Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	August 30, 2007

Take a look at the five nominees for the Mequoda Publisher of the Year

Today we are excited to announce the nominees for the 2007 Mequoda Publisher of the Year award. This award is given to the publishers that best serve their audience while running a newly launched Mequoda System (launched between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007).

Click here to vote

This year's nominees, in alphabetical order, are:

•Ceramic Arts Daily
•Flight Bliss
•Golf Vacation Insider
•HR Daily Advisor
•Knitting Daily

The Mequoda Daily will profile a different nominee in each of our next five issues, describing how each publisher serves their audience online.

We're starting off the 5-issue series today with a profile on Ceramic Arts Daily, based on an interview with President of the Ceramic Publications Company Charles Spahr.

Ceramic Arts Daily

If you enjoy creating or collecting elegant vases, hearty pots or any ceramics, then Ceramic Arts Daily is for you.

Since the Ceramic Publications Company launched the site in July, the hub has been serving daily tips about ceramic artists, their work, techniques and artistic prospective.

"[Ceramic Arts Daily] provides a lot more timely information to the people we had previously served with magazines and more traditional websites," says President of the Ceramic Publications Company Charlie Spahr.

"Those websites that we had before did not get updated nearly as often as this one does. This one gets updated everyday...before it was much more typical of a magazine cycle."

That update cycle mostly paralleled Ceramic Publications Company's two print magazines, Ceramics Monthly and Pottery Making Illustrated—which is usually too infrequent to be successful online.

Now the website's update cycle is daily, which is a good strategy for attracting repeat website traffic and building an email newsletter database.

Website's Offerings

One of the major benefits of Ceramic Arts Daily is that it allows its audience to "do a lot of things from one place," Spahr said.

Anyone wishing to learn more about creating or collecting ceramic art does not have to look far. The site serves as a center for products, making them more accessible to customers, Spahr said. The site brings together books, magazine subscriptions, Potter's Council memberships and workshops—all designed to teach people about ceramics.

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Other educational tools include three free downloadable books on the site, which come with a free subscription to the daily email newsletter. The daily email newsletter drives the website's update schedule.

"The free products are actually pretty robust," Spahr said. "They have a wide appeal to attract as many people as possible."

Rather than just a place to post tips, the Ceramic Arts Daily's website is also becoming a forum for artists and collectors to meet and interact. People started commenting on posts and answering each other's questions less than six weeks after the site's launch.

"I think [the commenting] is going to catch on very much, and it has already started to do that," Spahr said.

The site also serves as a reference, with third-party listings for workshops, classes, artist guilds, residencies and colleges. Anyone can view the listings, free of charge.

There's a gallery section of the website where artists can post their contact information and provide an image of their work. That part of the site will hopefully see major changes in the future, Spahr said, with the addition of features that will allow artists to post an array of their work and link to their websites.

One thing Ceramic Arts Daily does not offer is third-party advertising—at least not yet.

"We certainly will be offering advertising to third parties in 2008, maybe sooner...I've already received unsolicited requests for advertising on the website," Spahr said.

Unsolicited advertisers? It seems like this Mequoda Hub is off to a great start and can only go up from here.