EdgeClix and Performance-Based Advertising

Directory publisher Easier to Read recently added value to their Yellow Pages book by putting it online using Dirxion’s look and feel digital directory product, EdgeClix. In doing so, they discovered a host of new marketing opportunities for their existing local business advertisers.

While some publishers choose to simply use our product in its most basic form, which is designed to highlight and give added value to your existing ads just as they are seen in their printed counterparts, others like Easier to Read, see our list of expanded advertising features and cannot wait to seize the opportunity to not only help their advertisers enhance their online presence, but also monetize their new investment.

Cover Banner Advertising

iPick link appears within Popular Categories in the Table of Contents

When clicked the iPick window pops up highlighting your advertiser

Both the Cover Banner and iPick programs were designed so directory publishers could offer their advertisers exciting ways to insert ads at any time of the year. By selling premium placements like these, publishers can guarantee advertisers additional exposure, while also giving them the ability to keep their promotions current.

Easier to Read is just one excellent example of how our customers are using their digital directories to capitalize on the strong relationships they’ve grown with local businesses. Even without large changes to their sales structure, digital directories can be equipped with many of our advertising programs to help generate new, steady, profitable streams of revenue.

Allow your advertisers to use one or many of our exciting, interactive features to get the most activity out of their ads.

22 Magazines That Are Seeing Increased Ad Revenues

The Business Insider recently wrote an article about 22 Magazines That Are Actually Kicking Butt In 2009. They discussed how the Magazine Publishers of America keep records of 249 different magazine titles and of those 249, 227 saw a decline in their ad revenues in 2009 compared to 2008. Over 91% of the industry is suffering from the recent decrease in advertising.

Looking at the 22 titles that are earning more revenue than they were last year, five are published by Meredith Corporation. Patrick Taylor, of Meredith Corporation, says these magazine titles “do a good job of building their brand” especially on the Internet. He went on, saying that magazines can find a larger audience by making content available on the internet. Also, by going online, publishers can find new forms of advertising and creative ways to boost their print subscriptions. This is just another example of how going digital can help support your print and keep you afloat during tough times.

Here is a quick run through of the 22 Magazines that have muscled out increasing ad revenues over the last year.

Better Homes and Gardens - Up 1.9%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $547,346,531
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $557,534,448

Ladies’ Home Journal - Up 2.5%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $220,113,560
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $225,511,330

Soap Opera Digest - Up 2.5%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $12,894,257
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $13,217,837

Executive Travel SkyGuide - Up 4.0%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $5,470,212
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $5,689,007

Family Fun - Up 4.3%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $75,434,521
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $78,651,596

Woman’s World - Up 5.4%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $23,708,020
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $24,987,610

Endless Vacation - Up 5.7%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $10,493,050
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $11,091,905

Women’s Health - Up 8.8%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $58,709,640
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $63,900,299

More - Up 12.7% (Meredith,
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $82,346,521
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $92,812,076

Muscle & Fitness - Up 13.2%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $71,483,698
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $80,948,436

Scholastic Parent & Child - Up 14.5%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $34,688,914
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $39,682,262

Flex - Up 15.4%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $24,595,411
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $28,379,120

Organic Gardening - Up 17.4%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $3,198,473
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $3,754,516

OK Weekly - Up- 17.5%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $47,755,400
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $56,099,244

Fitness - Up 17.5%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $70,798,273
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $83,200,149

Saveur - Up 18.9%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $8,678,312
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $10,322,035

Family Circle - Up 21.8%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $254,590,657
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $310,058,104

Twist - Up 22.1%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $2,635,592
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $3,217,460

The Week - Up 30.4%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $19,760,226
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $25,766,774

People Style Watch - Up 32.2%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $19,675,743
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $26,005,532

Fine Cooking - Up 66.2%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $793,914
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $1,319,440

Spry - Up 550.6%
2008 Ad Revenues through September: $5,508,047
2009 Ad Revenues through September: $35,837,667

Shoppers will do more of their holiday buying online this year

News from the E-tailing Group last week … “55% of frequent web shoppers plan to shop online this holiday season, up from 49% last year, and e-commerce will account for a 26% share of holiday spending, up from 21% last year.”

How about giving your customers something that’ll make their lives a little easier during the holidays? Create a digital edition of your Christmas catalog so your customers can shop from cover to cover online!

Long Live the Catalog

Advertising Specialty Institute®, the largest media and marketing organization serving the advertising specialty industry, just recently announced results of an end buyer study that shows paper catalogs drive 93% of purchasing decisions. Also mentioned is that paper and online catalogs are not only effective sales tools, but also assist buyers in sparking creativity, discovering new products and realizing the importance of customization.

We at Dirxion think that the components of a printed publication cannot be beat: the attractive layout, the vibrant images and the aesthetics neatly blended with content. And well, buyers agree. While everyone may appear to be going online to purchase, it’s still the look and feel of print that gets them there.

Search Engine Optimization & Your Publication; What is Dirxion Doing?

As a publisher looking to move your printed material to the web, you’ll find that the majority of the digital publishing options out there are fully Flash-based. To most people this may actually sound more than acceptable. Flash content is great as there are hardly any limitations to building interfaces, designing, animating and creating user interaction. It has all the elements that give a site the heightened experience that today’s users are looking for. Flash is used to break all those conventional rules associated with flat, lifeless HTML pages.

But with all of its pros comes one very large con – unlike HTML, Flash content can’t be indexed by search engines. And if people can’t find your content on Google, Bing or Yahoo, it’s up to you to put it directly in front of them. But even with Herculean marketing efforts, your content will never reach its full audience potential.

Dirxion understands that if you want to maximize your reach and circulation, it’s critical that the content of your pages can be properly crawled by spiders for search engines. It’s for that reason we have introduced a Search Engine Optimization method designed specifically for digital publishers. We call it Trax. When you send us files for your new digital publication, we not only convert your data into Flash but also run it through Trax making a search engine friendly format called ASP. ASP is a dynamic code that is first sent to an ASP engine, where the file can be read – line by line – and then returned to indexing spiders and browsers as plain HTML. So it works just like HTML. And with Trax laid, this data will run behind the scenes solely for Google, Bing and Yahoo to crawl and navigate through your pages. But on the front end of your publication, your readers will still have the rich media experience of Flash.

Our SEO efforts, in a nutshell:

–Presenting all of the pages in your directory in a format that can easily be indexed by the search engines. Search engine users can now find your directory by searching for business names, categories, addresses, phones numbers, and more. Not to mention, search engine results open up pages inside of your directory with searched keywords already highlighted!

–Creating dynamic, search engine friendly landing pages that are designed for intuitive the optimal user experience.

–Providing additional ways to share pages from your directory with friends and family.

–Implementing URL strategies to optimize traffic to your site.

–Updating or adding more content when possible.

Our ultimate goal for customers is maintaining the familiar experience of print, while using the web to increase readership and engagement. Marketing is always going to be king, but there is no reason not to have SEO on your side. With the help of Dirxion and Trax, more readers will find your content. That’s already been the case with the customers we’ve converted.  Search engine directed traffic has been increasing drastically. Some publications are currently seeing up to 78% of their traffic coming from search engines.

Contact a sales representative to learn more about how Dirxion can have your publishing put in front of a larger audience now. Call 888.391.0202.

What Marketers Want

Since the introduction of moving type, never has the world of publishing seen so much refinement. Even if that may be a little exaggerated, you’d think it was true by the constantly breaking news and blog reels spinning out of control with stories of new websites, applications and devices that will change the way people read forever.

If you were following the events of the last month, you’d probably think the publishing industry was going to make a complete about face away from paper. It almost seems logical with devices like desktops, laptops, iPhones, smartphones, the kindle and a slew of new tablets and e-readers being introduced what seems like everyday. On the surface, it seems like the publishing industry could start saving the truck loads of money it costs to print and deliver mountains of books, magazines and catalogs to their large audiences. But what many articles aren’t considering is the actual driving forces behind print - advertising.

Subscriptions to magazines aren’t a publisher’s main source of revenue. It’s the advertising inside. Marketers believe that those physical pages of a magazine continue to prove enticing to potential customers in a way that computer text and images cannot. In the same way, catalog publishers keep showing statistics that by paying the price to mail catalogs they are actually helping advertise and drive more sales to their web sites. One study showed that consumers who received catalogs from a retailer spent 28% more on that retailer’s website than those who didn’t receive catalogs.

We believe that print and web are two elements that, when working in harmony, are stronger than the sum of their parts. Why not mail a catalog or magazine to subscribers, but also make yourself available in the same outstanding visual quality on the internet. A digital edition is the perfect medium between a printed magazine or catalog, and a website or e-commerce site. It brings the reader and/or customer that same intuitive look and feel that you spent such resources designing and editing, while providing them with a fully-integrated, media-rich web experience.

It’s finding that right balance between digital and print that’ll maximize your audience and appeal to advertisers like never before.

Special Magazine Issues Made Even More Special

The New York Times has just published a good article about magazine publishers making some waves with special issues – ESPN’s Body Issue for example, where athletes are featured in mostly nude poses.

Gary Belsky, editor in chief of ESPN The Magazine brings up a great point in the article: “These days, people are skeptical enough about print, or at least wary enough about print, that they’re looking for executions that differentiate print.”

This couldn’t be closer to the truth.

Belsky goes on to say, “Print can’t deliver music, video, but what print can deliver is beautiful, in-depth visuals and journalism that explores subjects in a particular kind of way.”

That’s a HUGE misconception with print. Print can actually deliver more now than ever. By distributing your “print” on paper and online in the same form, like a special issue, it can differentiate your publication and attract more advertisers.

Digital editions not only cost less to publish and distribute, they also allow publishers to up-sell really exciting features to advertisers like music, video, animated ads, rollover windows and hyperlinks. All of these things add an element of “cool” among audiences and allow advertisers to offer more dimensions and in turn, value, to their ad.

“Magazines need to offer these creative alternatives to standard pages,” said Charlie Zakin, vice president for corporate media at Hasbro in response to Hasbro running an ad on the November cover of FamilyFun magazine, the first time FamilyFun would do such an ad. (The cover would be a pocket and contain a pull-out sheet promoting Hasbro’s family-game-night initiative.)

Imagine a digital edition of FamilyFun, where an animated section of the cover would promote and link to a pop-up window, which would contain all of the information found in this fun pull-out sheet, complete with animation, audio or video about the family-game-night initiative. Cool, eh?

I’ll end with this quote from Deborah Mignucci, publisher of Disney FamilyFun:
“Print is not the medium that is in vogue right now, and so we have extra pressure to overdeliver to our advertisers.”

Magazine Publishers, use a digital edition to spring up some new advertising sales. With animated, interactive ad pages you can start overdelivering now.

Retailers Finding New Touch Points With Digital Catalogs

It is widely accepted that one of the keys to success is the ability to adapt. The retail industry, customarily driven by brick and mortar stores and weighty catalog mailings, has been profoundly affected by present-day circumstances. The current harsh economic climate coupled with the rampant growth of online shopping and social media has caused many companies to take a step back to reevaluate their strategies. The retailers that have done the best jobs to adapt and start using these “threats” to find new marketing opportunities are starting to reap the benefits of their versatility through increased revenues.

The catalog has been the flagship of the retail industry for decades. Even with the recent increased shipping costs and decreased sales, it’s still hard to turn a blind eye to its proven track record and ongoing performance. Data shows that on average, catalogs can still generate $7 in sales for every dollar it takes to have them published and mailed. And how do you give a value to the catalog’s unmatched ability to show off a retailer’s well polished image? For most retailers it also goes unequalled in its skill of generating new business. It would be a drastic lapse in judgment to simply abandon it in an effort to cut costs.

Unwilling to sacrifice reach or branding, the adaptive retailers have been finding that the solution to reducing these expenses doesn’t have to be touching fewer customers, but instead changing how they touch customers. Besides the traditional means - decreasing circulation, trimming the size of catalogs and using less expensive paper - a company can take a portion of their savings to reinvest into Internet marketing. In the retail industry, online marketing and digital catalogs are growing in popularity and are much less expensive alternatives when compared to the traditional print forms. Statistics show that for every dollar a retailer spends doing online marketing they have a $45 return.

So in situations where it may be adapt or perish, those who allow themselves to evolve to the changing circumstances will grow stronger. The retailers who are quick on their feet and can find that harmonization between the tangible and digital can not only survive but thrive in a desert-like economy.

What’s on your desktop?

First came what’s on your iPod, then came what’s on your Pandora mix? Could the same be said for what digital publications are on your desktop?

All right, maybe that’s a stretch to assume that online publications such as digital catalogs, digital magazines and digital phone books are that overwhelmingly popular. However, we have seen continued growth in all digital look and feel publications, in addition to a number of unique ways that people are accessing these publications (i.e. full publication downloads, desktop icon shortcuts and social networking links.)

So maybe the question should be when do we reach the point where people ask if you’ve seen the latest fall catalog or if you’ve read such and such article in this month’s online edition? Maybe that virtual conversation is already taking place. Have you shared an entire digital edition or a specific product or an article in a travel guide? Or maybe you are working on a wish list from one of your favorite online catalogs? If so, drop us a line at marketing@dirxion.com!

A Better Way to Search

Imagine being able to offer your customers the power to search across all of your digital editions from one simple little search box. With Dirxion’s Catalog Library Search, the days of searching through individual  publications are gone.

By giving your customers the ability to search all of your online publications simultaneously, not only will you provide better search results, you’ll also boost the end-user experience to a new level of satisfaction. Your customers will now be exposed to products/articles/ads that they might not have otherwise seen.

One customer that recently took advantage of Dirxion’s Catalog Library Search is TED Magazine, the voice of top electrical distributors in North America. Try it for yourself.

The Catalog Library Search feature packs a lot of potential, are you ready to take advantage of it?

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