Newsletter Upgrades and Changes

As of the Monday of January 11, 2010, Press Publisher is changing the way the system handles Newsletters to Subscribers. (Please Note: the Newsletter feature is only available with Paid Package users of the Press Publisher system). While some Users of the system have been content with the simple Newsletter feature that allows you to send basic Newsletters to your Subscribers in the system, others have wanted a considerably more robust solution for handling newsletters.

Press Publisher has integrated with MailChimp to provide a more robust solution for sending Emails/Newsletters to your Subscribers. This means to use our Newsletter feature, you will have to have a MailChimp account. Here is the good news, for most users of our system this will not cost anything additional. MailChimp has a free package that is priced based on the number of subscribers and the number of emails sent in a monthly period (0-500 subscribers and 3000 emails per month for FREE). So, everyone wins!

What are the Benefits?

1. If you have en existing subscriber list with another service, you can import it directly into MailChimp and then sync the subscribers in our system, with the list you import into MailChimp.
2. Professional templates. MailChimp is the premier email marketing and mailing list services in the industry with the ability to create your own or use one of their pre-designed email templates.
3. No limit to the number of subscribers you want to send emails to or the number of emails you send. They have a package for you.
4. Detailed analytics of email campaigns. MailChimp has a powerful tracking system to monitor your campaigns.
5. Instant opt-out for your subscribers from your email campaigns. This is an important spam control measure.
6. Better system health. Because we will no longer be handling emails on our system, we will no longer be prone to problems associated with spammers on our servers and network. We will do what we do best and MailChimp will do what they do best.

What do I have to do?

This change only effects users of the Press Publisher system who are on a paid package.

1. If you want to use this service, you will first need to register for an account with MailChimp.
2. Once you have an account set up, you will need to create at least one list and at least one template in MailChimp.
3. In MailChimp, you will need to create a Valid API Key. Go to Account > API Keys & Info
4. Click the “add a key” link.
5. Copy the API Key (it will look like a really long string of numbers and letters). This needs to be copied and pasted under the Settings page in the Press Publisher CMS.
6. Once you have inserted and Saved the Valid API Key, you can go back under the Settings > MailChimp and select the list you created previously. If you have multiple lists, choose the list you want to use for your newsletter mailings. Please note: you can change this from mailing to mailing if you want.
7. You are ready to start creating your email newsletters under the Newsletters tab in the CMS.

This has been a widely requested feature and we are excited to see it come to completion. We are sure it will be a truly positive enhancement to the system.

Comments Management Enhancements

We have added a new comment feature to allow better overall management and control of the comments on your website.  From your publication website management area (the CMS), you will find two new additions.

The first is under your settings (Settings > Comments).  In this small area, you can choose whether to “Auto Approve” events for instant approval of all comments posted to your Blog Posts and Articles.  The other option in there is the option to be notified via email when new comments are added to your website.  If comments have been added to your publication, then you will receive and email over-night.

The second addition is under the “Magazine” drop-down menu in the CMS.  This will show you a list of your recently added comments and you can filter them by Approved, Unapproved and Either.  You have a paginated list of comments where you can easily review and make your comment approvals right there from a single page.

Enjoy!

P.S. Coming soon . . .  Mailchimp.com integration!

Coupon Feature Addition

We are pleased to announce the release of the much-anticipated “Coupon” component of Press Publisher. This feature is custom-built for users who set subscription fees for their publications, providing a variety of adjustments that override the default subscription settings. The system allows multiple “Coupon Codes” for maximum flexibility.

The new functionality is also useful for any user, because it can track your web site’s registrations without setting a price. Clever manipulation of the Coupon Codes can even help you track the source of those subscribers.

The settings available for Coupons are virtually identical to those for a “PayPal Subscribe Button” inside PayPal. Since both our system and the subscription feature are linked to PayPal, these settings include:

• A First Introductory Period, Duration and Price
• A Second Introductory Period, Duration and Price
• The final ongoing subscription price – either Monthly or Yearly fees

As noted above, the coupon settings override anything you already have set up in your normal PayPal subscription. (You can check those values in your “Settings” section.)

The new Coupons feature is located under the “Magazine” tab of the CMS. The subscriber sees a new coupon field on the main subscribe page, the resulting subscribe success page, and on the profile page.

We hope you find the new feature useful and, as always, look forward to your feedback.

The Importance of Advertising

As publishers, we are all familiar with the importance of advertising: traditionally, the companies who paid to put their name in a periodical were the main way to cover publication costs. The Internet’s changed that by reducing the costs and increasing relative revenue. But do online publishers still need to do the leg-work to find advertisers? And is it worth it?

In the last blog entry, we mentioned that online advertising expenditure has overtaken its television equivalent. This isn’t a passing trend – it was reported by Spiegel-Online for the United States in 2008 and this year by the IAB for the United Kingdom (along with several other, smaller economies in the interim). Those figures have yet to surpass the spending on print advertising, which means that – as an online publisher – you benefit from the best of both worlds.

That answers the second of our opening questions: is it worth it? The figures show there’s an enormous amount of money circulating in the virtual world – and some of it could be headed to your bank account if you include ads on your site.

But what about the leg-work? Thankfully, the big advertisers make it very easy to place banners or ad blocks on the published page. Systems like Google’s Ad Manager - which not only links to AdSense, as one would expect, but to other providers as well – give you the tools to simply decide where you would like the ads to appear, and leave the rest to them.

The advantage of this is that the provider will find appropriate clients and feed their adverts to your site. Their systems analyze your page content and figure out what subjects you cover, then match those with keywords the advertisers use. Only those ads that match will be sent to your site and, for every click, some extra revenue comes your way.

Combine this with PressPublisher’s built-in support and it couldn’t be easier. If you’d like to start including some advertising on your publications, we suggest starting with the three video tutorials available from the home page (or follow these links to Part 1 and Part 2 for banners, and Part 3 for blocks).

Effects Of The Recession

Magazines and periodicals have been hit by the recession, in much the same way as most other businesses. However, the falling newsstand sales figures published by some of the bigger players don’t show the whole picture. For example, Bauer Media – publishers of FHM, Empire and other huge titles - revealed very positive sales on the majority of their brands from January to June, despite the general downturn.

What the news reports and commentary also don’t show is that long-term sales are still rising. A survey of 81 leading titles published last month by MediaPost showed that readership has increased by 8% since 2000 - and that specific men’s and women’s interest magazines have seen over 13% growth.

Surprisingly, very few of these figures take online readership and subscriptions into account. Given that the world becomes more connected every day, this would seem to be a massive oversight, but many publishers consider online readership less indicative of overall trends. Their belief is that too many of the site hits reported are one-off visitors and not regular readers.

In truth, this shows a lack of understanding more than anything else. With careful analysis, the one-off visits can be filtered out of the overall picture in much the same way as customers browsing the magazine stand, but not buying, are excluded from paper sales data. Unique, repeat visits can be identified. With RSS feed and online subscription data providing similar detail to real-world subscriptions, the information collected is comparable in quality with newsstand statistics.

Unfortunately, tracking those figures is not an easy task as there is little centralized reporting. The Audit Bureau releases paper sales figures regularly in the US, from over 500 participating publishers, but online data is not included. In the UK, ABC reports independently on the media industry and has recently been pressured – by the industry itself - to include Internet figures as part of ABCe, the electronic media division. How many publishers will be included remains unknown.

The important message in all this is that online publishing is still seen as being of secondary importance. While many of the smarter periodicals have already made the leap to the Internet and are receiving regular attention from a devoted readership, much of the industry remains stuck in the mud of paper publishing and concerns over falling newsstand receipts.

Spending on online advertising is now bigger than television advertising expenditure: surely that should be enough to convince even the biggest publisher that online readership is just as important.

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