In our previous post, we talked about three foundational methods for integrating content and commerce: Market Leadership, Scalability and Smooth Transactions.

Today, we’ll look at examples that build on those methods.

Social Commerce

As you well know, social is the name of the game these days. But it’s not just about social media, it’s also about encouraging social interaction on your own site, to deepen audience engagement and increase time on site.

Shoppers on Success.com can recommend, comment on, rate and share products in the store. Meanwhile, readers of the Turnaround Letter are able to make recommendations, provide feedback through “Tell Us What You Think” and also participate in an interactive blog Q&A—taking audience interaction deeper and TAL’s context awareness higher—so they can continue to provide a product their readers value most.

Context Awareness

Speaking of context awareness, Grand Rapids Business Journal employs tactics to ensure they are continually learning about their customers, to increase loyalty and repeat purchases. GRBJ leverages a combination of value-added content and customer data management to accomplish this goal:

• Relevant Content: GRBJ.com engages readers with related articles, events and products presented in context.  Semantic tags link to topic pages that list all related articles. The contextual presentation improves organic SEO and keeps people on the site longer—by automatically giving them more of what they are looking for.
• Relevant, Engaging News: Image Galleries, Video, reader-generated content and other features create a rich experience, whether a reader is browsing the latest news or researching a local industry.
• Search Results present a wide range of available resources—articles, pages, blogs, products, events, lists and classifieds—providing business professionals with a choice of resources for news, research and analysis.
• Author Tools encourage relationship building with individual authors and specific content by introducing authors at the end of each article or the beginning of each blog post, with links to other articles or posts they’ve written.
• Trending Article Features encourage visitors to join the conversation, view more pages and share with colleagues.  Visitors quickly see articles that are most popular and generating the most comments.

Rewards

Rewards are a great way to reinforce engagement and return visits. Premier Guitar's PG Perks is an affiliate program that offers discount codes to readers and at the same time helps PG identify subscribers who are buying from select vendors. They also encourage readers answer a quick survey and be entered to win coveted prizes, like guitars, gift cards and other gear.  In this way, they increase reader loyalty and gather data to build their context awareness

Diversified Revenue Channels

Successful online publishers are not simply focused on ads, subscriptions and paywalls—they are diversifying their revenue channels to increase revenue per reader.

MediaTec Publishing, Inc. did just that when they relaunched Workforce.com on ePublishing's Content Management and eCommerce platform.  The new Workforce celebrates a variety of revenue features that include:

• Sponsored Content: Roadmaps
• Lead Gen: Resources = downloads, whitepapers
• Sponsored Events, Webinars
• Sponsored Video and Podcasts
• Vendor Directory with Premium, Plus, and Free listing options

Workforce’s Roadmaps feature is built specifically for their audience—guiding managers through complex issues and design policies to respond to specific workplace challenges, such as Performance Management and Succession Planning.

Of course, Workforce would not be able to monetize their content without its market leadership position.  The website provides a source of practical, value-added information to empower HR managers with news, regulatory developments and best practices. 

 These are just a few examples of how publishers are leveraging ePublishing’s Enterprise Publishing Platform to build greater commerce out of content. With a flexible, scalable content management system, the world is your oyster.