Mequoda Library: Jane Zarem

Jane E. Zarem is a freelance editor, researcher, and writer. She is a senior editor for the Library on general publishing issues and on topics related to ancillary product opportunities.

Jane has written for B-to-B magazines such as Folio:, Circulation Management, 1to1 Magazine, Customer Support Management and Catalog Age as well as white papers and marketing materials for clients in or related to the publishing industry. For several years, she was editor of The Qualified Source, the bimonthly newsletter of the National Trade Circulation Foundation Inc., an association of B-to-B circulation professionals, and editor of Ancillary Profits, a monthly newsletter that was targeted to publishers and ultimately became a quarterly column in Folio:. She also researched and wrote “Travel Solutions in CRM 2003,” a 62-page special report published by PhoCusWright and Hershel Sarbin Associates. And in 1986, she compiled the Connecticut Citizen’s Handbook, a guide to state government, published by Globe Pequot Press for the League of Women Voters of Connecticut Education Fund.

In addition to her focus on business topics, Jane currently contributes travel articles to several magazines and newspapers, updates guidebooks for Fodor’s Travel Publications and writes quarterly reports on global real estate issues for Cartus.

Executive Summary

Fodor's Travel, a division of Random House, Inc., has been recognized as the premier guidebook publisher for more than 70 years. Today, the Fodor's Travel brand exists firmly in print, online, and on mobile devices.

Fodor's target audience is what Publisher Tim Jarrell calls "age 25-plus travelers who are interested in attainable luxury." The huge array of print guidebooks and the Fodors.com website are resources that the Fodor's audience uses to discover the best places within their budget to stay, eat, shop, and explore.

Fodor's Travel publishes guidebooks-- 14 different series that include about 450 separate titles that cover 300 destinations worldwide—and sells more than a million units a year. The company hosts a website, Fodors.com and also provides mobile applications that customers can add to their mobile devices. Product development depends on the product. "We're certainly defining what it means to be Fodor's content," says Jarrell, "Then, we use that as a prism through which we evaluate everything that we do." For digital content, Fodor's often works with partners, such as Garmin or Expedia, to develop products.

Fodor's Travel launched Fodors.com in 1996 "just as the World Wide Web was beginning its dramatic expansion," according to the publishing company. Shortly thereafter, Fodor's began to "nuggetize" its text by requiring its editors, writers, and updaters to reformat the entire content of every book into "minimum information units," where each bit of content the contributors and updaters produced was written and tagged as a stand-alone unit that could be created once and used, repackaged, repurposed, and re-monetized elsewhere—over and over again. "Nuggetizing was critical in allowing us to shoot our content out to the Web, as well as to our licensees," says Jarrell.

The company posts free content from many of its guidebooks on Fodors.com and supplements that content with general travel advice, the offer of a free weekly email newsletter, and a community for registered users with areas such as discussion forums and user-generated ratings for hotels and restaurants.

"We're now entering the next phase of our website development," he adds, "where we believe we need original online content. We realize that the Web can do certain things better than print in terms of providing information, so we are now investing in creating original content for the Web."

Fodor's generates revenue from its vast array of travel guidebooks that are sold in brick-and-mortar bookstores, online at either Fodors.com or RandomHouse.com, and through third-party e-retailers such as Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Fodor's also licenses content to various partners, both online and offline, and that has become a valuable piece of business for the publishing company.

"Online, I would say that, overwhelmingly, we are ad-driven," says Jarrell. Fodor's digital income comes mostly from ad sales but also from content licensing and e-commerce affiliate programs, the relationship with Expedia's booking engine being the primary example. Fodor's receives a percentage of all bookings on Expedia that are generated through Fodors.com.

Executive Summary

Online sales represented a tiny 2.2 percent of total retail sales in the first quarter of 2006. That means publishers who want to prosper selling ancillary products to consumers should look to broaden their retail distribution channels rather than simply posting additional product offers on their e-commerce websites.

Some publishers already use retail distribution channels in the same way they’ve historically used direct mail or public relations. Rather than trying to generate revenue, they view product sales as a loss leader or breakeven source. Their primary objective is to build a database of qualified customers to whom they can sell directly.

Their reasoning? It’s a lot easier and less expensive to market your products if you can identify your best customers. And capturing customer information on your website is easy, inexpensive, and effective.

To drive website traffic via retail distribution:

Find a third-party retail message channel and ride along on that medium with a product containing a great offer.
Include a response mechanism on the product itself or in the packaging that entices readers, users, viewers, listeners, or buyers to visit your website and register for additional useful information or a free download.
Install appropriate conversion architecture on your website to capture the registration data and also offer a free email newsletter or other regular contact device that allows you to begin a relationship with each new site visitor.

That, in a nutshell, is a successful deployment of the Mequoda Internet Marketing Strategy.

Usability and design are two key factors in publishing great websites. You may have a clear strategy and great content, but if your site is unusable and unattractive, it will be difficult for users to find what they're looking for, difficult for you to get users to do what you want them to do and difficult to get users to become loyal customers and revisit again and again.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #14: Promoting and Supporting Brand Preference and Awareness.

Using public relations to drive website traffic and build relationships with an audience is rather simple on its face—so simple, in fact, that many publishers don't "get it".

Those three steps are core to the Mequoda Marketing System and making the most of earned media. It’s not enough to do just the first and second steps. Without completing the third step, the site visitors are simply left hanging. The publisher has given them no reason to come back to the site on a regular basis. And there’s no opportunity to build a database of loyal individuals to whom revenue-generating products may be promoted on a regular basis.

The shame of it is that the third step is no big mystery. It just requires the proper conversion architecture on the website:

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #13: Designing Aesthetically Pleasing Websites.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #12: Speeding Up Website Load Time.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 11: Providing Urgency and Content Freshness.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 10: Organizing Homepage Real Estate Logically and Profitably.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 9: Improving Readability and Content Density.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 8: Applying User-Centric Labeling and Language.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 7: Ensuring Links and Buttons do What they Afford.

A user commonly will want to complete just five or six tasks on a website and those tasks account for 80 percent of online activity. Browsing and searching are common to all types of websites, but other tasks—finding an article, signing up for a email newsletter, buying a product, checking on an order, changing a profile, submitting information... whatever—are different for the various website archetypes.

Mequoda researchers have found that users often will complete a task in an unanticipated way. And when that happens, it's good. It means that the global architecture of the site provides multiple paths to the finish line.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #6: Encouraging the Next Step with Effective Task Completion.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 5: Keeping Navigation Intuitive, Persistent and Consistent.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 4: Increase the User's Connection to your Site by Promoting Community.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #3: Building Relationships with Email Capture.

Creating user-friendly websites begins by following the 14 Mequoda Website Design Guidelines for successful website design. By reviewing a site's score for each of the 14 items, along with the overall average score, the areas of the site that operate well, and those that need work, become evident.In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #2: Webifying Content to Maintain Interest.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline #1: Improving the User Experience with Clear Strategic Intent.

In the not-too-distant past, publishers were content with creating a single corporate website that integrated all of their various business units, products, content, commerce activity, advertising... everything. For many publishers, that's still true today. A single-site strategy, however, results in a kind of uber-site, particularly for multi-title publishers, that is incredibly complicated in terms of content management and too complex and confusing for the average user to navigate easily.

Introduction to the Mequoda Method™ 2006
How to Transform your Book, Magazine or Newsletter into a Niche Media Empire

The Mequoda Method is a collection of media management behaviors that when operated as a repeating cycle, create an audience-driven, continuous improvement media management system. To discover and document the Mequoda Method, the Mequoda Research Team has studied the management strategies and habits of hundreds of successful (and not-so-successful) media organizations to arrive at seven best practices, or organizational habits, that comprise the most current version of the Mequoda Method.

The media case studies you will find in Part 2 of Internet Strategy for Publishers represent the best examples of the seven integrated new media management habits the Mequoda Research Team has codified as the Mequoda Method 2006. While each organization we have reviewed does not excel in all seven habits, each does in several and some, in all.

Key metrics are numbers that, when multiplied together, determine costs or revenues generated and their respective effect on profit and loss. For websites, some metrics are more important than others, depending on the site's business model. Knowing which key metrics to use can be confusing—many site owners find themselves paying attention to the wrong ones.

The major differentiation between the Internet marketing strategy of the Mequoda Method and that of traditional publishing models is the use of free content to drive online traffic. By offering free content (e.g., email newsletter subscriptions, HTML webpage access, eBooks or eReports, blogs or Web feeds) through a variety of free and/or paid media sources, a publisher can entice interested individuals to a website—a Mequoda Internet Hub.

Usability and design are two key factors in publishing great websites. You can have a clear strategy and great content, but if your site is unusable and unattractive, it will be difficult for users to find what they're looking for, difficult for you to get users to do what you want them to do, and difficult to get users to become loyal customers and revisit again and again.

We have developed the Mequoda Website Scorecard, which includes 14 design guidelines that we use to review websites. Using the criteria we've determined for each of these 14 guidelines, you can easily evaluate your own site's usability and design. By reviewing your site's Mequoda Website Scorecard—the scores for each of the 14 guideline items and the average score—you can clearly see the overall effectiveness of your site and easily understand the areas that operate well and those that need work.

Customer-driven content management will be common in the very near future, allowing a diverse community of online users to engage and be engaged in many different ways compared to simply subscribing to a magazine or buying a book. The resulting environment will be much bigger and more sophisticated than in the past. People instinctively want to be heard, to express themselves, to contribute, to belong—basic human needs that are addressed by organizing content around the customer.

The point, of course, is to create many user-centered products; to embrace the Mequoda organigraph as a dynamic map of the company's functions, critical interactions, and relationships; to recognize the system's leading roles and supporting players; and to understand the key media management concepts for building a special-interest niche media empire.

Once you understand the relevance and importance of the Mequoda Media Pyramid to publishing success (see Mequoda Method Habit #2: Build a Mequoda Media Pyramid, Second Edition), the next step in building a Mequoda Marketing System is to understand the relevance and importance of building a Mequoda Website Network in order to synchronize your various online business units and make them work to your advantage.

A Mequoda Website Network—the all-important centerpiece of the Mequoda Marketing System—defines and determines the organizational architecture required for a 21st century media company to compete effectively and profitably. Essentially, the Mequoda Website Network represents the product portfolio of the media company. The network comprises a free, content-rich, relationship-building network hub that is surrounded by—and feeds traffic to—one or more marketing satellites, where the users can be monetized. It is critical, therefore, to understand the unique architecture of a Mequoda Network Hub and the individual archetypes of the various kinds of Mequoda Marketing Satellites that, when combined, become a Mequoda Website Network.

Building a Mequoda Media Pyramid is the core of the seven Mequoda Method habits—an exercise through which you dig down and determine exactly how you're going to run your company. In a Mequoda media enterprise, the commonality is not the platform; rather, it is the expertise in, knowledge of and in-depth perspective about the subject at hand. And those capabilities can, and should, expand across several different kinds of media that are marketed to targeted, qualified prospects and distributed from a master production operation.

The various media—whether products, subscriptions, events, services or something else—are marketed to increasingly specific audiences at progressively higher price levels that offer considerably more valuable margins to the publisher. That is the essence of the Mequoda Media Pyramid.

Setting up a strategic management system simply means determining your core values, defining your vision, stating your mission—and then clearly and effectively communicating those basics to everyone inside and outside your organization. Employing a strategic management system means setting clear objectives that align with your organization's values, its vision and its mission—then supporting those activities through your day-to-day activities.

America's Test Kitchen is a weekly television show on local PBS stations, but it is more than just a cooking show. The TV program and its companion website, AmericasTestKitchen.com, serve as the hub of a well-designed network for Boston Common Press, which produces the show. The program directs the show's 2.9 million viewers to AmericasTestKitchen.com, where, by requiring registration, the company builds an enormous permission-driven database in to which they market their various products. This strategy makes America's Test Kitchen one of the most successful practitioners of the Mequoda Network that we have found.

Products the company promotes to its database include two bimonthly print magazines (Cook's Illustrated and the recently launched Cook's Country), three membership websites and several cookbooks. America's Test Kitchen effectively feeds all these business units—all of which are very much intertwined and interdependent—resulting in an integrated system of product sourcing and support for the parent company, Boston Common Press.

Chris Kimball, publisher and editor, says he feels that publishing business is increasingly becoming a database business. That's also how he views the business side of what his company does, and the way to market to people with an interest in cooking. While access to AmericasTestKitchen.com is free, visitors must register in order to view the recipes. The result is a rich database of qualified individuals for the company to use to market its other products. Additional ways America's Test Kitchen leverages website traffic is through eNotes, a free monthly e-newsletter—tips, techniques, recipes and other items, along with links that bring the recipients back to the site—and promotional ads on the site that encourage subscriptions to the company's other websites and its magazines.

PCWorld.com Internet Marketing Case Study
PC World Makes OFIEs Work by Giving Them Prominent Placement Near Editorial, Making an Email Address Optional and Offering Plenty of Premiums

OFIEs, "Order Forms in Editorial" are embedded subscription forms. They are placed in unused space at the bottom of webpages and, when used to generate subscriptions to a companion print magazine, churn thousands of new orders per year at virtually no cost. PC World is a perfect example.

"Our website (PCWorld.com) is our most profitable new business source for the magazine," says Shawne Pecar, vice president of consumer marketing at PC World. "The embedded sub form on the website has proven to be a very strong, extremely reliable, and particularly worthwhile generator of new subscriptions to the print magazine." While Pecar won’t reveal numbers for PC World, the word is in the industry, among publishers who routinely utilize OFIEs, that they have the potential of tripling new subscription orders generated online.

Key metrics are numbers that, when multiplied together, determine costs or revenues generated and their respective effect on profit and loss. For websites, some metrics are more important than others, depending on the site's business model. Knowing which key metrics to use can be confusing. Many site owners find themselves paying attention to the wrong ones.

First, it's important to decide whether your site implements a sponsor-driven or user-driven business model. For purposes of this article, we are focusing on metrics that are key to user-driven sites. Those sites are run by that hearty group of traditional, circulation-driven magazine, book, and newsletter marketers who have decided to sell information products online. "User-driven site" describes only three of the Mequoda models: the editorial hub, the membership site and certain retail sites. The key driver of a user-driven site is not traffic—not the number of site visitors, nor the number of impressions, nor even the number of paid members—the key driver is the free eLetter.

The Mequoda Strategy Model is a dynamic modeling tool that will help information marketers understand the effects of the key driver, the key variables and the key metrics that affect a particular business. Included are links to two downloadable examples of the Mequoda Strategy Model: the Mequoda Advisory Network case study and the Mequoda Strategy Model blank grid. The Mequoda Strategy Model effectively summarizes the results the targeted business experiences in a given period, and it may be implemented to serve different purposes: a reporting tool, a modeling tool or a planning tool.