When planning a custom publication, one of the first issues that needs to be addressed is what’s the most appropriate business model for the project. As you’ll see below, each approach has its pros and cons (you’ll see examples of each of these at the Custom Publishing Australia web site).

Client pays all expenses

In this model, the client basically pays all the expenses. The advantage to the client is that they have full creative control of the magazine, the disadvantage, is that custom publishing can be expensive.

Client pays expenses, but invites suppliers/vendors/partners to advertise for a fee to defray costs

With this approach, the client pays all the expenses, but asks suppliers/vendors/ business partners to kick in some money through paid advertising. This is a good way of defraying costs if there’s a compelling reason for suppliers to advertise. Here, the client retains creative control of the publication, but for this approach to be sustainable, the client needs to have good relationships with its suppliers/vendors and business partners, who are willing to support the magazine in he long term.

Client pays expenses, but sells advertising to recover costs and make a profit

This scenario arises when a client from a non publishing background wants to embark on a publishing venture, but they don’t have the internal resources to put the publication together. In this case the custom publisher is simply as an outsourced publishing department for the client. Again, the client retains creative control of the publication, but for this approach to be sustainable, the client needs to have good relationships with its suppliers/vendors and business partners, who are willing to support the magazine in he long term.

Custom publisher sells advertising to pay expenses, though client still subsidises publication

In this model the custom publisher sells advertising on behalf of the client to help fund the magazine, although the client still makes a contribution to help cover costs. This usually happens where the client is keen for a publication to be produced, and there is a healthy pool of advertisers who can be approached to support the magazine. Here the client may only have limited control of the publication’s creative as the custom publisher needs to make the magazine as appealing to a broader pool of advertisers. The client’s input may simply consist of a set of guidelines that need to be adhered to.

Custom publisher sells advertising to cover production costs, no contribution by client

Where there is a significant pool of advertisers, and a compelling sales story, the custom publisher sells advertising to completely fund production of the magazine. The client makes no financial contribution to magazine, and in some cases receives a license fee or a share of the profits. Here the client may only have limited control of the publication’s creative as the custom publisher needs to make the magazine as appealing to a broader pool of advertisers. The client’s input may simply consist of a set of guidelines that need to be adhered to.

Of course, all of these models are just generalisations, and there is a lot of room for negotiation in how a custom publishing project might be managed.

The key of course, is coming up with a business model that is sustainable in the longer term. There’s nothing worse than launching a custom publication that fizzles out because the business model hasn’t been well though out.

You’ll find more information about custom publishing at the Custom Publishing Australia web site.

To be honest, it’s taken me a while to get to this point. I’ve always been very cynical about the field of search engine optimisation (SEO), which I’ve always associated with people who want to unfairly manipulate search engines - the so called “black hat” SEOs - for unearned personal gain.

For this reason I’ve avoided SEO, but I started to change my mind when I had an experience with one of my mainstream blogs that demonstrated quite clearly that a small change to your web page can increase traffic, and it’s not about cheating, it’s simple about making your pages as easy to find as possible. Here’s what happened.

Wordpress (the open source content management system), by default, creates page titles that look like this:

Cogent Insights >> Blog Archive >>Book review: Get to the top on Google

However, when that page appears in a search engine, all people see is the first part of the page title, which isn’t actually very meaningful. By changing the page title to something like this:

Book review: Get to the top on Google - Cogent Insights

I was able to dramatically increase traffic. That’s not cheating, that’s just ensuring that my web pages appear in Google in a user friendly way. This made me realise that there might be other tweaks that I could do to make my sites more search friendly,  I decided it was time to find out what SEO was really about, and that’s why I turned to Get to the top on Google by David Viney, who’s described as a “SEO expert”.

The 250 page book is well written and easy to read, though having some understanding of web page design and HTML does help. Viney explains what search engine optimisation is all about.

There’s not really that much too it. Basically you select some keywords you want to target, and then develop a web site that features those keywords, and then you get other web sites (preferably those well regarded by Google) to link to you. Of course, that sounds easy, but getting results in a competitive environment, can be very tough.

Viney also provides step-by-step instructions on:

• How to work out what key words to target
• How to set up your web site and pages
• Writing copy
• And how to get links to your site

In addition he also talks about how to avoid getting penalised by Google for inadvertently doing the wrong thing.

We’ve all heard of Google blacklisting sites for trying to cheat, so his discussion on this topic is very interesting.

In the last few chapters Viney talks about Adsense, Google Maps and Google Earth, and things like Google Analytics.

Overally, Viney’s done a very good job of explaining what SEO is about, and making it accessing in a no bullshit kind of way — he does make it clear that there is no easy way of getting to the top of a Google search enquiry.

If you are running a web site, than I certainly recommend Get to the top on Google as a very good introduction to the field of search engine optimisation.

By Mahesh Sharma

Jan 18, 2007

Years from now people may look back at blog tech.blorge.com as a paradigm of this time in publishing: leaving print to venture online.

Computer mag Free Access was shut down around April last year by founder John Pospisil, and later in the year he quietly re-entered the tech media space with tech.blorge.com, a decision purely based on his opinion that the media’s future is online.

“It really came down to making a choice about where the future was, and as much as my background is as a print journalist and I love print and magazines, if you’re talking about where the future of publishing is, I don’t know if you’ll find too many people saying print”, he said.

“Being a print publication, the production costs of that compared to a website are very different. You face very different risks and you’re talking about a loss of tens of thousands of dollars per edition, as opposed to thousands of dollars for a website.

“Free Access also had some weaknesses. Obviously it was always dependant on Harvey Norman, Myer, Dick Smith, and the main distributors.”

The catalyst for the closure was the retirement of their ad manager, but Pospisil said the mag’s circulation had remained steady leading up to its demise and that he saw the departure as an opportunity to go out on a high.

“The circulation was around the 45k mark. It was an audited mag and completely reputable…The last issue made a profit, it wasn’t necessarily about Free Access losing money until it shut down.

“We concluded that Free Access had been a remarkably successful product over its life and rather than running it into the ground, my preferred option was to set it down while it had some dignity.”

Pospisil said many of the lessons he’d learnt with Free Access over its eight-year lifetime assisted him in soft-launching tech.blorge.com in November last year.

“One of the lessons I’ve learnt over the years is how important it is to do market research, make changes where appropriate, and to not be rigid. They’re the kind of lessons I’ve been applying to tech.blorge.”
Pospisil is gunning for a portion of the ICT audience that already has a glut of information to choose from on the Net, but he believes tech.blorge’s ‘edgy and opinionated’ approach is finding its mark.

Starting from scratch in November, Pospisil claimed to have more than 200,000 unique visitors in December. Alexa traffic shows that in late December, the site had a major spike in traffic around the time of the Microsoft blogger controversy, which would have contributed significantly to those figures. Pospisil said the goal is to achieve higher, more consistent traffic levels thought to the end of March, and then double those figures by the end of June.

And reader feedback since the site went live over two-and-a-half months ago has convinced Pospisil that they are on the right track before their full launch somewhere between May and June.

“It’s more or less confirmed our original idea, which was to launch a site that wasn’t afraid to tackle the big issues, wasn’t afraid to be controversial if needed, and wasn’t afraid to take up stories that perhaps had been overlooked by other people…This was confirmed by the reader response in terms of feedback and the stories that have been read the most.”

Reader participation on the site has not only helped Pospisil tweak the editorial direction of the site - a story on the Microsoft blogging scandal attracted 57 comments - but it’s also something Pospisil expects will help promote the site once it’s ready to go.

“There are many ways you can promote a website. There are a lot of citizen journalist and social news websites out there that have started to pick up our stories and have brought in readers…Social computing in general is a really good way of promoting a website.”

The tech component of ‘blorge’ currently makes up half of the sites under that umbrella – the other site is ‘photo blorge’ - and while Posposil said he has currently devoted all of his time to his area of expertise, his long-term goal is to expand the blorge brand to encompass a wide variety of fields.

“The broader concept is that blorge is the umbrella brand for a number of different blogs/newssites. At the moment tech.blorge is the number one priority,” he said.

“It’s an area we’ve all worked in and an area where there’s already a large audience on the Net looking for tech news and comments. The idea is that as tech.blorge grows and becomes more self-sustaining I’ll start to look at other blorge sites.”

Sound ambitious?? You bet.

So why the name Blorge?

Well I wanted a brand that I could call my own, and a brand that had some connection to blogging. I wanted a brand that couldn’t be claimed by anyone else, and a brand that I could register as a dot com.

If you’ve ever tried to register a dot.com you’ll know that almost every conceivable name is taken. I even tried names in Spanish, Latin, Czech, and Australian Aboringinal. All gone.

Then I started to play with joining names together. My colleague Alex-Zaharov Reutt suggested Blogasm, but I didn’t want to use a name that might have negative connotations. I wanted a name that was suggestive of blogs, but that also suggested the “reading of blogs”. I started thinking of other ways to express  this idea and came up with “consumption of blogs”, which led me to ”gorging on blogs”, and so you can see that Blorge is a combination of Blog and gorge.

Once I was happy with the name I asked designer Ian Tjhan to come up with a logo. I’ve worked with Ian for many years, on both online and print projects, and I really like his work.

I think Ian’s Blorge logo is clean, striking and modern.

You’ll notice that the Blorge logotype is encased in a speech bubble, which represents the expression of ideas and dialogue, which is what blogging is all about. The logo is in black and white as a tribute to the printed page (which is usually black-and-white, think books and newspapers), which was the precursor to modern electronic publishing and blogging

It’s still early days, but the first two blogs are up and running. You’ll find them at:

• TECH.BLORGE.com - PC and lifestyle technology
• PHOTO.BLORGE.com - Digital cameras and photo tutorials

In the next few posts I’ll discuss editorial strategy, differentiation and competitive advantage, as well as introduce you to some of the people who are making Blorge possible.

Spencer interviews Michael Bolding at Pugster, online retailer of charms and jewelry. The business has a MySpace profile, which it is using to help generate traffic and sales. Bolding provided some advice on how to use MySpace as a marketing vehicle. His key points were:

• Focus on the right group for your product or market - don’t get overwhelmed by the numbers.
• When you first start you need to get as many friends as possible, and Bolding suggests targeting bands (who also want as many friends as possible)
• Use MySpace mail as a softsell tool to build relationships with people
• Be patient as it takes time to build credibility. Provide something interesting, such as blogs or music - “the only investment is your time”
• Keep it personal, and don’t go over the top with the selling
• Simple profiles work best
• Don’t let your site become a slow loader (ie too much junk so that it slows down)

What I think is interesting is that if you look at Bolding’s advice, it’s consistent with some broader, well-established themes that you learn in marketing school, and which I’ve talked about here and in my book Hacking Myspace( in the chapter that provides advice to bands on how to promote themselves).

First the importance of segmentation, ie targeting the “right group”. Whatever you sell, you cannot be all things to all people, and it’s vitally important to identify a target market, and than focus on reaching that market. Obviously, since Bolding is selling charms, MySpace is a great promotional platform for him, but even then, not everyone on MySpace wants to buy charms.

Second, adding value to the experience of visitors to your profile helps you engage potential customers, and helps to generate interest in whatever it is that you’re doing.

Third, be easy to deal with and make it clear what you’re about and what people can do to follow up. In my profile I provide a link to this web page, as well as a link to Amazon where people can buy my book. I actually had a conversation about this yesterday when I met someone at a cafe and it wasn’t clear whether there was table service or whether you had to order at the counter. My colleague said that he had on occasion walked away from an unfamiliar cafe because it “was just too hard”. Don’t let people leave from your profile because it’s not clear what to do.

Here are the three principles I came up with:

You need to be authentic: I would explain this by saying that this is more of an attitude and approach than a marketing tactic. I think the kind of people using MySpace can spot a phony a mile away, and I think to succeed, you really need to be passionate about what you’re selling. I think this will come through in your profile and how you deal with people. While researching the book I interviewed a number of different artists to see if I could obtain some insights into how they used MySpace to promote themselves. The bands that really cared about what they were doing, and cared about their fans, had the profiles that were very engaging.

You need to interact: The Internet is a two-way communications channel; social networking sites even more so. If people show an interest in your profile, make a point of sending a thank you comment. Listen to what people have to say about what you’re doing. One of the big themes in marketing is getting closer to your customer. The idea is that the customer can help you shape the services or products you offer, so that create services or products that are more appealing to your target market. MySpace offers all sorts of opportunities to communicate with your customers, so take advantage of MySpace to interact.

You need to add value: Try to put something on your profile that will add value to the experience of people visiting your profile. It can be something as simple as information, or it can be more. A lot of the promotional sites offer backgrounds, or badges, or widgets that other MySpace members can add to their site.

I’d be very interested in your ideas. Do you agree or disagree with the principles I’ve come up with? Do you have some principles that you’d like to add?

By the way, Business 2.0 is the only newstand magazine that go out of my way to buy (and it’s quite expensive out here in Australia). There’s always something interesting in each issue, and if you’re looking for business opportunities, online  or not, you’ll always see something ot get the creative juices going.

It’s well-researched, and well-written, and if you’re interested in the blogosphere and new media, it should be on your reading list.

I have no association with Business 2.0; I’m just a very impressed reader.

So what competitive advantage do you gain by joining a blogging network?

The barriers to entry of starting a blog are very low; ludicrously low, I think.

To get some perspective, let’s look at print magazines, which I think were the old-world equivalent of the blogosphere.

Some years ago I started what became a successful computer magazine, FREE ACCESS. It cost $30,000 to print the first issue, and there was a huge opportunity cost in terms of unpaid wages because my business partner and I had to quick our day jobs to create write and layout the magazine, and sell advertising.

Compare that with blogging. Blogging platforms, like WordPress, are completely free – and if you’ve never tried Wordpress, you’ll be impressed by just how powerful it is, especially when used with plug ins. As far as investment of time to get a blog started, I think it would be fair to say that as long as you know your area, you can get away with spending about an hour a day to get your blog started. As far as selling advertising, you can use Google Ad Sense to sell your advertising until you get to a critical mass where it makes sense for you to start exploring other opportunities.

So to distil the key issues raised so far:

• There is unlikely to be much a technological advantage gained by joining a blogging network – the technology is free, and most of the problems you’ll face have already been solved by other, so you’ll find free solutions on the Interney.
• Is there a selling advantage? Ie will you be better sell advertising by joining a blogging network? Google Adsense is incredibly efficient, and because it dominates the market, it’s much more likely to be able to deliver advertising that matches your site. Most blog networks use Google Adsense anyway, so if anything, you’re just adding a middle man to the process who is taking a cut? On the other hand, a blogging network will know how to optimize advertising so that it better works on your blog – but this is something you can learn by trial and error, or you can simply buy one of the many Adsense books on the market.
• One of the big problems with there being such low barriers to entry is that there is a lot of competition (though not all of it is real competition, which I’ll talk about in a future blog). This means is that differentiation (another future blog topic) and the product develop process are really important (another future topic) – but you don’t need to join a blogging network to get these right.

I think the real competitive advantage offered by a blogging network is a marketing advantage. After all, one of the big challenges of publishing a blog is for it to be noticed. So the question to ask yourself is will the marketing benefit outweigh the cost of a reduced advertising margin? I think this needs careful evaluation, and I’d be really interested in your opinions — I want to explore this in more detail in future blogs.

There are other issues as well, such as, who owns the blog, but let’s leave that for another time as well.

I seemed to have raised more questions than answers in this blog, but hopefully that will give you plenty to comment on and give me plenty to write about.

Rubel’s blog reflects all of these qualities, and helps make it one of the most interesting, and well-read blogs in the blogosphere.

The focus of his writing is “how social media is transforming marketing, media and public relations”.

Given Rubel’s position he is able to offer some very interesting insights into social media. What I like about Rubel is that in the spirit of the blogosphere he is willing to share high-quality information, and to comment on issues that are close to home (for example, issues that relate to his employer).

Rubel’s a good writer, and his blogs are tight and on topic. His style is friendly and conversational, so much so, that when reading his blogs you can easily fall into the trap of thinking that you know him. He updates his blog religiously, often when he’s away from home on business.

Rubel’s also a gentleman. Even when he was personally attacked, he kept in his cool. In fact he turned the attack into an opportunity to blog about his ideas on how to treat people.

Passionate, engaging and authentic are three words I would  use to describe Micro Persuasion, and for this reason was the first site selected for this series of posts highlighting the best of the blogosphere.

While I’ve written a number of books over the years, I still get a buzz when I first see the finished product. I think the publisher, Wiley, has done a great job on the cover design and layout.

And yes, the book is red, and not blue (as it was shown in the previews).

If you do decide to get a copy, or already have one, I’d really like to get your feedback. I’d also be interested in hearing about any ideas you have for this site.

If you feel that the book or web site has helped you, than I would really appreciate your help in trying to get it onto MySpace’s top ten books list (which you can find out how to do here).

John Pospisil