Gain quick authority and exposure by printing your magazine
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Do you have that feeling that print media is out of demand and digital is the moving train? You might want to have a change of thought!
If you are a business owner, printing your magazine and issuing it to your respective subscribers will not only give you niche authority and massive exposure, it will also boost your sales. It’s a strategic way of attracting and retaining potential clients. Also, giving your magazines to your existing customers can make you retain them and get more deals from them.
To help you start on the right foot, this article will expose you to the strategic steps you will need to print your magazine to gain quick authority and exposure. Let’s get started!
1. Conduct a market survey
Before you start printing your magazine, you should be sure to have conducted enough research to estimate the value your business will generate over a given period. And these steps include:
- Conducting competitor research
You should identify your competitors in your target niche. Even if it’s online or in-stores, you should be able to find them. In a situation whereby you can’t find competitors, there are chances of no existing market for what you wish to publish.
- Identifying your audience
It’s crucial to be aware of those that will read your magazine. Your content should not just be appealing; it should also imitate the interest of your audience. To do this, you should know more than just their age and gender. You should identify their hobbies, dislikes, and what they find most interesting.
- Know your unique selling point (USP)
What are the unique demands from your audience that you think your competitors cannot attend to? Once you’ve figured that out, come up with unique ways to satisfy them and achieve what others haven’t been able to.
2. Cut a budget
You will need to come up with a planned budget to make way for better growth. As soon as you have an idea of how much money you are willing to spend on the magazine printing, then you can start making plans towards distributing it. Include an initial investment that the entire business operation may require.
3. Conduct marketing campaigns
The exposure of your magazine all depends on how well you promote and sell it, especially during the early stages of readership. A website is a perfect way to promote your magazine, as people can visit the website and purchase a subscription online.
Next in line is to leverage social media and SEO to promote your magazine, as well as the website. You can simply target potential audiences who are in your preferred audience demographics and follow publications relating to yours, then pick it up from there if you wish.
4. Come up with quality content
Unarguably, the life of any publication you could think of is the quality of the content. Feel free to hire good writers who will richly contribute to your magazine and get a pack of them to create an interesting content plan for your magazine each month.
5. Be sure to edit
If you have completed the previous steps, by now you should have lots of quality content at your fingertips, ready to roll out. You should start editing them but be sure not to entirely rewrite what the original writer might have tried to portray in that content. Writers are often willing to be part of publications that don’t try to alter their work completely.
Photo by NMG Network on Unsplash
6. Be creative with designs
If you have zero to no ideas in this step, you can be inspired by other magazines and identify the structures they mostly use to make their content attractive enough to the audience. To get started with magazine design, you might need publishing software, or you can either hire a professional designer and leave it to them to handle it all for you if your budget is flexible.
7. Ensure you proofread
When it comes to printing magazines, there shouldn’t be any room for mistakes. As soon as you have ordered the printing and it arrived at the press, there is no going back. This is the reason why you should never forget to proofread your work, or you might as well have someone handle it for you.
Don’t forget to cross-check thoroughly. Note that what is displayed on the screen of a computer does not always relate exactly to the final product. For sure, it could have the same layout pattern, but the output may differ in terms of colors and image quality. So, it’s a wise idea to make use of images with over 300 DPI resolution and be sure that no image is close to the edges.
It’s needed to have a set schedule so as not to be late for printing and then handling everything too fast the day before the distribution of your magazine. Save yourself the trauma! Also, don’t forget to request a preview before the actual printing of the magazine. This could help get rid of unwanted errors.
As soon as your business magazine is a go, it should be distributed to your target and existing clients. Be sure to request feedback, as it could be useful for your second batch!
