Often they come from the cover photo. Ragan’s PR Daily has 12 “most fabulous” ways to make the cover photo for you or your business really pop, while hongkiat.com has 40 “really creative” examples and a downloadable template to help you get your Photoshop on.
You have the links. Now start getting fabulously creative.
A couple of employment lifetimes ago, I spent the better part of my days writing and editing newsstand magazines. I also did marketing, sold ads and mopped up water during the occasional flood of our basement office.
Anyway, when the discussion got around to readership numbers, the conversation in our office went more or less the same way it did in every magazine office: Readership equals number of copies sold times some pass-along factor, usually in the range of about 2.5 or thereabouts.
I was thinking about this today because I was setting up a new phone. As an information junkie, I have a lot of apps that aggregate RSS feeds, things like Google Reader, Pulse, Flipboard and more.
I noticed that I tend to repeat some of my favorite news and information feeds in multiple places, which then led me to think about the publisher looking at the numbers: “We have 100,000 RSS subscribers, so we must have 100,000 readers! Woo hoo!”
Except not so much. That 100,000 might mean 50,000 or even 25,000.
There may be some study out there that’s looked very closely at RSS feed subscription numbers and drills down into the data to determine how reliable they really are. I haven’t seen one, which is not to say they don’t exist, and I’d love to know what the RSS version of the pass-along factor might be.
I’m pretty sure, though, that 100,000 feed subscribers does not mean 100,000 readers. Probably not even close.
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
—Thomas Jefferson
Take a look at what bowlingball.com is doing. Smart, simple, and effective promotion. How effective? The banner at the top of the page says, “Help Pyramid Bowling get to 1,000 likes on Facebook.” They’re at 2,716 as I type this.
On this day in 1964, Hello, Dolly! opened on Broadway with the first of 2,844 performances. Here’s Carol Channing and the original Broadway cast performing in 1965 (not on Broadway, though; one commenter on the video suggests it may be the White House).
