Profitable Publishing webinar - Special Issues & E-commerce metrics

Hey, welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to our first ever profitable publishing webinar. Jeremy and I thought that it would be time for us to share all the cool stuff that we do day to day in a little more of an organized format as far as building subscriptions publications. And so here's our first one now. Looks like five of you guys, six of you guys are in here along with us. And I'm Pete. That was Jeremy who was talking before. If you don't know who we are, I tend to be more on the sales and marketing side. Jeremy is one of our lead developers here and building all this cool stuff for you guys. So what we're going to talk about and we're going to shoot for 30 minutes, see how that goes. I want to talk a little bit about leveraging your existing content and creating special issues for your publication. Taking content you already have and just organizing it in a package that's attractive to your readership. And then Jeremy, I'm going to hand off to Jeremy and he's going to talk about something new he's been working on with integrating Leaky Paywall and Google Analytics. And then when we're done with that, we'll have Q and A we can open up for questions. And I'd say that if you look on your meeting screen, there's a Q and A button. I think you guys can type in a question there anytime while we're chatting and we can interrupt each other. It's something we should answer right off the bat. So feel free to ask questions. All right, Jeremy, you started recording once I see that. Cool. Yep. All right, guys, so I'm going to jump into special issues now. What's a special issue? I think a couple of you guys are already publishing issues with our issuem plugin. And that's awesome. What it does. ISUM plugin allows you to. Essentially, it's the same thing as a news blog post, but it's organized by issue. So I'll just show you. So Ipolitics here is a news publisher, real time fire hose of news. And what they do once a week is they take what they feel are their best articles of the week and they put it together in an issue that they call the Weekender. If I click on the Weekender, I get the past issues page of the Weekender and then I can pop into one of these and catch up on what happened during the week. And in this case, they picked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 articles that they feel are important for their readership to read and the way it Works is pretty cool. They just go back and they look at what they've already published. They create an issue, give the issue a name, which is very quick, and then they migrate those news posts into the Weekender. So not sure exactly how long it takes them to do that, but I'd say in an hour you could probably get an issue done. Let me show you another one. So this is Tjourney and this is a publication that publishes news about tea. It's a very deep, high end tea publication and they pull content out of China and other countries and then produce long form articles essentially in real time. And then what they're doing is they're thematically creating. I'll go to their special issues section, issues based on their existing content. So their latest public issue, I'm logged in as an administrator, so I see the new one that they're working on. But the green tea issue, if I hop into that, it's simply an assembly of articles. They've already written that they've migrated into green tea. So the idea is that you create an issue based on a theme. In this case, it's a type of tea. The green tea, as you saw India is coming next as an issue and they're taking evergreen content that will last for a long time and creating that issue. Some other ideas I wrote down for special issues are you can do a best of issue, a holiday issue, maybe an interview issue or how to issue. If you have a special issue, focus on the subject matter, how to do something. If you're a local news site or a news site, it could be sports, like a baseball issue or a local health issue, or a food issue, a real estate issue. I mean really, you can take a look at the articles that you publish and know what's popular and put together a theme for an article for an issue and then put together that issue. And I'd say that if you're already publishing issues, it still works. You can pull articles out of your different issues that are thematically similar and create maybe a special issue section and just keep adding the sort of new bodies of content to your site. And then what do you do with the issue? Well, promotionally you will want to probably email the issue out to your list and say, hey, we put together this special issue. You can, I would of course in social media promote it. And I'll give a special call out to Modern Drummer, which on Facebook what they do every month is they make their Facebook page kind of look like their current issue. Sort of a neat trick to give Facebook sort of that issue flavor and then post some of the issue content into the Facebook feed. So another thing you can do. And then because you're emailing these issues to your list, why not find a sponsor for the issue? So as far as monetization goes, yeah, it's great promotionally and for visitors that come to your site, it could be a whole new section of content for you. But why not find a sponsor for an issue? So the email that goes out to announce that issue, you could probably find a sponsor for to pay for that on the issue itself. There's no sponsor for this issue, but you could imagine a green tea producer or distributor or whatnot who might want to be the sponsor for this particular issue, which is an evergreen. It's really an evergreen issue of content. I think there are two, three, there's seven articles here. Okay, so let me show you really quickly for those of you who haven't seen this before, how these issues are created. So I'm going to hop into the dashboard here of tjourney, our issue in plugin. Once you install it, it creates a post type called articles. And in these articles essentially you have, what you do first is you create an issue and to add a new issue you just give it a name. That's really all you need to do. And then when you're in the issue, What I would recommend is create a neat little cover image. It can be just a nice photo, your logo and then a little bit of text. If you're not an actual issue producer, printed issue producer. And now you've created your issue and then as far as migration goes, I'm going to go head over to posts here. So most of your content here, if you're a news publisher, lives under posts. And with issuem, we have a migration tool. You'll have to install the migration plugin. There's a little pop up that says migrate to issue M hit that and then so one at a time I can choose, okay, well which issue is this article going to go into? And then you typically want to copy the post, otherwise it will remove the post from your news feed and then hit migrate. And that's how you do it one at a time. And then you can also do a bulk migration. So if I go and click on the migration tool here under articles I select, okay, I'm going to grab look at articles that are in all my posts and then you can go and actually just check off all the articles that you want to migrate to that particular issue. Same deal. Pick the issue that you want this to go to, hit copy posts, hit migrate posts, and all of a sudden you have under issues here. You'll find that your new issue under count has seven new articles as an example. And you can hop into those seven articles and then you can edit them if you need, or you can, hey, you can write fresh content for the issues. It's up to you. And I think that wraps up. I don't know how I did on time here. I think that wraps up what I really wanted to cover on special issues. I'd say, regardless of whether you're publishing issues or not, think about repurposing your existing content into special issues that create nice packages of content. You've already written the content, put related content together, call it something, and then promote it. Find a sponsor for it if you can. And it's a very efficient way of repurposing what you already have done. So, Jeremy, anything you want to add to that? Did I come up pretty good?

That was good. Anyone have any questions? You should be able to type those in.

There's a little Q and A box there if you guys have any questions on special issues. All right, then, in the spirit of efficiency, Jeremy, I'll hand it over to you. Okay.

It looks like we had a couple questions come in there.

Aha. All right, so question number one. We are doing Spanish issues, which we consider special issues. Currently place them in the same feed as regular issues. How do we separate them? That's a good question. That's from Damian. So that is almost like an issue category question. Do you want to take that one, Jeremy? In other words, you have sort of your standard issues, and then there's going to be a new category or section of issues that are going to be the Spanish issues.

You could do as far as issues go. You might be able to do child relationships on that. So.

If you go to. Let's see.

Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do that kind of thing out of the box currently with issue in, because you would just. Maybe you put like, you know, just in the name of the issue, maybe put which category it's connected to if you wanted them to actually be separate. That's a good idea. That could be a feature that we add to issue M to be able to have different kinds of issue sections.

How about creating a category and just outputting the category with a shortcode on a page? So if the Spanish issue is in the Spanish category and then with the shortcode, you output just the Spanish category into a section. Yeah. Take a look at the short code section in the docs. But that is a good idea for separate sections of issues. Next question, is the layout fixed? So the issuem plugin will create sort of a default layout for you. It will inherit some of your theme styling, not all of it. And then what you really want to do is hop in and do some CSS styling to make the issue look the way you want it to look. So really in any case, whether it's the weekender or tjourney or whatever, that output's going to require some styling from the press developer because everything is different. Any thoughts on how to determine what you should ask for dollars in sponsorship? That's a good question, Paul. Well, I think we with anything and I'm kind of a broken record here with pricing. If you're dipping your toe in the water for the first time, I'd start with a number that you think would be a no brainer to sell to somebody and then start somewhere around there because once you get a track record of what you know people are willing to pay for, you can raise the price from there. I mean you could pick a number, double it. Try that. If you get resistance, go back and drop it. It's a very good question. I don't really know. Some of it's going to have to do with the size of your email list. If you're just starting out and you have a small email list, then your sponsor dollars are going to be quite a bit less than if you have a very big email list because that email is going to generate a lot of, a lot of views and then the issue will certainly generate views as well, depending on your traffic. Good question. Let me know when you figure it out. Okay, so set up a category and output as its own page. Yeah, I would try that. I know there's a shortcode section under our help docs that's a whole bunch of shortcodes for issue M. And you should be able to output by category. If not just circle back on that. I think it's a good idea to have Pete.

Yeah, you want to go ahead and open up zine101.com and just show how.

To get to our docs real quick.

Just in case anyone doesn't know.

Okay. All right, so get help docs and support takes you here. So we have our products here. And hop into issuem. Here's the issuem short codes. And so take a look through the short code section here. Take a look through that. Yeah. Let's see, here's the archive. So this is the actual issue Output. Not sure the category is available right now. Yeah, I'm not. I don't see a category in here. All right, Jeremy, that's one to noodle on. Yep. Okay, Shuda, if you could be helpful too. If you can't find a solution for that to shoot an email our way to remind us on that too. Sometimes we make a slight change to articles and republish them as new articles. Is there a way to duplicate articles in the administration?

Yeah, there's plugins for that that will just let you duplicate content when you're in the admin edit screen. Duplicate post is one of those. So if you just Google WordPress duplicate.

Post.

That would be where I would start.

All right, cool. Okay, now we do it for articles too.

I believe it does.

Have to double.

Check, but it should.

Yeah, I mean, WordPress custom post types are so standard right now. I imagine it would have to.

Okay, take a look and if I find something else, then I'll let you know.

Okay. All right, let's jump over to Google Analytics.

Okay, so two things I want to cover are how to do Google Analytics event tracking and then we're also coming out with the Google Analytics ecommerce integration. So we're going to start with the event tracking and then we'll move on to the E commerce integration. So I start sharing here.

Let's see.

All right, can you see my screen here?

Yep. Okay, great.

So we're going to start with the event tracking piece. And so with Google Analytics, as long as you have Google Analytics installed on your site, there's a lot you can do to kind of see user behavior both before and after a transaction. So with Google, with the events, one thing you can do is track when people click on the subscribe nag. So after they read a couple pieces of content and they hit the subscribe nag and they get the prompt to either subscribe or log in using the code you can see on my screen here. And I'm just in the leaky paywall settings. You can actually put a little event on the subscribe link and I'll send out a link to the. We're going to have a help doc for this, so you can just copy and paste the code from there. So don't worry about writing this down or anything, but let me just show you basically what that's doing. If we go into Google Analytics account, we go to Behavior Events Overview. This site has a few different events we're tracking, but one of those is that subscribe nag. So you can see, since I've installed that code. 46 people have clicked on the subscribe nag. And if I click on that event, then I can get specific details about that event so I can change the date range of when I want to see people clicking on it. And then what you can see click on there. Go back to over here you can actually see how many times it was subscribe nag. There we go. So on Monday, April 22, that subscribe link was clicked eight times within the nag. So you can see how many the engagement people are having with your subscribe nag, which is pretty cool. So that's just one event. You can also add events for your other buttons. So say you wanted to add them to your subscribed cards themselves. So if we go to the subscribe page, you can add events for these buttons down here and all that will let you know where people are going in your funnels. So that's the event piece. Just wanted to touch on that. But the main thing I wanted to show today was the Google Analytics integration we've been working on with E Commerce. So if you go into your admin section in Google Analytics and go to the E commerce settings and make sure that Enable E Commerce and Enable Enhanced Ecommerce are both on and then hit save and then we have a new plugin that we're about to release. But I will show you kind of what the beta version looks like. So we've got this new tab here if the add on is installed called Google Analytics. And what it lets you do is add your Google Analytics site id, which is the UA long string of numbers that Google Analytics gives you and you can either choose to add the basic Google Analytics code to your site if you don't have a plugin doing that already, or Google Analytics integrations you've got going on and then what will happen is anytime a transaction takes place through the leaky paywall registration form, it will commerce and overview. Since we've turned that integration on here, you can see that we have this data coming in. So the product which is the leaky paywall level. So in this case we have an annual and a monthly. We can see the product revenue for those products, the percentage of product revenue between the different products and leaky pay. The analytics integration we have been building will automatically do this part for you. You don't have to do any coding or anything on your end to get these products to show up. As long as you create your products inside of your subscriptions area and le keepay wall will show up here, and then you can filter the date range again so you can adjust.