If architecture is only your hobby, Architectural Record Magazine might be too much for you. At least we as a magazine subscription service are not making our entire living with it and do not have to know everything about it. Chances are that only a small part of the content in each issue might interest you. Nevertheless, Architectural Record Magazine is a good and serious architecture journal. So the key question is not whether to read it or not, but how to read it wisely or read which issue(s).
We have a lot of corporate magazine subscribers and we even sell subscriptions to a bunch of school and public libraries so we don’t really have a handle on who subscribes or who reads it but we do have a good cross section of readers.
Architectural Record Magazine displays great photography including very exotic and intriguing designs. Reading this magazine is very enjoyable because of its easy layout, and of course because of what it contains. Architectural Record Magazine is truly worth giving 5 stars. My personal favorite architect of all times must be Frank Lloyd Wright. To know that he wrote in this magazine is so truly encouraging to me.
Fortunately, several clues can provide us with good suggestions. Each issue of Architectural Record Magazine has a special section called “Building Type Study” which focuses on one type of building (such as library, museum, bridge, office building, etc.). You can choose the right issues by skimming through this section. Moreover, each year Architectural Record Magazine has a special issue called “Record Houses” featuring about ten residential projects carefully selected around the world. If you are into residential architecture, you don’t want to miss them.
Unless you are a hardcore architecture fan and would like to know all about it, amateurs like me can choose the right issues to read and get the information I need. I think this is the right or smart strategy to take advantage of this quality magazine.
You can order Architectural Record Magazine, one of the most innovative and fantastic architectural magazines ever created, through MagMall for the low price of $43 for a one year subscription. Not bad, huh?
I asked a friend of mine who is an architecture student to recommend a good magazine for me to read and get into. He suggested Architectural Record Magazine (AR) immediately and I followed his lead and started buying Architectural Record Magazine from bookstores. I didn’t think I needed to contact a magazine subscription service yet because I didn’t know much about it.
After reading magazines for about one year, I got some opinions on the pros and cons of this magazine and would like to share them with prospective readers/subscribers. Please note that my evaluation is from a layperson’s point of view. It might not work for professionals.
I think the goal of Architectural Record Magazine is to keep people updated about what’s happening in the architectural communities around the world, to present the latest works, and to reveal some patterns or trends in today’s design. Based on this mission, I think Architectural Record Magazine does a great job.
Architectural Record Magazine can be a very provocative magazine that might encourage a person to actually go out and try ‘Architecture’. Luckily I am an Architecture Major, but for those who are simply browsing to see which magazine they are going to get into next, then (trust me!) you definitely want to read this one. It motivates your body, it stimulates the designer inside of each and every one of us; as well as it encourages us to stop by a building and look at it as more than wood or steel put together with nails, but a form of relieving the designers that we all are.
You’ll learn to appreciate the home that you live in and as well bring out the dream house that we always wanted to life in some instances. From distinct locales around Europe or outstanding architects like Frank Lloyd Wright or Gehry’s masterpiece in Los Angeles (the ‘Disney Concert Hall’) Architectural Record Magazine will represent the best and only the best. This way you know what is good and what is not. So trust me if it is not in this magazine, it’s not what you want to learn about.
This is a copy of a recent write in from a MagMall customer in our dreams. One day this might be really happening. For now we will content ourselves with selling subscriptions to our corporate customers and libraries and the occasional individual who finds us on the search engines or through trusted affiliate partners. If you are interested to subscribe at a cheap discount price, we may have a good sale going on. Right now the price should be around $43.00 a year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
