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In 2022, Publishers Take Back Control With Subscription Success
RebelMouse's Subscription Features
As a creative agency powered by modern technology, we know how to build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
- Free Trials: Create one-day, weekly, or monthly subscription plans.
- Coupon Codes: Use promotional codes to give access to strategic partners and complement B2B deals.
- B2B Subscriptions: Use email matching to sell access to companies.
- Testing Powered by Data: We have a sophisticated suite of A/B testing tools — complete with Google Analytics integrations — that give you the ability to test what works, what doesn't, and how to better cater to your readers' needs.
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
The Success of Our Subscription Model
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their time leveraging RebelMouse’s paywall strategy, La Verità has experienced continued, unprecedented growth. They are now one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've enjoyed significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
La Verità's superior site performance using RebelMouse's paywall tools.
Is a Subscription Model Right for You?
In the past, there was a stigma around paywalls that signaled they were only sustainable for large publishers with massive audiences already in place. But with today's users maturing, subscription models are more attainable for a variety of emerging media properties and legacy names alike.
It's important to strike the right balance between free content, subscriber revenue, and ad strategy. This is a lot to juggle for publishers who are already maxed out trying to create quality content worth reading.
At RebelMouse, we can help you determine if a subscription model will benefit you, and then build a custom, easy-to-use paywall system that works for your site. If you're not publishing on RebelMouse, we also operate as a world-class creative agency that can help you navigate the subscription business and any other content strategy you may be building toward. Either way, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
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Rebel Insights
New Report: Email Is a ‘Key Tool’ for Building Loyalty
The report also found that the majority of users who consume news via email are older, richer, educated, and have a heavy interest in news-related content. In fact, one in seven adults over the age of 55 in the U.S. said that email was their main way of accessing news. Additionally, 80% of users who use email to read news are over the age of 35.
While the insights around exactly who gets their news from email and how they do it may seem limiting to the average publisher, there is still plenty of room to leverage email for topics outside of news.
The Benefits of an Effective Email Strategy
The data from the Digital News Report confirms that email is a great way to distribute specialized content across a wide range of subjects. The minimalist nature of email lends itself nicely to personalized content that could otherwise get lost in the noise.
“Despite its relative lack of sophistication, it remains a key tool for publishers as they focus on building deeper relationships with loyal users — as well as attracting new subscribers.” —Digital News Report 2022
The easy-to-read nature of email also creates an opportunity to show off your content’s unique style. Of the thousands of users surveyed in the Digital News Report, 64% said they valued email for its convenience, and 28% said they favored newsletters because they liked the tone of the author.
As mentioned above, one of the primary characteristics of email news readers is that they are highly interested in news-related content. With the right email strategy, that same effective audience targeting can be applied to any topic.
Weave Newsletters Into Your Content Workflow
While newsletters are not likely to be your site’s primary driver of traffic, it’s still prime time for publishers to capitalize on the benefits of email sooner rather than later. Click here for some quick tips on launching a newsletter campaign.
The RebelMouse platform has an intuitive newsletter dashboard that makes it easy to use major platforms like Mailchimp and Sailthru without ever leaving your CMS. Our elegant integrations allow you to turn posts into newsletters, choose templates, and schedule campaigns right from your editing space. Click here to learn more.
Easily schedule newsletters from RebelMouse’s editing interface.
If you aren't publishing on RebelMouse yet, get in touch today and let's get started. We are a full-service creative agency that can help you with all of your website and email marketing goals.
Rebel Insights
What You Need to Know About Alt Text for Search
What Is Alt Text?
Alt text, which is short for alternative text for images, is very important for accessibility, and can also have benefits for SEO. Briefly, alt text is wording that is added to an image to describe it to search engines. It also allows people using screen readers to be able to know what the image is without actually being able to see it.
Here’s a quick three-minute explainer on alt text from Google:
Since alt text is designed to describe an image for someone who cannot view it, it should be more detailed than a traditional photo caption.
Differences of wording between caption and alt text. Both are easy to implement on the RebelMouse platform.
Alt text is an HTML tag included alongside an image attribute. As you can see from the image above, the RebelMouse platform makes it easy to incorporate alt text during the editing process.
What Are Some Best Practices for Writing Alt Text?
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller has said that Google has no specific guidelines regarding alt text. This came up during a recent Google SEO office hours hangout, when Muller dispelled speculation that Google only crawls the first 16 words of an alt text tag.
Mueller said that there are actually no restrictions for how long your alt text can be, and that in terms of SEO, you can add a lot of wording to an alt text tag as long as it's relevant for that particular image.
Here’s a helpful example from Mueller of what kind of relevant text can improve your alt text:
If you have a picture of a beach, you could use an alt text and say, ‘Oh this is a beach.’ But you could also say, ‘this is the beach in front of our hotel or this is the beach that we took a photo of when we were doing a chemical cleanup.’ And kind of those intents are very different and people would be searching in different ways in Google Images to find more information there. And giving that extra context always makes sense, in my opinion.”
While this guidance from Google may seem vague, it’s safe to say that any effort to describe an image with helpful context is better than nothing. However, Google does clearly mention in its best practices for images documentation that you should not stuff keywords into your alt text tags. This means you should not use the alt text field as an opportunity to mindlessly input your desired search phrases, or even the name of your company, with no context.
Here’s an example from Google of keyword stuffing in the alt text attribute:
From Google.
How Does Alt Text Impact My Search Ranking?
The impact of alt text on your search rankings is, like most things related to SEO, a bit hard to determine. While Google hasn’t directly mentioned alt text as an official search ranking factor, it has given several clues to its importance. For example, their guidelines do state that keyword stuffing alt text attributes like mentioned above could cause your site to be marked as spam and negatively impact your site’s search rankings.
In 2020, Mueller gave another nugget of insight into alt text’s impact on SEO. He said the alt text attribute is particularly important for image search, and that “using the alt attribute is a good way to tell us this is on that image and we’ll get extra information from around your page with regard to how we can rank that landing page.”
So the quick answer is yes, alt text is an important part of your holistic SEO strategy.
While making sure that every image on your site has appropriate alt text will not be a quick fix to better performance on search, it is an important part of your site’s usability and overall SEO strategy. Plus, when done correctly and with appropriate context, it’s another chance to reinforce your content’s search phrase for Google’s crawler.
Start Solving the Search Puzzle
Today’s modern search strategy requires putting together a lot of moving pieces, including the implementation of technical SEO, putting together a search-centered content strategy, and publishing to a high performance website.
RebelMouse is a modern CMS that weaves in every aspect of SEO into our product and your content creation workflow. Not only do we follow all of Google’s best practices for images, but you can easily manage alt text directly from our editing interface and optimize every piece of content for success on search. Additionally, our platform is known for delivering industry-leading page performance, and includes SEO must-haves like structured data right out of the box.
Stop stressing about checking off every box needed for a perfect SEO strategy. Let us do it for you. Request a proposal today to get started.
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