That’s the problem Mortgage Success Source faced last year. In addition, their market changed practically overnight, from small, independent companies to formal, larger enterprises.

But Senior VP Torry Burdick and her team took a two-prong approach to address the market shift. First, they unified their service — reorganizing it to make it easier to use — then stripped away extraneous content and added more sophisticated solutions to meet the needs of the enterprise user, not just the individual.

Then they increased retention rates. But you’ll have to attend the Subscription Site Summit to find out Burdick’s secret to increasing retention in a declining market. Hurry up and buy a ticket today–there are just a few seats left!

• eNanny Source
• Napster
• Real Networks
• WriteWork
• VetFriends.com
• and others…

CEO Chuck Meyst of AgencyFinder has been able to harness his years of expertise and experience in the advertising agency to create a unique business model — one that asks agencies to pony up for an annual subscription in exchange for an invitation to pitch a qualified new business lead. When I was on the phone with Meyst, he explained how advertising agencies often found it difficult to close generic new business leads from generic online database searches, so he created a site that would serve as a sales funnel for them. It’s a unique business model that consultants and publishers of industry directories should consider. Take a peek at Subscription Site Insider’s case study on AgencyFinder for a full explanation and in-depth analysis.

Meyst also uses PR Web to augment his search engine marketing. It’s a clever technique that Greg Jarboe will be expanding upon in our upcoming Webinar, “Drive Site Traffic With ‘Cheap’ PR Tactics,” on Tuesday, March 13th. Sign up now to attend!

Mike Manning

When our publisher, Anne Holland, met Mike Manning and some of his marketing compatriots at the Maxymiser dinner a few months ago, she was so impressed with their stories of A/B testing, she immediately offered him a spot to speak at Subscription Site Insider‘s April Summit in San Francisco.

Mike is the Vice President of Marketing at LoopNet, a website for commercial real estate listing and research. They recently found that adding a simple “lightbox”-style overlay when visitors tried to access paid content, instead of taking them to a barrier page, increased conversions. (It’s also a more beautiful design element!)

But overlays are not fool-proof; they can be as annoying as pop-ups when done wrong. For handy tips on implementing overlays on your site, check out this easy-to-read how-to article.

And to learn some of Mike’s other tricks, along with tips from 14 other speakers, sign up today to attend Subscription Site Insider‘s April Summit in San Francisco. It’s going to be a memorable event!

Through the Google Books Partner program, you can upload your white papers and PDF downloads and have them indexed in Google Search as well as on the Google Books subsite. Users can then purchase your Google Book through your website.

For step-by-step instructions on joining the Google Books Partner program — and why you should avoid becoming a Google Books Seller — check out the how-to article on our sister site, Subscription Site Insider.

This is unfortunate since Amazon’s dominance in both the print and ebook markets is allowing the company to create something of a monopoly. There is also some speculation that Amazon is trying to get rid of publishers and distributors all together; according to the Bits blog from The New York Times, “The only two essential parties in the reading experience, Amazon executives are fond of saying, are the reader and the author.”

The good news is that subscription, membership and paywall sites may have a more favored relationship with Amazon Kindle — for now. Amazon’s penchant for decreasing profit margins incrementally may leave even independent sites with original Kindle content scratching their heads in a few years’ time. The best option? Diversify and make your content available on as many platforms as possible.

In fact, this week our sister site, Subscription Site Insider, will be publishing an article on the pros and cons of Google Books for membership and subscription sites. Check back here tomorrow for a tip that will save you time and money.

Publishing Expo is the U.K.’s “only mutli-platform publishing show” and has a variety of talks and seminars of interest to digital content creators and marketers, such as:

• All you need to know about the Cloud (Mark Pratt, Vice President, Business Development, Metropublisher)
• Social data - the tool to capture your audience: data acquisition with social and sharing (Reena Mistry, Marketing Director, Adestra Ltd)
• Apple newsstand – how and why it has changed the game (Mike Goldsmith, Editor-in-Chief of iPad and Tablet Editions, Future)
• Coming out on top of the Digital Marketing Ecosystem (Nicolle Pangis, President of Europe and Estelle Reale, Ecope Director of Marketing and Communication, 24.7 Real Network)
• Thirty tips for niche publishers: digital media on a shoestring: Carolyn Morgan, MD Specialist Media Show, Rob Chambers, MD Total Telecom, Andy Marshall, MD Immediate Media Bristol

If you’re interested in attending, you can register here. And if you do attend, feel free to write us a note about how it went and what you got out of it.

His new 152-page printed book, Sell Your Brain Power, offers readers a very sound action plan for creating and marketing information materials online. To his credit, Gleeck, doesn’t promise any “Get Rich Quick” schemes, but he does break things down into digestible chunks. In fact, unlike other DIY Digital books I’ve read, it was easy for me to put down the book and pick up where I left off.

Chapters include Getting Your Systems in Place, Seven Steps to Information Marketing Success, Selecting Your Niche, Writing Copy to Sell Your Products and Creating Your Product. Gleeck also includes helpful links to websites and SaaS sites — a really boon for people who don’t want to have to sift through reviews of a vendor services.

Gleeck has graciously given us five copies, which we’re giving away to the first five people who fill in the form below. But if you don’t win, don’t despair — you can come listen to Gleeck speak live and in-person at the Subscription Site Insider Summit in San Francisco April 24-25th.

The move will likely benefit GigaOM, as technology and digital publishing go hand-in-hand. But it might hurt Guardian News and Media (GNM), who seems quixotically determined to make free, all-access content work — in the UK and US. GNM has formally stated that it’s selling paidContent and its sister sites — including contentSutra.com and mocoNews.net — so that it can focus on its The Guradian’s U.S. venture.

GigaOM, on the other hand, seems to be experimenting with premium content, while keeping the majority of their content free. It recently launched GigaOM Pro, a resource for professionals in the digital technology space. Whether paidContent stops being an ironic name is still uncertain, but GigaOM is likely the most logicall choice to breath life and geek-certified order into this confusing publication.

That may be changing as a number of notable academics are calling for an “Academic Spring.” Their gripes are many, but center on the current trend of publishers charging for user-generated content. As The Economist states:

Academics, who live in a culture which values the free and easy movement of information (and who edit and referee papers for nothing) have long been uncomfortable bedfellows with commercial publishing companies, which want to maximise profits by charging for access to that information, and who control many (although not all) of the most prestigious scientific journals.

I suspect the ethics of charging for user-generated content is only going to become a bigger debate, especially with Facebook’s recent IPO and YouTube’s flirtation with charging for subscription channels.

In what seems a poorly-planned defensive move, scientific journals now want to get paid for anytime an article is included in a patent application. While we usually applaud creative revenue streams, this one really does go against the idea of fair use — that is, to disseminate ideas to the public. More importantly, if it becomes  financially prohibitive for anyone to note the ideas in your publication, you will likely cease to be a publication of note. With an mean average of two readers per article (that’s a lifetime score!), academic publications should see citations and references as good word-of-mouth marketing, not a copyright infringement or potential revenue stream.