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: The Web 2.0 bandwagon has been rolling for some time. Visitors to your site expect to see blogs, video and social networking features. Yet, many subscription sites aren’t sure which interactive features actually make money.

In our latest Sherpa Kit, we answer that question and more:
- Glossary of terms and checklists to get you started
- Making the most of widgets
- Cheat sheets for YouTube, user-generated content and blogging
- Lots of creative samples to swipe ideas read the complete article

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: Many content publishers have added Web 2.0 tactics,
but are any of them seeing ROI? Next week, we'll release
another Sherpa Kit with everything you need to get started
(if you haven't started yet) or fine-tune (if you're ready to advance further) your own social networking strategies.

But, first, listen to our podcast and discover anecdotes about publishers' experiences with Web 2.0 and the advantages of using existing social networks to increase your base.
http://podcast.marketingyak.com/flash/web20/index.html
(Time: 7:32 minutes) 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