I have been getting a few queries lately on the print magazine business from the American end and if I intend to grow it past one consumer title. The answer is: ‘Of course.’ While we do have the announcement of a special Lucire edition for Zinio (click here to download), we have been considering additional titles, including one for the 48 (US) states that we’ve begun name-dropping. Can’t say more since they are the ones doing more of the work than me(!), but it is a cooperative deal with two of our team on the west coast.
   The trick really is finding a good mixture between print and online. As with any of our ventures, I tend to go for websites first as toes in the water, use it to assemble a team and create a community.
   The proliferation of media means that we should look for ready partnerships out there—and they are likely to already exist. I don’t think every niche has been plugged, but there are enough peripheral ones that can help position a new venture as cool, conservative, cutting-edge, etc. They can even help existing ones refresh their audiences.
   Last week, I wrote on another blog about reacquainting ourselves with TopButton.com, a site that we had worked with many moons ago. TopButton.com’s site is vastly different from when it was NYSale.com, with stronger communities and fans in three centres (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco), and it felt right to say hi to co-founder Mike Feldman and see if he still felt whether his site and Lucire complemented one another.
   Once upon a time, we did this sort of thing to get links to raise our Google ranking. Nowadays, we are probably more sophisticated. It’s not the quantity of the links—because PageRank is not the be-all-and-end-all of search engine optimization—but the market positioning of those links. You are judged, not by search engine robots but by consumers, on the company you keep—it is a conscious or subconscious brand analysis—and social networking pages such as those on MySpace or Facebook are very good examples of that when they display links as badges of honour.

Tags: PageRank, links, Google, SEO, Lucire, search engines, marketing, branding, media, positioning, social networks Posted by Jack Yan, 02:45  permalink

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