FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
U.S.
ISBN AGENCY R.R. BOWKER ANNOUNCES ONLINE MARKETING SERVICE FOR THE BOOK INDUSTRY
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH CONTENT DIRECTIONS
Service Creates the Next-Generation
“Digital ISBN” for the Internet
New York, NY – June 6, 2005.
R.R. Bowker, the U.S.ISBN Agency, today announced a partnership with Content Directions, Inc. (CDI), the leader in next-generation Web marketing, to create
the “digital ISBN” for the Internet.
This new service, now available
and marketed under the brand name “Bowker MarketLinks™,” offers all book publishers the automated creation and
maintenance of permanent, persistent links that dramatically increase publishers’
top-line revenue by making their books more discoverable on search engines,
driving higher click-throughs deep into their websites, and converting visitors
to purchasers at a rate almost double the conversion rate of normal visitors
to their websites.
The announcement follows
a 9-month market test in which CDI and Bowker selected several publishers,
deliberately both large and small (e.g. Penguin Putnam, Houghton Mifflin,
Acropolis Books), and rigorously measured the increases in Google rankings,
user traffic, and sales as a result
of the service. Improvements
in page 1 Google rankings ranged as high as 1400% in “before and after” tests,
in which the same search terms were tested both before and after the service. In one publisher’s case, 36% of the searches
resulted in the publisher’s book appearing as the #1 result on page 1 of Google,
60% as either #1 or #2 on page 1, and 79% somewhere on page 1. One publisher found that 60% of all Google
referrals to its website are now coming as a result of MarketLinks found on
Google. One publisher’s sales
via Amazon quadrupled.
“Bowker is proud to be building
on the legacy of the ISBN as the product identifier for the Book Industry.”
said Michael Cairns, President of Bowker. “With MarketLinks, Bowker
is leveraging the ISBN from its pure ‘identifier’ role into a marketing powerhouse
that makes books more discoverable online and drives demonstrably higher traffic
and sales conversions.”
“Significant revenue growth
-- driven by the clever application of next generation Web navigation -- is no longer theoretical,”
said Hugh Brownstone, CEO of Content Directions. “We’re
delighted to partner with Bowker to bring real, dramatic on-line sales &
marketing gains to the publishing world.
The combination of Bowker’s market leadership and CDI’s technical leadership
serves as a potent model for helping companies accelerate top line growth
on the Web.”
Examples of the service can
be viewed via the following MarketLinks: