.FLYINGHEAD From the Editor-in-Chief
.TITLE What a month!
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY We’ve been trying to find a word to describe our first month of PalmPower Magazine and the word that keeps coming to mind is Yowzah! This has been an absolutely amazing four weeks. It’s clear that PalmPower struck a chord among PalmPilot users worldwide. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz shares what he’s learned about PalmPower and you in our first thirty days.
.DEPT
I’ve been trying to find a word to describe our first month of PalmPower Magazine and the word that keeps coming to mind is Yowzah! This has been an absolutely amazing four weeks. It’s clear that PalmPower struck a chord among PalmPilot users worldwide.
PalmPower Magazine has only been available for a few short weeks, yet the comments from our readers have been nothing short of astounding. Not only are these letters incredibly good for our collective egos, they also demonstrate that we’re building an excited, enthusiastic readership.
Every day, we’ve been getting letters from our readers. They’ve ranged from congratulations on the new publication to support for our design decisions to thanks for solving a nagging problem to one, where an overly kind fellow called PalmPower "profoundly written". If you want to see them all, visit the "PalmPower News Center", where we update reader feedback on a daily basis.
We’ve been digging through our log files and discovered some interesting statistics about PalmPower’s first month of operation:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET We’ve been averaging 25,000 – 32,000 page requests per day.
.BULLET Over 12,500 people have already subscribed to our free PalmPower Tip of the Week mailing, and we seem to be adding 2,000 – 2,500 new subscribers a week.
.BULLET The bulk of our readers read through entire articles and many read cover-to-cover.
.BULLET Something that will thrill our advertisers: over 10,000 people have "clicked through" an ad to visit an advertiser’s site.
.END_LIST
As I’ve told many of you before, Managing Editor Denise Amrich and I have run four other publications, three of which were print-based, and one which is on a CD-ROM. But the dynamics of a publication run through a web site are nothing like that of a print publication. We’ve been editing the Insider for Lotus cc:Mail (a sixteen page print journal) for about three years, and yet in the first month, we already know more about the PalmPower audience.
For example, we now know that Calvin Parker’s Graffiti article was the most popular. We know that the technical support article by Chris Brown was heavily read. While our interview with PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins was popular, more people were interested in getting the most out of their PalmPilot than in the insider scoop. And even our most specialized article on connecting the PalmPilot to Lotus Notes was well received.
Based on this knowledge, we have already been able to tweak our editorial content (something we probably wouldn’t be able to do in a print journal with anything resembling the degree of surety we have with PalmPower). We’ve asked Calvin to write another Graffiti article and the one in this issue promises to be a big help.
We’re launching our PalmPower Magazine PowerBoards this month. They’re still not fully finished. It’s kind of like moving into a new house; most of the furniture’s in place, but the pictures haven’t been hung yet. In our case, most of the discussion areas have been set up, but we haven’t integrated the nice graphics, nor finalized on all the discussion topics.
Also, we’ve provided a link from each article to a discussion on the article. So if you’ve got questions, information to add, or other ideas, you can get involved with other PalmPilot users with a simple click of your mouse.
This has just been a most incredible month. Thanks for making it so much fun. PalmPower to you!
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://www.component-net.com/webx?13@@.ee6b855
