Contentbiz

SUMMARY: You really can’t beat customer referrals, but measuring the impact of this type of word-of-mouth marketing is notoriously difficult. A subscription-based discount club for college students solved this problem by turning its customers into affiliates through compensated referrals.

Students then promote the service to their friends through email messages and widgets on their social networking profile pages. Thousands of customers have signed up to produce a 12% conversion rate. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Users of Web 2.0 channels, especially social media sites, are tempting targets for subscription marketers. But you need to select channels that best fit your brand and develop a strategy keyed to those online communities.

We asked a subscription marketer who has tackled that challenge to share some insights on social media marketing. Strategies include:
o Setting goals and expectations
o Finding sites to target
o Creating a monetization metric read the complete article

SUMMARY: "In March 2008, there were 3,733,200 online advertised job vacancies, a 0.6% decline from the March 2007 level." "States where labor demand continues to be high include Alaska, Nevada and Delaware." "Alaska posted 4.65 online advertised vacancies for every 100 persons in the state labor force, the highest rate in the nation." view the complete research record

SUMMARY: Like other publishers with a vast content archive, Marvel Comics saw an opportunity to make thousands of Spider-Man, X Men and other comic books available online.

But the marketing team didn’t want to cannibalize their print copy sales, and they needed to attract hard-core comics fans as well as new readers. We got an inside look at how they launched their digital archive. Includes three landing page copy tests. read the complete interview

SUMMARY: What conversion rate are trial offers getting these days? Which marketing channels deliver the best traffic for online subscription sites? What impact is Web 2.0 having on the industry?

In our latest Special Report on the state of online subscriptions, we have those answers and more. Includes 12 new data charts and key analysis. read the complete article

By Anne Holland, President

It was so funny -- there we were last week at our Selling Subscriptions Summit in New York talking about "Web 2.0," the new Internet where visitors create and organize content as much as professional publishers do.

We had Case Studies on how to market subscriptions via blogs, etc.

But what struck me, and some of our Summit attendees as well, was the fact that this was an "old-style" Summit. Speakers spoke and... read the complete blog post