ANGLOTOPIA LLC
Passionate about British Heritage and Culture
Anglotopia was recently featured in Classic Chicago Magazine. Jonathan and Jacqueline Thomas were photographed at the recent Royal Oak lecture at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The lecture featured author Jane Tippett speaking about her new biography of King Edward VIII.
I wanted to give a little behind the scenes look at a contest we recently launched over on our Londontopia site.
Contests are one of the best ways to quickly build up an email list, and we’ve had a lot of success building our email lists through contests over the years. Almost a decade ago, we gave away a trip to London and received over 15,000 entries. Just this year, we gave away a year’s supply of tea back in January and got over 9,000 entries! Many of those who entered these contests have become longtime Anglotopia subscribers.
As part of our plans to reboot Anglotopia in 2024, I wanted to approach our next contest a little more deliberately. I knew the prize we wanted to offer – I wanted to giveaway the new Lego London Phone Box set (along with their other London sets). I decided to focus the promotion on Londontopia as that email list needs some serious growth this year as we expand with an events guide and attraction review directory.
But as I was thinking about it, I also wanted to kill two birds with one stone and still encourage sign-up for the Anglotopia email list. How can I do both?
Enter a fantastic new tool we’re using for the contest. Called Rafflepress, it’s a WordPress plugin that manages a contest for you. It handles entries, but it also allows users to gain ‘extra’ entries and chances to win by doing additional things to enter. So, you get one entry for subscribing to Londontopia, but you can also opt to get one extra entry if you subscribe to Anglotopia. The tool also allows many other ways to enter, and it tracks everything.
We used to use Google Forms to collect contest entries, but this was very limited in that it just gives you a raw list of entries – and it doesn’t validate them in any way. So, then you have cheeky people entering the contest 42 times. It takes work to filter those entries out. This new tool gives entrants the option to enter more than once and then tracks everything. And makes picking the winner super easy. It also integrates nicely with our email list manager – every entry is sent directly to our live mailing lists, so they immediately get a welcome email and will get the next newsletter. Very slick.
Over 24 hours, I’m very pleased with how the plugin is performing. Almost 1,000 entries so far, with 300 new email subscribers. This is only from us promoting the contest lightly. That’s just stage one. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a major marketing campaign and partnering with several other websites to get this contest in front of as many people as possible.
For British companies looking to enter the North American market, we highly recommend running a sweepstakes of some kind. It doesn’t have to be a high-value prize, but you would definitely get more interest in a higher-value prize.
Many marketers would argue that ‘sweepers’ – the slang term for people whose hobby it is to enter contests – are not quality subscribers. That’s partly true, but those who are really interested will simply unsubscribe in the first few weeks, and those who never open can be filtered out long-term by most email software. Those that stick around have immense value to your brand.
If you’re looking to run a sweepstakes, we can help you with that. Anglotopia has deep experience in marketing and contests, and a big contest will help you make a big splash in the North American market. Get in touch with us!
After almost a year of work and preparation, Anglotopia is excited to publish its latest book, Great British Houses: The Anglophile’s Guidebook to Britain’s Stately Homes.
This new book is adapted from a series of articles published on Anglotopia between 2015-2020. All have been updated and expanded, and pictures have been presented of each.
The book features 50 great houses in England and each chapter is a survey of the history of the place, why it’s important, and how to visit.
This book launch is a milestone, as it’s the first time we’ve published a print, eBook, and audiobook version on the same day, providing a way for readers to enjoy the book however they like.
This is the fourth book in the ‘Great British’ series, joining:
It’s available from booksellers everywhere and direct from Anglotopia via its online store.
Great British Houses: The Anglophile’s Guide to Britain’s Stately Homes is a comprehensive and fascinating guide to some of the most magnificent and historically significant houses in Britain. This book takes you on a journey through the grandest and most elegant homes, castles, and manors in Britain, and provides you with a wealth of information about their history, culture, and architectural significance.
In this book, you can explore the grandeur of houses like Highclere Castle, the setting for the popular TV series Downton Abbey, or the stunning Blenheim Palace, which was the birthplace of Winston Churchill. You can also discover the majestic beauty of Chatsworth House, which was used as the setting for Pemberley in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and the imposing Castle Howard, which was featured in the classic TV drama Brideshead Revisited. This is just a sampling of the fifty houses in this book, each with a detailed and fascinating history.
This book is not only a guide to the finest stately homes in Britain, but also a fascinating insight into the history and culture of the country and a chronicle of the British aristocracy. It provides practical information on how to visit these magnificent houses, as well as a wealth of interesting facts and anecdotes about the houses and their owners, as well as their appearances in movies and TV shows.
Whether you are a history buff, an architecture enthusiast, or simply an Anglophile with a love for all things British, Great British Houses: The Anglophile’s Guide to Britain’s Stately Homes is an essential guide that will take you on a journey through some of the most breathtaking and historic homes in Britain.
A common request for us when we publish our books is to release an audio version. Audiobooks are incredibly popular in this day and age but it’s very hard for a small publisher like us to produce an audio book because of the costs involved.
So, we were excited to be invited to participate in a new program from Amazon Kindle and Audible to produce an audiobook of our most recent book, End to End: Britain From Land’s End to John o’Groats.
The narrator is not me – trust me, my voice is not suitable for long-form listening. The audiobook is available exclusively on Audible, which is whwere most people listen to audiobooks these days.
You can purchase the Audiobook for $14.99, or you can claim it as one of your credits if you’re an Audible member. If you’re not an audible member, you can sign up for a free trial and listen to the book for free (but you won’t ‘own’ it).
The total length is six hours and thirty-nine minutes.
Here’s the link to Audible to listen to the book: https://amzn.to/43zPW6h
It’s also available on Kindle for $2.99 (or free as part of Kindle Unlimited) and hardcover.
We will be releasing a paperback version this summer.
If you look around Anglotopia.net, things might look a little different. After years of using the same design and layout, we have rolled out a beautiful new design for Anglotopia.
This has been in the works for quite some time. I don’t want to bang on about all the wonderful design changes we’ve made and whatnot, but I wanted to say something so everyone would know that it’s us who have changed the design, and we’re not going anywhere.
The biggest change you will notice is that article pages are now a single column. We have ditched the old-school sidebar. It’s a final acknowledgment of the fact that 80% of readers look at this website on their phones and never see the sidebar, so it’s functionally useless. So, it’s gone. I’ll miss it! Many of our previous design traditions continue – our logo will stay the same, our fonts and colors are the same as well. Things are just laid out a little differently now and hopefully easier to read, no matter which device you’re reading on.
The entire new design is optimized to look great on mobile and tablet devices. There’s a new header, and footer area and the menu has been simplified to make it easier to hit Anglotopia’s key content sections. The homepage is still a work in progress (as are a few other new features). But overall, this is how Anglotopia will look for the next few years.
Now that we’ve done this, we can finally begin to roll out major new features that we’ve been planning, where the old design and software were a major limitation. This new software opens up a ton of new possibilities for us as we reboot Anglotopia in 2024.
If you have any feedback on the design and layout, let us know! When we switched over Londontopia’s theme last year, user feedback was critical in ironing out the bugs. If you come across any bugs or if anything looks weird, please let us know. Flipping the switch and changing 20,000 pages means that something will be broken somewhere. There’s a common issue where images aren’t centered correctly – we’re working on that.
Also, if the site feels a bit slow for you, please bear with us. We had to purge our entire cache when the new design went live, so that means it’s going to take a few weeks for it to rebuild with the new layouts. The deeper you go into the Anglotopia, the slower is will be, for now. But it’s only temporary. We’re working hard to mitigate it behind the scenes.
So, please have a look around and let us know what you think!
Anglotopia is a US-based company with almost 20 years of experience marketing British products, services, and attractions to the American audience.