You too can help our group grow - You know; “help me, to help you”

It’s human nature, that those that contribute or start something will most likely have people around that want to join in and/or help if they can. So the more you contribute, the more opportunities you create for yourself.

Most of us have situations in our professional life, when we are looking for some new contacts and ways to promote ourselves or our work to others within the industry. At that time it’s nice to turn towards our trusted networks and groups with many helpful industry members at reach.

You can join us here. If you choose show that your are member of our Group (in your site/blog) and want to help our Group grow, you can download our Group logo from this link:http://www.ratecards.net/blog/magazine_publishing_group.png and you can link directly to our group via this link:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/125214/7CAEB6030B21

Please let me know if you choose to link to our group, so I can give you credit for doing that, by adding link to your site/blog. I will start listing those links here and in our group announcements.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for developing our group even better, you can share them here.

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A group that was originally started as a way to help communicate magazine publishing related issues in July, has quickly grown connecting more and more people within the industry and is becoming a valuable group in LinkedIn, when it comes to Publishing Magazines.

With our Group, the aim is to connect as much of the Magazine publishing related professionals worldwide, to help communicate, to ask questions, to share experiences and to help each other.

Based on the discussions and some direct feedback that I’m getting from our members, the Group is serving its purpose well and there have been several great connections established through our Group already.

Looking forward of reaching our next milestones with you.

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• In the very beginning we did some AdWords advertising to get some initial visibility to our system. At some point we will do more of that.
• Next we wrote and published “how-to” article, of implementing advertising to a blog/website. This article was then distributed via few article publishing sites. We hope this article will help those that are new to online advertising to get the basic details on how to implement advertising to website/blog.
• As our tool is mainly developed for magazine publishers we also created a Magazine Publishing Group in LinkedIn to help all magazine publishing professionals to network among peers and share ideas. Naturally we want to actively network among publishers as well. This communication among publishers will help us to develop our service.
• We have also witnessed the traffic to RateCards.net site slowly starting to build up, with small but steady growth, when the Google and other search engines have started to do their “thing”, indexing our pages. We are now starting to get OK PageRank to some of the pages and domains.
• We have been registering several domain names for different regions and adding those to system. We also registered and implemented the www.magazineadnetwork.com domain, because we feel that is a good generic term that also explains the system quite well. Let’s see how that will help our traffic build via search engines.

Some bug fixes and general fine tuning of Rate Cards system has been done as well.

• Changed how the advertisers registration works. Made it simpler and faster to register, with less required field. Also now advertiser registration can be done in one process (no need to verify). We will rater make it easier to register and deal with potential problem users via other means.
• For advertisers, added direct option to move from ad rate card to campaign assistant and also option to contact that publishers/rate cards contact directly from the rate card (no need to go via campaign assistant if only want to contact that publisher directly)
• Same features added for publishers and advertisers when contacting service providers.
• Rate Cards are now shown directly in main window and not in separate pop-up window. This was creating some problems with search engine links and browsers pop-up blockers
• Some message-template texts and instructions updated relating to done changes.
• We have fixed the text entry fields in “My Pages” edit forms so that there is no need to use any HTML tags to do line breaks, that potentially breaks up the layout of the system for your rate card. System will now do those automatically.
• The bug that did not allow to enter publishing dates have now been fixed, rate cards details can now be updated using rate card editor via “my pages”.  Selecting “Publishing dates” -> link “Update Deadlines”.

We have gotten some good feedback from our users and look forward on getting even more. This feedback is the best way for us to develop the system to offer best value to our users.

For the next few monts, we have outlined a list of new features that we will be implementing, majority of these new features are going to be developed for advertisers, making it easier for them to be updated on new advertising opportunities, upcoming topics in selected publications, search agents etc.

As part of building traffic to ratecards.net, we hope that everyone could also use the “link to your rate card” feature in our system in your websites. When everyone starts doing this, it will help to increase traffic to RateCards.net and help it to be more visible in Google. In return this will bring in more users and advertisers and will start to increase the number of ad positions found for right publications to advertise.

If your publication is not yet in our free rate cards service, please let us know what’s holding you back. Is there some assistant that you would need, or is there some things missing that would convince for you to get on board with RateCards.net service?

I want to point out that publishers are in important role to help develop this service, to be appealing to advertisers and service providers. When more and more publications can easily be searched, found and contacted via Rate Cards service, it will start to attract more and more advertisers to use it.

Looking forward for your comments!

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I want to share some of my own thoughts on the future of publishing. Being a little of a geek always using the latest tech toys (visit one of my other blogs; Mobile and Internet), I think I have some idea of what’s coming in future. Also It’s important to understand that even if the change is coming, it does effect so many people that it will be some what slow…

First of, I think it’s very import not to bundle everything into one. The Magazines and Newspapers are very different. Newspapers focus on News and Magazines mainly to very different and variety of topics.

I think that the main factor that is and has been important for Newspapers is moving to other channels and that is the News. If you want your news fresh (like many do) then newspaper (in paper format) is not your source anymore.

Therefore I think that Newspapers are in different category than Magazines in this matter, since Magazine content is not so “time sensitive”

Will both die? Yes and no, I imagine some dying and others surviving, majority will change format away from paper, but obviously not all at least not for a long time.

The main factor for me (nearly) never to read news on paper, has been my iPhone and the reason I still read magazines, is because I like to read longer articles on paper. I also like the ad’s & overall visuals better on Magazines.

When iPhones, ereaders and similar achieve right specifications to give the feel and experience of the magazine (with professional layout etc.), the traditional paper format will start to really go away.

As I’m an avid RSS reader about 500 posts/day via google reader from various blogs etc. I can say that the visual experience is quite boring compared to magazines. Even if there is really good looking blogs, they are still the same looking from day to day & week to week…

What I like about online based content, is that it’s fresh and it’s easy to get various versions from same news, fast and with different viewpoints, not just one…

So depending on the content I use the following:

• News (RSS from main media sources & blogs)
• Topic related & short content (RSS & Blogs)
• Longer articles and when I have more time, I still enjoy Magazines, particularly while I’m eating by myself..
• While on the move Podcasts & RSS

What do you think and how do you consume your reading content?

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Dear YUDU Freedom User,

We’ve been listening to your feedback ever since we launched YUDU Freedom and now we’re ready to bring you even more amazing online publishing benefits.  Log in for a sneak preview to our new site using the details below, to find your publications and try out all the new features on offer!

You wanted to be able to upload your Word and PowerPoint documents; You wanted a place to display, promote and share your publications; You wanted privacy options for your creations; And you wanted a place to sell them.

GREAT NEWS!….You’ve got it…we’ve done it all!! We’ve gone and developed a whole new website for you – even bigger and better than before!!

As a valued YUDU Freedom user, we’re giving you an extra special sneak preview and login to the BETA site, before we let the rest of world see it!

What’s so special about our new site? It’s no longer just about free publishing… it’s an ePublishing application, Marketplace and eLibrary that gives you the freedom to express, the power to create and the tools to sell your publications - so if you liked YUDUFreedom.com, you’ll love YUDU.com!

So that pretty much says it all. Today I was testing their new beta service and I must say I’m impressed. Their solution looks professional with clean design.

This will be one of the very needed solutions for print publishers to extend their publications life and readership. Publishers can also set up their publication to be private or public, and free of paid version.

For many smaller publishers this will be a great way to market and store their publications online. This will also extend the visibility of their advertisers.

On top of new document formats like PowerPoint, Word.doc, etc., with this new beta you can also publish your websites, audio files and photos too. So that’s pretty much everything else but video.

YUDU is currently in private beta, but not to worry, it will only be for few days. The public beta will be opened next Monday, 8th of September.

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The actual question is a bit longer, but in short, it was asking “What kind of ad’s would you like to see online?”

And my answer was:

I have to say I like google ads for online, those are limited, many times well targeted and offer good value to me, not so much that I would actually buy via them, but do click when relevant & interesting or informative.

So conservative, well targeted, get to the point types of (text?) ad’s online and more branding, sales, funny ad’s, ad’s for new things etc. to Magazines, billboards, TV, catalogs, radio etc.

So my conclusion is that I don’t like to see bold or disruptive ad’s online, but often those are OK in other media. In TV those just have to be able to grab my attention when I’m fast forwarding the ad’s with my DVR, but if I see something interesting while doing that I will stop and watch that ad.

I think magazines and billboards are very good for some branding type of ad’s (big & good looking) and magazines, catalogs & daily papers etc. for when aiming more direct sales.

Naturally direct sales online does works too, but via ad’s, I don’t think for anything too expensive…

What do you think, how would you like to get your ad’s?

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Doing Google image search with Cooliris is probably 10 times faster. You really need to try it to understand it. I have written about cooliris (PicLens) before on my other blog, so you may want to read that as well.

I just installed Cooliris plug-in to this blog, even if I don’t (yet) have that many images. If you have your own website or blog and it’s run on wordpress you should install this plug-in, specially if you are photographer or graphics designer with lots of images.

For other than Wordpress there are other solutions to enable Cooliris as well. Read more at their website or do some googling with cooliris + (your CMS) or PicLens + (your CMS).

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