When you decide to publish a digital magazine it’s important to do your due diligence about what’s involved before you spend the time and money doing it. It can take a lot of resources, time and effort to produce a digital magazine – almost as much as it takes to produce a paper magazine. Therefore, it’s important to study what it takes to create a professional-level magazine that your audience will enjoy.
1. Survey Your Audience – What does your audience want to see in a magazine you publish? Ask them. Use your email list to send out a questionnaire about your proposed magazine and let them help you decide whether or not you’ll publish it and what will be in it.
2. Decide Which Software to Use – Knowing how you will create the magazine and what platform you’ll use to publish is important. Perhaps you’ll decide to hire an expert to help you publish the magazine to save time and reduce your learning curve.
3. Choose Which Topic You’ll Cover – Your magazine should encompass a niche and cover a specific subject with 8 to 10 categories and sections to fill with content.
4. Identify Potential Contributors – You likely already know people who may want to contribute in exchange for ad space or payment of some kind. You may even want to place a “tip” jar inside each bio so that authors can earn that way.
5. Identify Potential Advertisers – Who might want to advertise in your new digital magazine? You should be able to make a list of 20 to 40 potential advertisers so that you can contact them to offer them an advertisement.
6. Create a System to Organize Content – You’ll need a lot of content to put into your digital magazine. The way you collect content and upload content to your publishing platform needs to be streamlined to avoid a time suck from occurring.
7. Create Accounts Where You Plan to Publish – Many digital publishing platforms will submit your magazine for you, but it’ll end up being submitted under their platform instead of under your name. Ensure that you bypass this situation and publish on various digital publishing platforms under your name.
8. Consider the Format of Your Magazine – A lot of publishing platforms allow uploading PDFs to start, they then transfer them to HTML5 before publishing to various apps. The reason is that PDFs are not really a good form of digital publishing due to how big they are and the fact that they’re not really interactive.
If you do the work you need to do in order to publish a good magazine for your audience, you’ll be successful in your endeavors. It’s important to cover all bases before you get started. This helps avoid mistakes that can be frustrating when you want to create a new digital magazine to spread awareness of your brand or to start a new income stream.