Premier Guitar™ Uses Readable Online Magazine to Increase Monthly Visitors by Nearly 40 Percent in Just Three Months
Cedar Rapids, Iowa (PRWEB) May 1, 2007
The more than 15 million guitar enthusiasts in the world today are savvy Internet users, and Premier Guitar’s™ online community visitor statistics prove it. More than 400,000 visitors viewed the Web site, http://www.premierguitar.com, in March to access free content from Premier Guitar magazine as well as gear reviews, forums, and tips and tricks. This represents nearly a 40 percent increase in monthly visitors compared to January of this year.
“At Premier Guitar, we strongly believe that guitar players, collectors and enthusiasts want a single place to go where they can find, buy, and sell gear as well as talk with peers about all things guitar,” said Peter Sprague, managing member of Gearhead Communications, the publishers of Premier Guitar and producers of Premier Guitar™ Shows. “It’s not enough anymore to publish a great magazine, as guitarists in today’s digital world have come to expect more than that.”
A favorite of visitors is Premier Guitar’s online magazine. Visitors can read all the current month’s editorial and advertising content in its entirety for free by using the unique page-turning software developed for Premier Guitar by Informatics Inc. The application gives advertisers an extra bonus. Each advertiser and featured product or company is hyperlinked allowing readers’ direct access to their Web sites.
The latest major addition to Premier Guitar’s multimedia platform is the integration of online instructional videos, powered by TrueFire, (http://www.truefire.com), the leaders in online guitar education.
These videos represent the fourth content element in Premier Guitar’s multimedia strategy. In addition to the new educational arm, Premier Guitar publishes the monthly Premier Guitar magazine, organizes and hosts Premier Guitar Festivals all across the country, and helps guitar players seek and find instruments and guitar gear through its interactive online Gear Search service.
This convergence of services has resulted in a rapidly growing online community. With each additional free feature, the online portal has grown.
According to independent third-party traffic reports, when the free interactive Gear Search feature went live on Nov. 27, page views jumped from 3,376 to 19,799. Visitors increased from 4,637 to 5,150, an 11 percent increase in one day. Similarly, when the new Web site launched on March 23, page views increased from 49,208 to 69,620. Visitors grew from 17,917 to 26,133, an increase of 45 percent.
All in all, total monthly page views have increased roughly from 731,000 in January to more than 1.15 million in March, a 57 percent increase. The site’s total monthly visitors have also grown, increasing from nearly 292,000 in January to approximately 403,000 or 38 percent.
“These statistics illustrate how important and valuable Premier Guitar’s online portal has become to our readers,” said Sprague. “We want to provide them with an online community that will have all the information they need to feed their passion for the guitar.”
The Premier Guitar Web site was designed by Cedar Rapids-based Informatics to support the transition from a print publication to a multimedia platform that includes numerous different interactive elements.
“In redesigning the Premier Guitar site we created a scalable technical infrastructure that would be flexible enough to support Premier Guitar’s mission of helping guitar players improve their tone,” said John Osako, vice president of development for Informatics (http://www.allthingsinternet.com). “This meant that from a programming level, the web application would extensively utilize database-powered content through customized content management systems to handle the online magazine, reader forums, streaming online instructional videos and the ability to search a massive inventory of gear.”
Premier Guitar is among the industry’s most respected publications edited for serious, accomplished players. Published since 1995, Premier Guitar is read, in print and online, each month by more than 490,000 of the most qualified players, retailers and manufacturers in the market.
For more information, visit http://www.premierguitar.com.
Premier Guitar
Premier Guitar is a monthly publication that is dedicated to the “relentless pursuit of tone” and is edited for serious and accomplished players. The magazine provides guitarists with the resources to help them evolve into better artists and, ultimately, to develop and to improve their tone. The magazine, published by Gearhead Communications, is based in Cedar Rapids and in Fort Dodge, Iowa and is read monthly by more than 90,000 people.
The Company’s online portal, http://www.premierguitar.com, serves more than 400,000 visitors each month who read and, in some cases, print that month’s entire issue of Premier Guitar via its unique page turning software. The portal also offers, via its Gear Search function, viewers the opportunity to search an interactive database of more than 15,000 pieces of gear. In March, the portal recorded more than 1.15 million page views; 3.16 million hits; and an average visit length approaching seven minutes. To give serious guitar players an opportunity to share their guitar passion with others, Premier Guitar will also offer four guitar festivals in 2007: New England Guitar Festival, Boston, Ma., Sept. 14 to 16; Midwest Guitar Festival, Chicago, Ill., Oct. 5 to 7; Mid-Atlantic Guitar Festival, Washington, D.C., Nov. 16 to 18; and, Northeast Guitar Festival, New Jersey, Dec. 7 to 9.
Contacts:
Peter F. Sprague
Managing Member
Gearhead Communications, LLC
(319) 895-0050
John Osako
Vice President, Development
Informatics
(319) 363-3795
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