Why are we doing this? Lot’s of reasons:

1. The IssueM plugin is the best issue based solution for WordPress and we want everyone to use it.
2. We want IssueM to become the #1 platform in the world for magazine and news publishers. Yeah that sounds pretty lofty, but think about it… WordPress is the best blog based publisher, why not add issue functionality? WordPress drives 17% of the worlds website traffic today and is growing. The magazine/news publishing industry has a mess of publishing solutions for sale that don’t come close to what WordPress offers. Why not publish with what NYTimes, Mashable, TechCrunch and millions of others are using?
3. We want more feedback from you (as you are part of the WP community) to show us all the things IssueM can be used for and tell us what you need.
4. Financial: With wider distribution and premium add on plugins, themes and services we will become a stronger organization which helps you the WordPress developer/publisher.
5. Developer friendly: You will be able to jump right in and make the platform stronger.

A hint of what’s to come…

on June 10:

You will have access to an out-of-the-box, ready to go, responsive platform to quickly set up your magazine site… absolutely free.

Oh and if you want premium support for only $65 for the next year, buy the plugin before June 10 and you will save some dough. All existing licenses will convert to our premium support plan.

Bottom line:

By focusing on one topic (dealing with difficult students in the classroom) and demonstrating capabilities through video, Cristia Lesher has quickly reached national recognition for this skill and is receiving inquiries for new consulting work every week.

A little background

Critia Lesher Associates develops staff skills in the K-12 school system. They cover 100′s of topics… from dealing with ADD to handling parents,  to dealing with stress. What Critstia Lesher (the owner) decided was to focus on one topic and go deep with it: “Changing the worst classroom behavior”

Why pick one topic?

Well the answer is that on the web there are a million solutions and vendors competing for a customer’s attention and in order to cut through the ocean of information, you have to create deep content (think articles/videos) on one topic, so that when people search for help on on that topic, your content beats everyone else’s shallow content… and gets found. Naturally once you get your foot in the door with a new client, it’s much easier to sell additional products and services.

So the key takeaway and the one thing you should do for your online maketing campaign is:

Pick one thing you are awesome at and build a campaign around providing a valuable piece of it for free.

Here’s how Cristia Lesher does it:

1. Picked a topic focus: How to deal with difficult behavior in the classroom.
2. Videotapes a top consultant’s (Polly Bath) presentations.
3. Selects a 2 minute highlight from each video to promote.
4. Created a YouTube channel to upload and host the videos.
5. Set up a news blog on the site to add the videos to (this allows Cristia to easily publish and organize her videos on her website).
6. Gets a transcription of the video from castingwords.com ($2 – $4 per video) to add to the blog page under the video. This lets the video/article get found in Google search… Google needs text to rank a webpage.
7. Set up a MailChimp email campaign so that teachers and administrators can subscribe to the videos for free (subscribe for yourself to see how integrated the sign up process is). This helps Cristia build a her email list.
8. Installed social sharing buttons on the blog so that people can virally share the videos in Facebook etc.
9. Invites everyone she knows to subscribe to the free videos. This helps teachers deal with difficult students in the classroom  This is key. What Cristia is doing is creating free content that she can invite prospects to subscribe to… that will help them in their classrooms. It shows off her expertise,  builds trust, and gets promoted virally by enthusiastic educators.
10. Repeat. Every week Cristia adds a new video and transcription to her blog. Subscribers automatically get an email with the new video/article. They love it and are reminded every week how awesome Cristia Lesher Associates is.

So what are the results?

Results are best understood through an email Cristia recently sent me:

Niche-ing:

Wow. What a success that has been. Niche-ing Polly as “Changing the WORST Classroom Behavior” has made a huge difference. Before that we were marketing her for general behavior management.

For one thing, niche-ing led to a clear list of Polly’s services.

Meanwhile, that led to a new, folding business card for her, of which we are VERY proud. It is essentially a mini-brochure. Because it is a folding business card, and because it is so lively (this is a direct result of the energy and enthusiasm we spontaneously began to experience  within ourselves when it came to all-things-Polly once we narrowly defined her niche), Polly finds the new card standing on desks when she’s at her clients’ schools! Plus, people will say, “Hey Polly, can I have another card? Someone snitched mine.” Can you imagine? When has a business card ever gotten that kind of response?

You’ll see on the back of the card that we also tell people how to subscribe to her videos and how to follow her on Facebook.

General results:

1. It’s much easier to impress one of Polly’s prospective or returning clients now, because of her videos and book chapters on the website, and her active Facebook page with its running series of bite-sized behavior tips. I think it’s easier to close a sale — that’s my impression.
2. Clients and their staffs are regularly exposed to Polly, between consultations and even after a contract is completed, because so many of them have subscribed to her videos/articles and follow her on Facebook. (Which we heavily encourage! We bill it to clients as a free service and as a way to “keep the learning going.”
3. Just today I got an inquiry for services from someone who knows Polly only from her videos!!!! We’ve  only been at this just since November. I knew this would start to happen sooner or later.

I delayed, dithered, and dallied for several years before embracing social media. It just seemed so overwhelming. Where to start? Would it do me any good when it came to the bottom line?

But, now that I’ve gotten involved, I love it. There are so many creative opportunities to enhance sales.

Truly.

Cristia

Challenges:

The biggest challenge with creating the best online marketing campaigns today are that they take time to create. This strategy falls under the term “content marketing” which you may have heard of. The idea is provide awesome content for free. If you publish good stuff online, your prospects (and Google) will find your content and come back at you asking for more… and that’s when they start to pay you dollars.

So think about the #1 best thing you do in your business, the one thing that clients love, is emotional, that you naturally get excited about. Create a way to bottle great info for this one topic and put it online every day, week or month for customers to discover and benefit from. Once they do that your door to new business will swing wide open.

Do it. Your business will thank you.

The war for attention online is brutal. Today, you absolutely positively must do these 5 things right:

1. Open your arms to Google search: let your articles get easily found

Paper doesn’t do it. Flip-book/digital mags rarely show up. iPad/Android mags don’t do it. PDF’s don’t do it very often. So what format shows up in Google search over and over again?

Blogs, online magazines, news websites, and YouTube videos do. Their content (as long as it is free or at least teased) gets crawled by Google and shows up when readers look for information that is covered in an article.

Here’s an example: Search for “How to decorate your bookshelves”  Click the link and see what you get. The 1st 2 results are articles from House Beautiful magazine and realsimple.com. Note these are web based articles.

2. Let your articles share quickly via social networks

This means engaging your readers with article comments, Facebook Likes, Twitter tweets, Linkedin shares, etc. The web makes this easy to do. You want ultimately readers to add your article links to their conversations on the social web.

You want readers to comment on your articles, Like and Tweet  your content. You won’t find a more powerful and easy way to do this then a web based magazine. We are not as comfortable sharing PDF, flip book articles, or iPad app content. And linking to paper… well we are still waiting for that technology to arrive.

3. Make devices happy: Let your readers read your articles on their phones

Yes WordPress right out of the box will read nicely on iPhones/Androids/iPads/Kindlesand more. And yes you can make mobile device friendly reading experiences by either: using a responsive theme (which auto adjusts to the size of a small screen – check out

responsive designs at StudioPress/WooThemes/Solostream), or create a mobile device specific experience through the use of adaptive design or a WordPress plugin such as WP-Touch (affiliate links).

WordPress shoulders these 3 right out of the box quite well and it’s easy to add plugins to enhance these functions.

4. Use several ways to make money online

The fourth and less obvious thing WordPress does better than any other platform is let you create multiple ways to make money with your content.

You can:

1. Advertise (the low bar)
2. Sell advertorial pages that become part of your content
3. Build an email list and sell premium advertising to it
4. Create a monthly membership site with a plugin such as s2member or Premise (affiliates)
5. Mix and match free vs. premium articles or issues
6. Set up a way for your advertisers to blog about their business in real time on your site (Village Soup uses this very effectively)
7. Get sponsors and auto publish your podcasts to iTunes
8. Sell affiliate products
9. Sell your own products
10. Sell a how-to course
11. and yes more

Number 5: The invisible shield

The benefits of open source code and the WordPress community:

A. If you don’t know this, WordPress is open source and free and supported by a core team of developers at Automatic. Open source means that any developer in the workd can improve the code, keep it up to date, and contribute updates back to WordPress for inclusion. That means you literally have more passionate developers improving WordPress than Google does… 10′s of thousands. It’s what makes WordPress so damn state of the art, easy to use and flexible.

B. You won’t get stuck with a proprietary system. This is one of the biggest and long term critical protections you need. If you build a publication with one developer and decided to find someone else… you can move/give access to your site to your new developer… no sweat. I ran into a small nonprofit that had sunk $30,000 into a proprietary website and 2 years later decided they didn’t like the service level they had with their developer. They were stuck (and still are), and yes legals were involved. Don’t go there.

C. Fast Workflow. Yep I snuck this one in here. More frequently than not I hear things from clients like “wow I loaded up my entire issue in less than a day!” or “I can’t believe how easy this is compared to xyz system.” That’s right WordPress let’s you load up your content wickedly fast. Ask around.

D. WordPress is also the leading publishing platform in the world. Used by the biggest publishers today that are on the front-lines of the web and need to cover all the bases.

• There are currently over 60,000,000 WordPress.com sites and
• Over 5 million downloads of WordPress 3.5 (the latest version) there are millions of older versions running, and 1 copy of WordPress could create 1000 sites (many do). The math gets tricky here but I think you get the idea, and hey if the NYTimes uses WordPress why wouldn’t you?

If you are into charts here is a good one from Sage Internet. You can see how WordPress in blue in 2010 took a solid lead over the other 2 leading open source platforms (Drupal & Joomla):

Some WordPress website and magazine/news site examples:

I am always curious as to who uses WordPress today for their blog, magazine and even main websites. Not surprisingly the list is growing with brand names.  Here are a few WordPress examples:

Rolling Stones

BBC

Marines Magazine

Bangor Daily News

LA Times

National Geographic

The Wall Street Journal

Network Solutions

And many more brand name organizations:

Nokia BlackBerry Ford Social LinkedIn Reader’s Digest Forbes Best Buy Harvard Boys’ Life Vanderbilt Dartmouth Getty Images ESPN Ning GE TechCrunch AMD Carnival Cruise Lines Pepsi Samsung Rackspace Herman Miller Flickr Adobe NY Times Blogs

If you made it this far, I know you have comments. Agree? Disagree? Let it rip :)

This story starts with a person I call the frenzied editor. Not long ago I walked into the office of this publisher who was peering over a conference room table, with about 30 white pieces of paper scattered about. What he was doing was busily sorting out what pages would go where in his publication. He was determining what was on his homepage, the sub pages, where the features would go, the ad zones and all the components of his revised publication. He didn’t look very happy, because he kept throwing pieces of paper in the garbage, striking out certain features, frantically writing  notes in the side margins, and apparently didn’t have any idea where he was going.

Rean the rest at zeen101.com

What did they do? They turned to WordPress. Here were their needs:

• Publish and launch each issue every Friday
• Feature articles on the home page
• Access articles by department (sports, arts, opinion, etc.)
• Run a news blog alongside the articles
• Archive and provide easy access to past issues
• Feature Twitter discussions and encourage article comments
• Easily share articles and blog posts through Twitter, Facebook, RSS, email etc
• Show off each author’s publishing history on the author’s info page
• Let readers subscribe to the news by email

Watch the video below to see how this news site was put together to fulfill all these requests, and note this was built for less ($) than you think.

We implemented Middlebury’s design and built all the functions in WordPress using a handful of plugins. The end result is what we think is a state of the art news site.

Here is a list of all the sofware and services used to create the site:

• WordPress publishing platform (of course)
• Our IssueM plugin which turns WordPress into an issue based publisher
• MailChimp for email subscriptions
• GravityForms (affiliate) for contact form capture
• JetPack plugin for social sharing
• DISQUS for comment management
• YARPP yet another related posts plugin for displaying related article links
• Basic jQuery Slider for the home page “The Campus Current” (blog post slider)

The place whose sole purpose is to help WordPress magazine publishers succeed online. Check it out and make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an article that might just bring in an extra buck.

This site, which promotes the Optics in Medicine research lab at Dartmouth was built and launched in 18 hours. Yes that is fast.

A new online magazine we built for the Simmons School of Social Work that uses our IssueM plugin for WordPress. IssueM turns WordPress into an issue based publisher.

Our IssueM plugin turns WordPress into an issue based publisher… this means you can use it to publish a magazine or online newsletter. Now, due to popular demand you can play around with IssueM to see how it works.

The demo is located at: demo.issuem.com

Go here to login:

• Username: demo
• Password: demo

Feel free to muck about. We restore this site on a regular basis.

What the IssueM plugin does [:40 secs]

1. emailing help@tcwebsite.com or going to
2. help.tcwebsite.com
3. calling 603-863-6006 x2 (reaches Jeremy our new developer and dispatcher)

The helpdesk creates tickets for all requests (which you will recieve via email) and we will respond to you personally within 24 hours.

Our new WordPress developer is Jeremy Green who has joined us and will be managing the helpdesk, as well as developing and maintaining WordPress sites. If you use our helpdesk ticketing system you will reach Karin, Derek, Chris, Lew, Jeremy and myself. We have been beta testing it and it is working well. Feel free to use it for any request or question.

Helpdesk as knowledgebase
Another benefit is the centralizing of resource information for you. For instance 17 WordPress training videos are currently available on the helpdesk under the Solutions tab. Check it out and learn more about managing your website.

I think you will find that the addition of Jeremy, more reference information, and our new helpdesk will result in better communications and better care for your website needs.

We have been working on quite a few successful marketing projects lately. If you are interested in boosting website leads please let me know and we can discuss.

All the best online,

Pete

The most notable change for our clients will be taking over their helpdesk (zendesk) ticketing system. This will give clients faster access to both email and phone support.

I also want to welcome Jeremy from Catalyst who will help us handle updates and be the “man behind the phone” for client support. Between Chris, Jeremy, and Lew I am sure clients will be in very good hands!

• Current issue
• Archives
• Blog
• Custom styling
• Custom advanced search function (see screenshot below)

Our IssueM plugin is ready for use.

What does it do?
The IssueM plugin for WordPress lets you quickly build an issue based magazine or newsletter.

How does it work?
Your articles in each issue are a custom post type, letting you produce both issues and a standard real time news blog.

It seems natural to use WordPress as an online publication since it is SEO friendly, easily connects with social media, and can turn into a thriving subscriber/member community.

Find out more at IssueM.com

It is critical to pay attention and contribute to these new social properties to ensure that they are not driving away potential customers… and are in fact working for your business.

Watch this video [7:58] presented by Peter Ericson (to SCORE in Hanover, NH) to understand what this is, and what you need to do to stay on top of your reputation online:

This WordPress website was built in less than 30 days. Using a Premium Theme template we customized it to reflect Ivy Leader’s brand.

Watch this video (42:58) to learn what your business must be doing today in social media. Pete focuses in on 2 fundamental web activities that will drive new customers to your website and engage your current customers and fans.

Please pardon the sketchy footage of Pete as the room was a tough one to find a good camera position!

WordPress based and open source, IssueManager combines the features of satisfying your issue based workflow with real time blog stories. Get pricing and more information here.

Please note we are offering this price level to a limited group and may not be available at all times. Let us know if you are interested.

]]> http://tcwebsite.com/news/we-launch-our-foundation-magazine-solution/feed/ 0 http://tcwebsite.com/news/we-launch-our-1st-instant-magazine/ http://tcwebsite.com/news/we-launch-our-1st-instant-magazine/#comments Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:59:16 +0000 TCwebsite http://tcwebsite.com/?p=3157 Ok so Eastman turned our instant newsletter service into an online magazine. We take that as a compliment :)

This print and now online magazine plans to reach more home buyers in the NH area that are interested in a lakefront, active, 4 season community.

Since each story online is a magnet that attracts visitors searching in Google, the goal is to broadcast the richness of the community online, and then move the visitor to the main Eastman site to entice them to learn more. The more on-target visitors to both sites increases the chances that someone will ultimately purchase a home there.

View this magazine at EastmanLiving.com