Linda Ruth's Page

2009 wasn’t what you’d call a great year for anyone who cares about magazine sales at retail. That would be any publisher of a
print consumer magazine, magazine wholesalers and distributors, and the
retailers who carry magazines.

… Continue

Rumors and also sobering facts have been flying about Borders for over a year, so it isn’t exactly a surprise that FT.com came out with an article saying that the retail chain isn’t paying its smaller (book) publishers. Still, it isn’t exactly a joy to read. Phrases like “bleeding cash”, “growing arrears”, and “legal action” are never fun to read, and in particular not when those phrases refer to a retail chain so important to magazine publishers.

Borders Group Inc. is the second largest retail… Continue

Publishers' approach has changed a lot since the early days when everyone was out there scrounging, pretty randomly, for anyone, just anyone to link to their sites.

Anyone just anyone doesn’t work anymore. There is a degree to which it never really did; but as the search engines get better and better, the random indiscriminate linking works worse and worse.

But linking is still integral to search. The concept that in fact made Google a success was that sites that were valuable to searchers are… Continue

…and who gets the last word?

Recently I was asked to mediate what appeared, on the surface, to be a disagreement between a publisher and her circulation manager on the matter of the newsstand cover.

The circulator, when reviewing a cover concept, pointed out some best practices in terms of placement of cover lines, clarity of cover lines, and specificity of cover lines. The publisher’s position was that best practices in general might not be best when applied to her high-end audience; in fact… Continue

Now your site is clean and well-optimized for search: you’ve got your site map, your clean urls, your code is unbroken and unblemished throughout the site. The next step is to begin working with your keywords to bring the maximum number of the most highly targeted visitors to your site.

Your keywords will do that job for you. To choose the best keywords, begin by brainstorming a list of keywords that are both relevant to your site and of interest to your potential site visitors. As a matter of… Continue