For anyone running a business today, one of the most important factors that you can have is an understanding of how to properly market yourself. Marketing is such a hard thing to get right, that it’s no surprise many business owners make a lot of mistakes with their marketing plan. Without a doubt, one of the most effective tools that you have by your side is the ability to get people to subscribe to your e-magazine. Which is why you should start an online magazine today.
However, many feel a little uncertain about how to best manage starting an online magazine. To help you do that in the right manner, we recommend that you take a look at this How to start an online magazine guide. We are going to break down the best way on how to start an online magazine right now.
The more success that you can get now with starting up your e-magazine, the sooner you can turn it into one of your most powerful and useful marketing weapons!
Form a business plan
The first thing that you need to do to make an e-magazine people will subscribe to is to have a plan. Start off by choosing the topic that you will be covering, and the kind of tone that you wish to take to do that; educational, exciting, erudite etc.
Then, take a look at your potential audience and decide who is most likely to be interested in that particular e-magazine. Also look at funding options – personal capital, investments, crowdfunding etc. – and monetization. Will you sell advertisements? Link to products? Run it as a subscription program?
Do your research
Next, you need to spend more than a fair bit of time digging deeper into the topic and doing your research. Take a much closer, deeper look at the issues at hand and see if you can form a research plan that allows you to capture all of this properly. Is there a place for your magazine in the marketplace that you wish to try and enter?
Analyze your competition so that you know how to differentiate and set yourself apart from them, and also look at your potential audience and find out what they are searching for.
Build a team
Any good e-magazine is usually the child of a very good and active team who cares about the quality that they put out. So, start building a small team: starting alone is not really an option. At the very least, you are going to need:
- Someone who can do the content writing for your e-magazine.
- Someone who can edit the content to make it appealing to your readership.
- Someone who can do the design element to really make it stand out.
- Marketing experience to help you balance the advertising and promotion with the actual magazine creation.
Create content
At this point, your next aim has to be to start creating some fun and incisive content that people are going to enjoy reading and taking part using. Make sure that you take a look at either writing by yourself or using your team of writers.
Also, take a closer look at the polishing of word choice and tone to find a more editorial standard that makes the whole thing sound cohesive. Proofread as much as you can to eliminate logical errors and typos, too.
Also, don’t forget to add in quality media: videos, media and links are all addable to an e-magazine, if not a print one.
Strive for simplicity
As ever, keep it simple. You should always look to find a good balance in terms of the visual side of the e-magazine in terms of the content. Great visuals mean nothing with vapid content, but quality content will be missed without a big enough visual pull. You need to make sure you have a simple, sleek but attractive and eye-catching design.
You should, for example, look to use a smart online theme that can give you a good starting point; the Reinform WordPress theme, for example, makes perfect sense.
Set an editorial calendar
Start off by making plans for the future – set up an editorial table of contents which is to last for the next two years. This does not mean having article headlines planned out as news and information is fluid. It means setting aside when content will be published and how much of your budget will be used on each content release.
Plan ahead and you can make sure that you always have enough to make your e-magazine attractive enough to get people to subscribe. Make a prototype of the magazine and test out budget assumptions, adjusting when needed to get the model that works best.
Spread the word!
Of course, no e-magazine is getting off the ground without a clear grounding of promotion. Do yourself a favor and get on social media, but get into e-mail marketing, too; e-mail marketing is a vitally important way to help boost hits to your e-magazine.
Try and form a large community of readers as quickly as you can, but do so in a way that lets them see that the e-magazine is entertaining and educational, not just a thinly veiled promotional package.
So, with all of the above in mind, you should hopefully see why starting an e-magazine makes so much sense. It also should help you see how to actually start an online magazine and get to the point where you have people choosing to subscribe and be part of your future.
If you are interested in doing more of this in the future, then you should absolutely look to spread the word. The opportunities are there for anyone who is serious about taking things to the next level; you just need to be ready to take risks and, when ready, take action.
