Late on Friday night I was surprised to get an email from Dr. Flint McLaughlin of MarketingExperiments.com (MEC) telling me that information for which I’d previously been paying $39.95 a month would be free from now on.
MarketingExperiments.com is an excellent idea. Dr. F and his team conduct primary research into important issues in online marketing. Pay your subscription and you share in the results. I’ve been a subscriber for several years and certainly feel I’ve got some great value from the service.
To quote from the freshly redesigned website:
MarketingExperiments.Com is an online laboratory with a simple (but not easy) five-word mission statement: To discover what really works. We test every conceivable marketing method on the Internet. We publish the results in the Marketing Experiments Journal (110,000+ subscribers).
So what’s behind the new model? I think there are two important elements:
- The change from subscription to free content will dramatically increase the link value of the MEC website. Many more people will be able to link to the freely available content. Research that will now be available to everybody includes:
- Avoiding Unprofitable PPC Campaigns — How Data Analysis, Bidding Strategies, and 26 Proven Techniques Can Prevent Lost Revenue on Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
- Welcome Message Sequence Tested — How our test site utilized its welcome message sequence to create a return visitor rate of more than 46% in just the first five days.
- Long Copy vs. Short Copy — How our micro-testing increased conversion rate by more than 100%
These are just the sort of articles that writers, publishers and webmasters will link to as a matter of course. I would expect that MEC’s link popularity will rocket over the next few months bringing better search engine performance and more subscribers in its wake.
And I think it needs to: I did a quick test for inbound links to four marketing sites this morning on MarketLeap’s Link Popularity Check. Here’s the scores:
MarketingExperiments.com - 1,657 inbound links
MarketingSherpa.com - 59,739 inbound links
MarketingProfs.com - 105,230 inbound links
MarketingVox.com - 132,165 inbound links.
(Note, link popularity scores are far from an absolute measure - but they do give some valuable indications)
The change comes with a welcome site redesign - a vast improvement on what was a querky design before.
MEC’s change to free content reminds me of an important quote: “The funny thing about knowledge is that when you give it away, you still have it.” - and you gain from the reaction you get, the knowledge that people share with you as a result and the relationship you build with people as a result. So Dr. McLaughlin, good luck with your great experiment. I will mention and link to MEC whenever I want to point people to solid, dependable and useful information.
- The second is an increased focus on making money through recruiting research partners - companies who are prepared to pay a sizable monthly fee for involvement in the research projects. Follow this link to find out about becoming an MEC Research Partner.
