Before you publish your first digital magazine it’s important to understand what’s important about publishing a magazine. You can increase your audience, give more to your current audience, and find a new income stream via either subscriptions of the magazine or advertising revenue. Here are eight tips to get you started.
1. Start with Building a Potential Subscriber’s List – Before you consider producing a digital magazine it’s important that you have people who want the magazine. Start with building a mailing list or two using the categories that you plan to cover in the magazine to attract the subscribers. Try creating one free report for each category that you’ll have inside your magazine to attract the subscribers. This will give you a good idea of whether the categories you’ve chosen are what your audience wants to cover.
2. Understand What Your Audience Wants – If you don’t know who your audience is, it will be very difficult to know whether or not they even want a magazine, much less what they would want it to cover. Be sure to survey your audience, poll your audience and engage them on various topic ideas for your magazine.
3. Make Your Digital Magazine Available in Multiple Locations – Once published, put your digital magazine into several formats so that it is available on the different tools your audience uses to read publications. It should be available to download directly as well as have the ability to read via mobile device and PC.
4. Use Every Feature You Can – Your audience wants to see images, pictures, audio and other high-tech features in your digital magazine. Using a system that allows you to use all these types of features is what makes digital publications even more lucrative than print publications.
5. Use Super High Quality Images and Content – When you create a magazine the art is more important than ever, as is the content. Due to the way a digital magazine looks, your audience is expecting even higher quality work than they are used to seeing from you already. You’ll need to ramp up your work to a new level.
6. Archive Back Issues – For SEO purposes, be sure to archive back issues on your website. You can make them viewable for members and subscribers only, but having them there will enable subscribers to look back to previous issues which most people love to do. Having the titles searchable is always good for SEO.
7. Decide How You’ll Monetize Your Digital Magazine – It’s important to think about how you will earn money on your new digital magazine. There are a couple of ways that you can earn money, such as selling ad space and/or subscriptions to the magazine. If you are interested in spreading brand awareness, look into giving a free magazine and selling ads. If you are simply looking for another money-making opportunity, you can sell subscriptions and ads.
8. Market Your Digital Magazine – No one is going to find your digital magazine, no matter how many different newsstands it appears in online, unless you market it. You’ll need to promote it to your email lists, your website subscribers, via social media and more. You can even ask subscribers to share it.
By following these tips for publishing your first magazine, you’ll be super successful in your new venture. You’ll increase brand awareness, create awesome new content for your audience, and make more money doing it.