We will conduct ten 3-hour sessions over the five days. These 10 sessions will uncover the best practice guidelines for starting and running a profitable online publishing business. We will illustrate how successful publishers execute the ten strategies of online success and will discuss specifically how attendees can benefit from following a similar practice.

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The following are the topics of the ten sessions respectively:

1. Online Publishing 101: Understanding your Online Neighborhood

How familiar are you with the online market in which you operate and compete? Do you know how big your market is, or how fast it’s growing? Do who know who your top competitors are online, or your potential content and marketing partners? If you don’t know the answers to these and other important questions, you could be leaving money on the table, or worse, leaving your company vulnerable to competitive annihilation. This session will help you learn how to make your publishing company more competitive. You will learn how to do market analysis research, to determine your market size, annual year-to-year growth, seasonality and traffic patterns. You will discover how to determine which content models are dominating (or perhaps missing) in your market.

2. Search Engine Optimization: Making Google Your Partner

In the days of old, editors had one primary responsibility: writing great content. Getting people to subscribe to, buy and read that content was someone else’s job. In the online world, things are much different. If an editor wants their content to be found and read online, they must learn to partner with Google. They need to understand what people are searching for that is related to the content they offer, and must write and produce content specifically to those search terms. It’s not easy, but it is necessary for online success. But where to begin? What is the process for identifying, documenting and managing keywords and the editorial campaigns that should follow? In this session, you will learn how to research, analyze and monitor your keywords. You will understand learn how to prioritize online content development around those keywords to ensure you attract the targeted website traffic you deserve.

3. Designing Media Websites: Converting Visitors into Subscribers

Any webpage on your site is a potential landing page, as most traffic arriving at your website, especially when coming from the search engines, will not enter through the homepage. So how can you make sure your entire site is designed to attract, retain and monetize traffic? We’ve identified several webpage templates used by today’s top publishers that are built to attract lots of traffic and convert the most visitors. Understanding how to design and optimize each of those templates will increase the chances a visitor will take the action you desire and not click away. In this session, you will learn how to design and implement clean and intuitive website templates that are built to convert more visitors into subscribers, and more shoppers into buyers.

4. Online Content Management: Creating Website Posts that Get Found

Magazine editors today are in a crosshairs. Many editors are now responsible for print and online content, and in order to be effective, they must learn how to successfully unleash print content onto the web for maximum exposure and efficiency. The process of unleashing archived print content online helps facilitate search engine optimization and helps build a database of potential paying customers. But how much archived content does your publication have, how old is it, and how can you put it to work to make more money online? In this session, you will learn how to quantify all the content your organization produces and understand when and how it should be redeployed on your website for additional marketing, sales and profits. You will learn how to establish a policy governing your editorial release schedule to generate the most profits.

5. Managing Email Revenue: Maximizing Email Profits

Email newsletters are an invaluable way for publishers to repurpose the content they are posting at their websites and generate significant revenue in the process. Successful online publishers have a very specific editorial schedule and promotional strategy for their email newsletters, which leverages their opportunity to sell more product and advertising inventory. For some publishers, email accounts for 60% of their total online revenue. But what are the strategies being used to capitalize on all this email revenue opportunity? Learn how publishers are aligning their email content with their products and sponsors and understand the role of service journalism and clever copywriting in increasing email revenue. Discover how publishers are improving open rates, click through rates and conversion rates and understand the things that can help – or hurt – a newsletter’s chances of achieving its revenue goals.

6. Tomorrow’s Technology Today: Publishing on Digital Platforms

How will e-readers ultimately affect the distribution and consumption of magazines, books and newspapers? Will print really be gone in 10 years? Which magazines will survive the impending death of paper? While these questions could be debated forever, there’s no denying the need for existing print publishers to prepare for the future and start planning on producing low-cost, high-quality digital products. In this session, you will learn how to create a master product plan in the form of a product pyramid that identifies the categories, sets the pricing ranges, establishes the production values, and identifies the flow and timing of original research on each of your potential publishing platforms.

7. Selling Online Advertising: Maximizing Online Revenue

There are many factors to consider when selling online advertising. In order to maximize online advertising sales, a publisher should understand the difference between selling sponsorships and impressions and should be familiar with all the components of various ad packages. Publishers should comprehend whether lead generation or video is important to advertisers, and should understand the relevance of banners and contextual advertisements. What metrics matter to advertisers? How do you find, recruit and incentivize top online sales managers and account executives? In this session, attendees will learn how to maximize online advertising revenue and will hear how publishers are capitalizing on the success of their online advertising programs.

8. Organizing Online and Print Media Teams: Hiring and Training Online Editors

The first step in understanding how to organize print and digital teams is to know how your online business model affects your staffing requirements. There are many questions that must be answered before any staffing decisions can me made. In this session, you will learn how magazine publishers have evolved their organizational structure, staffing and responsibilities to launch and run successful online businesses that leverage their brand, content and business relationships. Learn how publishers are integrating their print and online teams to leverage editorial assets, cross promote print, web and email circulation and create advertising synergies for sponsors who are demanding multiplatform solutions. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages for integrating an online publishing business into your existing publishing company.

9. Key Metrics, Reporting and Analysis: Managing by Exception

Key metrics are numbers that, when multiplied together, determine costs or revenues generated and their respective effect on profit and loss. For websites, some metrics are more important than others, depending on the site’s business model. Knowing which key metrics to follow can be confusing—many site owners find themselves paying attention to the wrong ones. In this session you will learn the how, why and what to measure for ad-driven websites and for product-driven websites. You will learn how to analyze the acquisition and monetization of email subscribers to allow maximum growth for a minimum investment. You will discover the 10 key metrics you should be watching everyday and understand how to build a key metrics dashboard that everyone in your organization can use and comprehend.

10. Budget and Modeling: Business Plan and 5-Year Forecast

Every website publisher recognizes the need to have strategic control over items that impact their revenue. One way a publisher can do this is by looking at how their website has performed historically and forecasting its future performance. By inputting various data points into an excel-based publishing model, a publisher can closely analyze the past and forecast what the next 5 years might look like financially. The publishing model we will review will illustrate the importance of key metrics and how manipulating them can affect a publisher’s bottom line. Attendees will receive a blank model and will learn how to populate it for their own business. Attendees will understand how all of their metrics drive revenue, costs, cash flow and overall profitability.

Click here to reserve your seat!