10 Steps to Creating an Online Magazine to Grow Your Brand
Table Of Contents
Create And Schedule Your Content In Advance
Build A Community For Your Online Magazine
Growing a brand can be a challenge. If the more traditional ways to boost your marketing efforts aren’t working out, you might want to consider alternative ways to give new life to your business.
Creating an online magazine is an engaging and powerful way to grow your business. Not only will you be able to generate leads from various sources, but you will also be able to get practical experience in publishing and online content curation.
42% of adults in the US reported reading one or more digital magazine issues in the last 30 days. (Mequoda)
Analysts at Technavio forecasted that the digital magazine publishing market would grow at a CAGR of 20.36% globally by 2020. (ReportBuyer)
WebMD, an online magazine centered around healthcare, received 12.7 million unique online visitors in March 2021. (Statista)
Here are some steps that you can take if you want to create a successful online magazine to help boost your brand:
Have a well-thought-out plan
As with any other strategy to grow your brand, you need to consider all outcomes and plans when it comes to creating an online magazine as well. Having a detailed plan and layout is going to be essential in order for your magazine to grow.
At the initial stage, brands that use business plans have a 7% higher chance of growth when compared to the brands that do not develop a business plan at the same stage.
When creating an online magazine, you should ensure that you are setting clear goals and expectations. Everyone on your team should know these goals and work together to achieve them. Your plan should keep different sets of constraints in mind as well. You’re ultimately creating an online magazine to grow your brand, you don’t actually want the magazine’s growth to cannibalize your brand’s online gains.
Doing a fair bit of research and spying on your competitors is a quick way to set things in motion and start your online magazine on the right foot.
2. Build an eye-catching website that matches your brand
An online magazine that doesn’t have a proper website is not going to do your brand any favors. If you want your online magazine to help you reach your goals, you need to start treating it as an extension of your brand and not a forgotten side project.
There are a couple of things that you should keep in mind when building a website for a magazine. Going with technology like WordPress is going to reduce costs and development times.
Once you finalize the technology, you should see what you can provide to your online readers in terms of design and user experience. Just to highlight the importance of great design, approximately 75% of a website's credibility comes from its design, with 94% of users citing design as the basis for first impressions.
These days, a lot of online magazines opt for a more minimalistic design but, again, this depends on your brand styling guidelines and whether this sort of design choice would fall within them. Additionally, if you want your online magazine to appeal to multilingual audience, you should localize your website to overcome language barriers.
10 Steps to Creating an Online Magazine to Grow your Brand - Website Statistics (Credits: Digital Media Stream)
3. Hire the right teaM
10 Steps to Creating an Online Magazine to Grow Your Brand - Teamwork
Hiring the right team is also going to be important if you want to ensure that your online magazine will help your brand grow and not the other way around.
The size of your team depends on the pace you intend to move at. Larger teams generally get things done faster and are able to cover a lot more things when compared to smaller teams. Smaller teams are generally more flexible and come at a lower price point.
Applicants are four times more likely to choose your company for a future role when you provide them constructive feedback.
Choosing the right people is also a challenge. You need to hire people that not only have the skill set or the will to do their best for your magazine, but they also need to share your vision for the digital future of your brand. The people you will need to hire or to outsource work to would include writers, editors, graphic designs, a manager, PR people, a tech guy to sort out any issues with your website, just to name a few.
4. Create and schedule your content in advance
Once you have your team assembled, the fun part can start. Your content team should start by mapping content and creating a posting schedule and strategy for your magazine. This might sound easy, but you have to consider that your aim is to boost your brand. 60% of marketers create a minimum of one piece of content every day. With so much content being created, it makes sense to have a calendar to balance everything. You can easily schedule your magazine issues by using Paperturn’s “Flipbook Scheduling” feature.
Choosing the right topics and then creating the type of content that people would actually be interested in is the challenge. Finding the right keywords that are not only trending on different blogs but are also relevant to your brand should be the first thing that you should to capitalize on.
Assign content ideas to different creators and plan when you’re going to need a particular piece. Keep in mind that you’re also going to need things like feature images and other graphical elements to improve the quality of your content.
5. Publish your content & promote it on multiple platforms
Publishing content is easy when you have a content calendar that is followed by your team. Having the content ready beforehand and giving editors time to make any fixes is going to help maintain the quality of the overall content you publish.
10 Steps to Creating an Online Magazine to Grow Your Brand - Reading an online magazine on an iPad
Your publishing time is going to be important, as you want to publish at a time when people would be most interested in your content. Let’s say that you have a furniture e-commerce store and an online magazine that talks about small woodworking projects. An ideal time to post any content would be on the weekends since a lot of people interested would be free and receptive.
You should also post on as many platforms as possible. This is important because it would be in your favor to get as many views as possible. The more people that land on your website, the more leads you’ll be able to gather for your main business. In 2020, there were 3.78 billion social media users. Most of them are on Facebook, but other platforms like Instagram, Whatsapp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc. have a huge following as well.
Paid marketing is another tool that you can use to your advantage, but you need to be smart and focus on the pieces that would perform best. Investing in SEO is another way to grow your online magazine and achieve long-term goals.
6. Reach out to different influencers in your niche and leverage their following
As you start to publish more and more content, you should start reaching out to influencers within your niche. You’re already providing value to your audience, why not grow your audience by enlisting influencers? 66% of marketers back in 2020 planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets.
Leveraging followers of different influencers is one way to provide value to your magazine and in turn your brand. Having them contribute to your magazine is a great way to help them make the content as well as provide them with a way to grow their own audience.
10 Steps to Creating an Online Magazine to Grow Your Brand - Email Marketing
7. Start building an email list
Building an email list is important if you want to run a proper online magazine. Any reputable blog has an email list that they use to send out newsletters or top-performing pieces of content for the month, etc.. 64% of small businesses reach customers by using email marketing. Email is so powerful that it continues to beat social media in conversion rates (6.05% vs. 1.9%) and can yield a whopping ROI of up to 4400%.
To build an email list, you should add a small call to action at the end of every blog. Additionally, if there are any specific people you would like to reach out to, you can use various email finder tools and include them in your email list. Subscribing to your email list shouldn’t take long and needs to provide a clear benefit to your audience.
If people are generally pleased with the type of content you are putting out and are interested in getting more content published by you, they wouldn’t mind subscribing. Getting consent and making sure that your email list subscribers are aware of their rights is key to avoiding any compliance issues later down the road.
Once you have sorted through things like consent, you can weave in some content related to your brand in a non-intrusive manner. This is a simple way to get you started, but you can naturally find a lot of other ways to utilize your email list to grow your business.
8. Make an offer your online magazine visitors can’t refuse
Since the whole purpose of creating and running an online magazine is to grow your business, you should start creating different things that might entice people to migrate to your business. 50% of marketers that employ lead magnets report higher conversion rates.
An easy way to garner more attention is to offer exclusive content (for example, via an advertising banner) for people who visit your main website and make a purchase. This can be in the form of an eBook or just another blog that your readers might be really interested in.
Another way is to reward them with a free or discounted service or product that your main business offers. Study your audience and experiment with different rewards that will ultimately land them to your main business.
9. Build a community for your online magazine
Building a community is another long-term goal that you should have for both your brand and your digital magazine. From the very start, you should try to foster a sense of belonging for the people who benefit from your published content. Around 33% of businesses have at least ten thousand people in their online communities.
Reaching out to the early birds, empowering them, and giving them incentives to build a community around your magazine will help improve the quality of readers as well as improve the sort of leads that your brand might get from the magazine.
10. Use a professional online magazine publisher
Choosing a flipbook platform such as Paperturn can make creating your online magazine a breeze. Simply upload your PDF file and the Paperturn software will transform it into a digital, real-page turning magazine within a matter of minutes.
10 Steps to Creating an Online Magazine to Grow Your Brand - Online Magazine Maker
From there you can add an array of interactive features that will undoubtedly impress and engage your magazine readers. Furthermore, you’re also able to embed your digital magazine onto your website; share it on social media; and embed it into your email marketing campaigns for that extra reach.
Start a free 14-day trial or book a 1-1 demo call with Paperturn’s sales team to learn how to create your own online magazine.
Conclusion
Creating an online magazine is a journey on its own and doing so to grow a brand is another challenge altogether. Each brand is different and the strategies along with the work that goes into creating a successful brand will naturally vary. By learning the basics of creating an online magazine, you will have explored a potential lead magnet that will not only grow your business but help you start another profitable endeavor simultaneously.
Author: Wesley Cherisien is a speaker, trainer, entrepreneur and tech investor who has penned hundreds of articles, books and training guides for organizations in the Fortune 500, consultants and authors spanning across multiple industries. Chief Editor of wesleycherisien.com, Wesley is a creative and highly innovative thinker with 10+years of experience writing for online publications.
