Category: How to

How to optimize your registration page to encourage paid subscriptions

An Overlooked Opportunity A profitable digital publication has a lot of moving pieces. Your ever-growing archive of content, your paywall protector, the teasing newsletters, your various subscription levels: all of these play a part in your success. So it’s easy to overlook some of the smaller players. But every page can help the subscription process […]

Build your email list using related articles

From Casual To Committed The key to winning the subscription game is capturing the attention of your casual readers. Most of those readers will find you by searching for a specific topic and finding a specific article or through a recommendation on social media. (That’s why you have a metered paywall, after all: to make […]

Grow subscriptions by blocking incognito browser use

Strong Content, Strong Protection The Heisenberg Report is a digital publication of real-time political and financial news. They pride themselves on content that is current, accurate, rich with information, and just snarky enough to be engaging. All of which means that the Heisenberg Report has much to protect with its paywall. And that is why […]

The 10+ plugins you need to polish your subscription management

A Full Toolbox Your content is the engine that drives your publication. But your platform is the chassis that gives your content structure and stability. ZEEN101 has chosen WordPress as its foundation and partner for a number of reasons, not least among them the versatile set of tools available for enhancing the experience for publishers […]

How To Use Ad Techniques To Promote Your Subscriptions

Creative Use For Existing Tools The Texan is a young publication that focuses on political news from the Lone Star state. The publication prides itself on being advertisement free, as part of its mission to focus solely on the news and on the reader experience. As a subscription-based service, it is not surprising that The […]

How To Protect And Profit From Your Unique Content

A Different Kind of Content All content is valuable. Fortunately, just about any kind of content can be metered. Take a look at Automobl. Automobl is a new Canadian car comparison site. Founder Paul Webster has spent a lot of time compiling data on every trim available of more than 175 cars currently on the […]

How To Build Your Email List and Track GA Goals – A Profitable Publishing Webinar

Strategies and Walkthroughs On May 14th, ZEEN101’s Pete Ericson and Jeremy Green hosted our second Profitable Publishing Webinar. This week’s session included the importance and ease of building your email list and how to set up and track event goals in Google Analytics. The 22-minute session was presented live to our premium customers, with the […]

How To Turn Your Digital Issue Into Your Sales Funnel

A New Sales Engine The transition into digital publication has been rough on newspapers. (This year’s New York Press Association Spring Conference has made that clear.) Your digital front end isn’t just a supplement to your print edition – it’s the engine that drives all your sales, digital and print alike. It’s time to put […]

Being A Newspaper In The Digital Era: Lessons From the 2019 NYPA Conference

A Rough Season Newspapers are caught between a rock and a hard place. That’s the takeaway from this year’s New York Press Association Spring Conference. We had the honor of attending the Albany gathering on April 5th & 6th and between the speakers and our conversations on the showroom floor, we got a clear picture […]

The Problem With Password-Sharing

The Black Market of Content You spend a lot of time and effort on crafting amazing content. You want your subscribers to be excited about it. You want them to talk about it and share it. A good metered paywall like Leaky Paywall will allow just that: broad scale sharing over social media without compromising […]

How To Convert Subscribers With A Coupon

Everybody Loves A Bargain There’s a quick, easy way to encourage people to subscribe: add a coupon. Coupons are compelling to readers – everyone loves a good deal. They reduce the friction of sales funnel, giving your readers an excuse to finally subscribe. And they’re incredibly easy to create. Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ […]

How to increase ad revenue with sponsored galleries

History and Progress Spotlight News has been covering local news from the Capital District of New York for more than 60 years. Those years of experience have given them a solid instinct for advertising, even when moving forward into the world of web-based publishing. Their online publication is good but what Spotlight News has really […]

How to Price Your Digital Publication to Retain and Increase Your Subscriptions

And now for something completely different… We talk a lot about how to woo your subscribers. But before you can start growing your digital subscriber base, you must answer a very important question: How much should my subscription cost? Pricing a digital publication is a crucial starting point.  Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick Start […]

How To Make Your Email Marketing Smarter (And Easier) With Automation

A Tool That Goes The Distance It shouldn’t come as news that email can be a powerful tool for publishers. Building an  email list is vital because people who join your list are 10x more likely to become subscribers. Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick Start Guide to Accelerating Digital Subscriptions But if building […]

Join our webinar – Make The Most Of Your Metered Paywall

A metered paywall is a powerful tool for increasing your paid subscriptions and ZEEN101’s Leaky Paywall is as user-friendly as it gets. But even the friendliest and most powerful tool can be made more effective with a few tips and tricks. Join us for our FREE webinar and learn how to make the most of […]

Subscriptions, Not Ads: Lessons Learned At ‘WordCamp for Publishers’

A Learning Experience This August, WordPress held the first ever WordCamp for Publishers in Denver, Colorado. Hosted at the Denver Post building and attended by publishers of every size and shape – including such giants as Condé Nast, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Sun-Times – it was hardly an event that ZEEN101 […]

Hardening your metered paywall can triple paid subscriptions

The Challenge: Established Publication, New Era For 30 years, Military Living has been providing an invaluable tool to the military community: a set of guidebooks for military travel. Military personnel and their families are eligible for a number of travel discounts and Military Living has made that simpler with their three publications: one for hotel […]

Leaky Paywall is featured on the wpinnovator podcast

Lee talks about [1:37 secs] our metered paywall plugin for WordPress – Leaky Paywall Find out more: Learn more about monetizing WordPress websites at the wpinnovator podcast Leaky Paywall Thanks Lee! Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick Start Guide to Accelerating Digital Subscriptions  

Documentation updates

We have been working hard on catching up on documentation. Here are some highlights: Leaky Paywall: How To Change the Subscription Details on a Subscribe Card Adding Fields To The Free Subscription Sign-Up Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick Start Guide to Accelerating Digital Subscriptions How Do I Hide the WordPress Admin From Subscribers? […]

3 simple subscription nags that work

Your reader has reached the end of their free article meter and your nag to subscribe pops into the article. What can you do to motivate readers to subscribe? Here are 3 easy to setup nags that work. 1. Embed an image that sells your subscription View a few articles on http://dynastyfootballwarehouse.com until your trigger […]

Creating Your Content Hub

The mantra of modern online publishing is create your content and leave it to your readers to decide where they want to consume it. It’s a noble sentiment but the reality of enabling this approach can be daunting, as well as time and resource intensive if not planned properly. So, how feasible is it for […]

Make them read the blurred text – How to motivate readers to subscribe

You run a metered paywall. Your articles are getting found in Google search and they are getting shared in Facebook. Your readers arrive at your site and comb through more articles. They are interested. They might subscribe. How do you encourage them? Do what the Austin Monitor does: Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick […]

Make better decisions about your site with Google Analytics

If you publish a magazine or news site online you will often be faced with decisions on how to improve the experience for your readers. The answer is quite simple: you have to know how your readers got to your magazine and what articles and other content they are naturally gravitating to. So how do you […]

How to QUICKLY find great free stock photos for your articles

Get your hands on the right free photo fast. The problem with most free stock photo sites is they suck all your time just trying to find a good photo for an article. There are lot’s of free options and some provide really beautiful photos but the wasted time hunting through the long photo galleries drives me nuts. […]

How to Target Your Titles for Your Audience

There are many popular schools of thought when it comes to titling an article. Unfortunately, the trend we’re seeing lately relies too heavily on fishing: Pack ’em full of keywords so the Google robots find you; Bait your readers with scintillating tantalization; Tell your readers they JUST WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT…!; …Make a list! […]

How to create links in your articles to attract more readers

Easy and powerful. If you are writing copy you need to always link to sources. Linking properly is key to humans clicking and Google ranking your stories in search Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick Start Guide to Accelerating Digital Subscriptions

How to build and automate your email list building

Building your magazine’s subscriber base via email is job #1. The tools today also let you completely automate the task of sending your stories to your subscribers. Watch this video to find out how. The creation of your email list is critical to your success. Get our free guidebook: The Publishers’ Quick Start Guide to […]

Don’t design your online magazine… blueprint it (a how to)

Grab a pencil and some paper… This story starts with a person I call the frenzied editor. Not long ago I walked into the office of this publisher who was peering over a conference room table, with about 30 white pieces of paper scattered about. What he was doing was busily sorting out what pages […]

You must add site search to your WordPress magazine or news publication

Problem: How do you increase the number readers to your online magazine? Solution: Create articles that readers tell you they want 1. The typical way to get your publication ranking in Google search is to look at the keyword searches that are being done online (using Google Adsense which tells you the search volume for […]

How to price your digital magazine

I see a trend. The trend is $1.99 per month. Why? Because the Apple Newsstand (found within iTunes’ App Store) is now selling quite a lot of magazines and is showing price points for publications. Many are at $1.99/mo. Web magazines (see The Magazine, The Dish) are also converting to the $1.99 per month pricing […]

How to build a WordPress news site

Middlebury College recently rebuilt and launched their MiddleburyCampus.com news site. Their #1 point of pain was workflow as their current news site was slow and difficult to manage. Middlebury also publishes the campus news in print every week and needed to be able to publish digital editions to match this schedule. What did they do? They turned […]