How to Plan, Create and Publish an Online Magazine

As digital transformation continues across entire industries, an online magazine can open new opportunities for businesses to market, advertise, and connect to a wider audience of readers.

Here's everything you need to know about creating an online magazine for your business.

Why Should You Create an Online Magazine?

An online magazine can expand your marketing and sales strategies and do much more for your business. It doesn't matter what industry you're in; an online magazine can help you stand out.

A major reason to create an online magazine is to provide prospects and customers with information about your products, services, and company. Like social media, an online magazine can promote your business and products.
An online magazine creates a global footprint. You can reach more of your target audience by publishing an online magazine. More people can learn about your products and offer them if you reach a wider audience. Furthermore, it can help you promote ideas and thoughts within your field.
An online magazine makes it easy to track reader activity. It delivers insight into your readers' actions and how to optimize the magazine’s content and performance.
An online magazine is cost-efficient, allowing you to reduce printing and postage expenses significantly.

Ready to begin? Let’s break down each stage of the digital publishing process.

The Planning Stage

Before creating an online magazine or publication, map out your goals and strategy. Planning will revolve around the magazine’s editorial focus and target audience, so start by generating ideas.

What kind of content will be published? Is there a specific topic the magazine will cover? These ideas can help sell your product or help your business gain better visibility.
The next part is establishing a target audience. What demographics are being targeted? Consider age, gender, geographical locations, interests, and hobbies. Understanding your target audience helps to deliver content that makes an impact.
After identifying the target audience, outline the content style for the online magazine. The style can be changed later if something's not working after the planning stage. Some styles to consider are opinion pieces, surveys or quizzes, how-to articles, informational pieces, and profiles. The editorial mix can change as the magazine evolves.
With a clear idea of the magazine’s content, you can focus on the different ways to present it. For example, digital magazines deliver more engaging and interactive content than print. It includes videos, photos, audio, slideshows, gifs, feedback forms, and surveys.

The more detailed your planning, the easier the next stage will be, although staying flexible is important.. Be prepared to experiment with your content until you find a formula that works.

Creation

The next stage in creating a digital magazine is developing the content. It is when you write and edit the articles for the first issue. Again, you’ll need to take your time.

The higher the quality of the content, the more readers it will consistently attract. If you're worried about writing and editing a large number of articles, start with a few. It can establish the editorial framework. Then, you can build on the content in later issues.
Curating articles for the first issue is only half the battle. The next step is to determine the layout of the issue. Placement and design can contribute to a magazine's reader-friendliness and professional appearance.
The layout should reflect the magazine’s style and tone. Choose photos, fonts, and colors carefully while paying attention to the layout's details.
Be sure to keep your color palette and designs simple. Too many colors or different fonts can be distracting and make it difficult for the reader to enjoy the magazine.

Publishing

After developing the content, it’s time to focus on publishing. There are a few things to consider:

How and where would you like to publish the magazine? What is the most effective way to put your magazine in front of as many people as possible?
The best option may be to work with a third-party platform that hosts online magazines. These platforms make it easy to create and publish content.

At Joomag, we offer templates and robust features that can help customize your content, including static PDFs.

Additionally, we offer engaging and interactive elements that digitally bring your magazine to life. We’re talking about videos, slideshows, audio, photos, and interactive plugins.

Just as important, Joomag offers in-depth analytics to measure and optimize your content for maximum ROI.

Utilizing a third-party content creation platform is beneficial when creating, publishing, distributing, and managing content.

You can learn more about digital publishing here.

Distribution and Management

Now that you understand the basics of creating a digital magazine, let’s focus on distribution and management.

Publishing online isn't enough if you want to reach your target audience effectively. Your magazine must be distributed in different places and by various means.

For example, a newsletter or reminder email can be sent to subscribers when a new issue is published. You could also get your readers to opt-in to text or push notifications. An online magazine can be embedded on a website or delivered via a mobile app.
Posting on social media may be the most effective distribution channel. The magazine can be marketed using your company's social media profiles, personal social media profiles, or both.
To maintain and expand readership, you must manage the magazine’s analytics to track reader engagement with the content.

One of the best things about Joomag is that we do it for you!

We can help you track how readers engage with content on an individual, page-by-page, or publication basis and offer sophisticated tools to filter and segment audiences.

Understanding what readers like and dislike about your magazine is crucial. Therefore, management is a key element in creating your online magazine.

Without it, you could struggle to reach your readers effectively or gain a consistent readership.