain search engine rankings each time you sign on another linking partner.
One of the wild cards in optimizing your site for Google as opposed to the other search engines – and remember this whole notion of optimization on one hand is not at all about tricks (think whitehat or blackhat) but about informing the search engine to the best of your ability and in the best possible way you’re your site is about. So in our case since we sell magazine subscription services to a variety of customers at cheap or discount prices, we’ve got to make sure the searh engines know that this is what we do.
It’s a great paradox because on one side you don’t want to be appear too eager because then it looks like you are “over-optimizing” your site. At the same time though you do want to be sure the search engines get the whole picture concerning what you do. So we want the engines to know we sell to libraries just as much as we sell subscriptions to individuals looking to buy a gift subscription for Christmas or a birthday.
One of the wildcard tactics in this whole SEO process is whether adding Google Adsense to your pages will help. The notion is that if the Adsense code is on your page it will force Google to index your page every time it loads and therefore the chance is greater that your page is spidered and included more optimally in search results for related content keyword queries.
It is debatable whether adding Google sense helps your site get ranked in Google. Since it doesn’t seem to hurt results, here are some thoughts to consider.
- One ad somewhere small and at bottom
- Get an application at: https://www.google.com/adsense
- Use Google Ads at the bottom of pages.
- Make them blend into site design.
- See AdSense type layouts in Exhibit P
- Google claims the most effective sizes for click-throughs are
- 326×280
- 300×250 (inline rectangle)
- 160×600 (wide skyscraper)
While I’ve been talking about what you do in a static sense as you create web pages around your keyword rich concepts like magazine subscription services that are cheaper or more discounted than other services, the question is how often you update your content.
If you don’t talk about new services like the fact that you sell magazines to libraries or subscriptions to students at educator discounts, or the fact that businesses can order magazines at low prices, why would anyone come back to your site?
Fresh Updated Content
Every week, content needs to be updated so search engines think you are still relevant and hence worth ranking higher than your competitors (who may have more stale content). The easiest way to do this is to change part of your home page content every week. Another additional technique is to change one sub page article every other week that links from the home page.
There are a variety of software options to help automate this task. Be aware though that the primary problem with these automated solutions is that they use duplicate content from other sites and you run the risk that the search engines won’t value your content as highly as if it were unique. Here are 4 examples:
1. Pull Rss Feeds using software like RSS Equalizer, Power RSS
2. Add RSS Feeds with keywords related to sites theme
3. Article Scraping (pulls articles from other article repositories)
- http://www.authoritysitecenter.com
- Site Builder Pro
- Article Post Robot
4. Another site that gives you free content might include Emediawire.com
Quick review on our steadfast campaign to highlight some key factors in obtaining maximum rankability for our cheap and discounted magazine subscription services. We’ve covered the notion of keyword rich content being required to be spread throughout your web pages as part of a grand on-page search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
The next thing we did was to showcase the different ways you could not only write your keywords into the content of your pages but we explained the different techniques to use in displaying the text. That includes font styles (bold, italics, underline), content locations (ie. breadcrumbs, body content, or meta-tags) and content repetition.
The most important element though in the on-page optimization area is really the bridge between on-page and off-page tactics. It is the area of LINKS on a page. If I want to let the search engines know that Magmall has different target markets, the best way for me to qualitatively highlight this fact is by isolating each market onto its own web page. This means naturally that I will have to link to a number of distinct web pages which will contain content specific to each service.
So for library subscription services I’ll have a page that talks about public and private libraries.
For corporate subscription services, I’ll have a page that talks about reception areas and waiting rooms and how we enable companies to buy subscriptions for their employees with one bill.
For student subscription services, the page will talk about student discounts and educator discounts as well as even school library magazine services.
In a general sense I’ll also have specific pages for the types of subscriptions people can order at MagMall. So there will be a page for gift subscriptions and a page for renewal subscriptions and even a page just for new subscriptions.
Since I started rambling on about Marie Claire and how easy it is to get a cheap or discounted magazine subscriptions for a year at a time, it seems like a good time to get back into the topic of fashion magazines and beauty care in general. It doesn’t make sense to just talk about libraries and corporate subscription services when I can write nice informative and helpful content about women’s magazines and how they help men and women. Even students of sociology can get a kick out of the services offered inside the magazines.
Beauty care is one of the problems that most women (and men) of all ages face. Beauty, or the lack of it, is pretty much a state of mind. . .well almost. There are beauty tips for Hair Styles, Nails, Skin Care, Body and Shape, Weight Loss, Exercise, Fashion and Style, Inner Beauty and more.
Let’s talk about inner beauty care. True beauty begins from the inside out. Outer beauty will only appear when you’ve practiced beauty within.
Knowing how and what to eat, can make a huge difference in how you feel. Improper eating habits can cause depression, overweight, illness and an overall lethargy.
Change your eating and exercising habits. You can do this. Do not try to change everything at once, unless you are just one of those rare individuals that can do that.
Beauty care starts with a good diet. Diet does not mean just losing weight. Diet means the food you put in your daily eating habits.
Read more beauty tips in women’s magazines like Marie Claire magazine. For information on a cheaper discount on a Marie Claire magazine Subscription then click the link to read about it and see what kind of deals MagMall offers. It’s surely not going to be a waste of time. As always you can order a renewal or gift subscription and send the recipient a free gift card with your personal message.
If you are interested in learning more tactics on how to optimize your own web site, visit the search engine optimization timetable.
Getting back to the topics you’ll find in Marie Claire, don’t forget about their Current Events section which takes on topics that are much edgier and more controversial than most other women’s magazines. These pieces almost always focus on the situations of women living in difficult conditions. One article was an expose on sex tours in Thailand and the U.S. tourists who support the industry. My friend picked up the article and was shocked how interesting it was, seeing as it was in a girly magazine and all. Another month’s topic was a look at the women of the Middle East and their fight for a more powerful role in society. A powerful piece on meth abuse and addiction was also worth reading.
Entertainment - Every issue of Marie Claire has a Best to Do section with
movies, books, and music coming out that month. There are celebrity interviews with whichever star is on the cover of the magazine for that particular month. Recent articles detailed the lives of Jessica Alba and Cameron Diaz.
Love and Sex - Of course, this wouldn’t be a woman’s magazine without the obligatory eligible bachelors. Obviously I skim through these. There are usually one or two sex articles with thrilling topics like “Sex Lies You Must Know!” or whatever but generally the sex content is lower than, say, Cosmopolitan.
Read more women’s magazines like Marie Claire magazine. For information on a cheaper discount on a Marie Claire magazine Subscription then click the link to read about it and see what kind of deals MagMall offers. It’s surely not going to be a waste of time. As always you can order a renewal or gift subscription and send the recipient a free gift card with your personal message.
If you are interested in learning more tactics on how to optimize your own web site, visit the search engine optimization timetable.
