Updated Aug 22,2023
Graphic Design

How to Run A Profitable Online Magazine?

In today’s online-based world, we prefer online to keep connected with all things. And social media like Facebook and Twitter, video platforms like YouTube, millions of websites, and online magazines seemingly help us to present what we want in front of our eyesight. There was a time when printed advertisements and the print source was the main medium to make news and views through newspaper and magazines. At the time, the Internet did not enter the scene and people would post letters to communicate with others across distances. But as we can see in the present scenario, printed materials are losing interest and demand of the people because of the wide expanse of online. No matter what kind of activities you are involved in, if it is an offline business, social work, offline event, or whatever, you must have to create a distinguished online personality online for yourself. Everyone wants to become popular with a distinctive profile through which he will be known to all. Running an online magazine and connecting people through that provides quality and outstanding content in a particular niche. You can make money, grow your audience base and form a good identity by running a professional online magazine. As you can see there are so many online magazines, and magazine design services online, and you can find huge inspiration from these.

Why Should You Start an Online Magazine?

how to run a profitable online magazine

The online magazine makes a huge sense in this digital world. Since everything we can do now with our mobile phones, laptops, and people are materially spending more time online rather than offline. If you are a student or enthusiast of writing content and blogging, then it is a wide platform with endless opportunities for you. Online magazines are more versatile, easy, and cost-effective than running conventional print magazines. If you are thinking of starting with an online magazine but hesitating whether you should or not, then you are just doing nothing but wasting your time. For your convenience, here are some key points to realize why you should transform into real steps without wasting your time.

Quick Interaction with Readers

For magazines, interactivity is a must to engage new readers in it. interactivity comes with quality and trustworthy content, a good user interface and user experience of the magazine website, easy navigation systems, graphics, and the overall page layout. Online magazines are way better to interact with new readers than offline magazines. Because of its eye-catching graphics and other visual elements, it can easily interact with readers. Moreover, you have more chances to get new readers on various online platforms like social media. You can share the best content links with snippets and can interact with online activists.

Animated Contents Make It More Alive

Conventional offline magazines come with just raster images that are good but compared with the online magazine contents, they are nothing. When you are an online magazine, you can use video, animation, 3D motion, and whatever digital content you want to use on it. Thus, it makes your content more alive and fulfills the visual demand of the readers well.

Low Cost

Unlike offline printed design magazines, you can run an online magazine even with a low budget. No printing and material cost here, just build a professional look website with the help of professional web developers and publish content chronologically. If you are good at writing, then you don’t need to worry about hiring writers. Get topics from the various incidents happening around you and choose any of them that will go with your niche. However, you also need to consider a professional graphic design agency to help you manage all the magazine images you need. As you have to publish the magazine periodically, you must manage all the visual and written content before the publishing date. Sometimes it requires a full team to monetize all the activities of an online magazine properly, but as a starter, you don’t need to go much. Just start by publishing a few pieces of content and then create a routine of how often you want to publish content in your magazine.

Out of Bounds

Digital magazines are way out of all bounds. Since there is no restriction online, a single piece of content can flood across continents through continuous sharing on social media. We can access any website and get whatever resources and information we want within a few moments through online searching. With online magazines, publishers don’t have to worry about paying distributors or any other case of distribution. Once you have published the magazine, all you just need to do is share it on all the social media platforms and use other advertising ways to increase its awareness. The best strategy is to have a separate community base on all social media platforms who admittedly know about your magazine and want to get information as fast as you publish it each month. In this way, you can keep together all the readers under a distinctive umbrella where they can get all the information about your magazine.

Can Go Viral Easily

Online is crucial to make things viral faster than light. From our day-to-day social media experience, we can now say that going viral is super easy online if your content can capture viewers’ attention in all aspects. Even if you are an offline publisher, you also need to use online platforms to make your content viral and get people’s attention to your product. There is no other way of getting success online than publishing quality content and getting viral with that.

Updatable

It is an amazing feature of online magazines that you can update any of the content anytime you want. Contents don't always come as timeless. Unless it is a short story, novel, or poem, you should have updated your online magazine content to keep it not only relatable but also for your good. If you are concerned about search engine optimization, you have known that it is an important factor to keep up to date with your website’s SEO practice to update your content after a certain period. Updating content will make the search engine robot crawl again your content and index what has been changed in the content. Then it will help to rank the old and unprepared content in further adjustments.

No Revenue Loss from Copies that are Not Sold

Offline magazine publishers are always worried about unsold copies of their magazines. Since printing cost is a concerning issue for magazine retailers, they have to publish magazine copies according to the reader base. Although, they always published a definite number of extra copies of every offline magazine. However, if they aren’t sold, publishers have to lose revenue from those extra copies. On the other hand, online magazines are distinct from such characteristics. As there is no printing cost, therefore, there is no worry of many more copies of the magazine.

In-Depth Analytics

Online magazines are highly preferred because of their in-depth analytics support that will help you to see how your online magazine is doing. Analytics is a common and highly used term in the digital field. Analytics provides a clear view of any implemented digital campaign, and the overall performance of the website, blog, and social media content also. For magazine websites, you can see how much engagement is gathered through a particular content of your magazine, how much time readers have spent on your website, which edition has gained more impression, click, and traffic, and also how users are interacting with you. So, you can determine and visualize your next step by observing the analytics data and can make your online magazine journey more effective.

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How to Set Up A Strategy to Start A New Online Magazine?

profitable online magazine

As a starter, you have to make a sort of plan to go forward with your online magazine. There are a plethora of objects that you should have done before starting. Running an online magazine is simply having a website where you have to publish content in a particular niche. Therefore, you have to build up a website and have to ensure the other initial tasks for that. If you don’t know how to arrange an effective plan for a newly starting online magazine, we have stated here all the necessary steps that you should follow to make a sustainable online magazine from scratch.

Define Your Niche

First of all, you have to understand in which niche you feel comfortable working. Niche means your preferred sector about which you are going to cover topics in your magazine. You can take only one niche or can go for multiple niches. But as a starter, it will be better to work in a single niche as it will help you to easily manage topics and monetize the analytics. If you go for multiple niches, you have to take care of a lot of topics that may seem difficult to you as a starter. There are different types of niches available and you can choose any of them to go with. You can choose one of your favorite topics that you feel is great to discuss. You can also go for a niche that is at the top of people’s interests and dominating over other niches at present. To get ideas about trendy niches and topics, you can use analytic software like google Trends to quickly get an idea of what’s going on on google. Since Google is the number one in search engine market share worldwide, you can see search trends of the specific time, keyword, and so on with google trends.

Research Online Competition

However, selecting a particular niche is not all about it, you have to consider a lot of things, and researching the market competition is the main among them. Running an online magazine is all about getting as many readers as you can and making its name viral as well. Here the success and money will come through a high traffic rate, the click-through rate on the magazine ads, conversion rate, etc. whatever niche you have got, there must be a huge competitor already practiced with blogs, websites, and particular online magazines in that. Therefore, before publishing any content in your online magazine, you have to optimize its title, make proper use of headings, keyword competition, chances to rank on that keywords, and so on. They are determined for online content to help them rank on the first page of google. It’s called organic search ranking factors. As an online magazine, you may not want to spend money on paid search engine marketing and advertising design. Then practicing it in organic ways is the best option for you to see your content on the first page of google and when any searchers will search about them, they will find yours at the first position.

Get Domain for Your Magazine Website

Still don’t get a domain and subdomain name for your online magazine! It is vital and you can’t go without it. A domain name is what you want people to know you like the name of your magazine. That means you should keep the domain name the same as your magazine name. You should find a suitable name for your magazine and then check for the availability of the same domain name. A domain name acts as the identity of a website. So, you must choose a domain name like your magazine name. There are different types of extensions available for domain names, if you are willing to cross international readers with your magazine, you should prefer .com, or .net to include in your website.

Think of the Revenue Gateways

Before starting all the way, you should also think about the gateway of revenue to get a sweet return for your effort. Everyone wants to make revenue through their effort and when it comes to online magazines, the best ones make revenue in multiple ways. Magazines whether it is online or offline, mostly make money by allowing ads on the website. It is the easiest to make revenue with online magazines. You can also make revenue by accepting the content of individual writers or agency dealers if they want to engage with your reader community. There are many more ways to make revenue with an online magazine such as,

  • Banner ads

  • Click per day programs

  • Affiliate links and programs

  • Mailing lists 

  • Editorial opportunities

  • Selling memberships

  • Selling products like books and accessories

You can implement any of them to drive constant revenue for your magazine.

How to Design Your Online Magazine?

a profitable magazine

Since an online magazine is just a website integration where you publish all the digital content, those who are your absolute readers will come and spend time reading them. We have already known that we need a distinctive domain name for our magazine. When you have a particular domain name, then you have to go for hosting to make your magazine content visible online. After that, you have to attend to creating your website structure such as its layout, navigation system, and overall web design & development as well.  Here we demonstrate all the important processes that you should follow for your purpose. 

Layout

The layout is crucial for all types of websites. The layout makes the anatomy of websites and shows visitors the most interacting view of the site. There are different types of web layouts available and since you are an online magazine, you should go with a magazine layout.

Navigation

Website navigation is one of the important factors to ensure the best experience for the users. Your magazine website must come with a lot of options and panels in its dashboard. Rather if your magazine is subscription-based, then you have to make the payment and subscription process smooth for the users. A good navigation system means readers can easily find the options that they need. If you are a multiple niche magazine, then don’t forget to include a drop-down menu in the panel holding all the separate niches into it.

Design

The best web design will boost the user interface of your website. A bad user interface will influence your entire processing and will cause you to lose the reader's attention drastically. There are so many design aspects that you should consider to build the most appealing form for your online magazine design. Your magazine design should come in similar in perception to your magazine’s niche. When visitors enter your magazine website, they first get the sliders to look at. Therefore, you have to hand on sliders that will be perfect to impact visitors at the first sight. However, you have to make all the images professionally that you use in the magazine contents. Remember, the image has become an important fact not only to get consistent visitors to websites but also to show your site perfectly to Google. Since you can’t use images that have already been used on other websites. You should make all the images on your own at any cost. For your information, there are tons of image-providing websites like Getty Images, and Pinterest from where you can easily get the right choice of images. But you have to pay money to own that.

After all, it seems that having the best web design, layout, and navigation is quite difficult and as you aren’t a web developer, you can’t manage all of that on your own. Therefore, it will be better to hire or go for a professional agency to get the whole job simply done for you. For images, you can take the help of a professional graphic design agency that can make you all the needed images just in time before publishing the magazine at a specific time.

How to Make Your Online Magazine Content Go Viral?

There is no other way than to make your online magazine content go viral to flourishingly get readers, visitors, and subscribers to your magazine. The more you get readers, the more revenue you can gather through it. To get consistent readers traffic and visitors to the website, you have to implement a lot of different strategies that can effectively call people’s attention to your magazine. However, making content viral online requires a lot of realization, good practices, and of course time. Whatever type of content you are creating, whether it is video content, 2D/3D image, the written content you must have to care for each part of the content. As we are here to discuss online magazines, then our deal is with written web content. Are there any professional views in this regard to make your magazine content go viral? Yes, there are so many of them, if you are interested to know, below are some points included to realize how you can make your online magazine content viral and get traffic seamlessly.

Reader Friendliness

For blogs, digital magazine content, reader friendliness is one of the most important factors to determine how it will engage the visitors and readers. Magazines are organized with content related to their niche. The contents aren’t so long and not so short though. No matter how long they are, they have to be perfect in all the aspects such as storytelling, clarity and making things understandable for the readers. If your content isn’t formed with these abilities, it will probably fail to engage readers and provide the desired result. Therefore, try to publish quality content and bring an exciting, joyful theme so that readers won’t get bored even if the content is so long.

Cover Trendy Topics

On every online platform, people always pay attention to trendy topics which have already gone viral. If you are familiar with social media, you could see new trendy issues found every day on different social media platforms. Be concerned about all the trendy issues to find a suitable topic to cover magazine content for your magazine. Trendy topics will create an instant flow of traffic that isn’t going to be permanent but will be a reason to make a difference in your regular journey. But you should be aware that not all trendy issues come as trusted and reliable; rather a large portion of social media news is made for fun. Don’t go for rumors without verifying the news trustworthiness and you will lose existing visitors when they find you covering rumors in your magazine.

Don’t Be So Complex, Make It Short and Simple

You should make your magazine content as simple as possible. Even if you are discussing a crazy complex science topic, you should present it funny and interestingly so that it can make readers’ minds read through the content. Albeit today’s people are mostly spending online seeing unlimited videos of entertainment, buying and selling, sports, 360 news videos, and so on. It is also a matter to consider that people are more likely to engage with visual content rather than long-form articles. Whatever, still there are a huge number of people who are fond of blog, web, and magazine posts online and go through them for their needed information and resources. Try to make all of your magazine content in a way so that it can get easily noticed by readers. Well-researched, enchanting way of storytelling is the key to making online magazine content go viral all the way.

Keep Consistency

Consistency is one of the characteristics that can make your online magazine journey smooth and flexible. No matter whether it is online or offline, magazine publishing is a long journey. If you can get enough response and regular traffic to your magazine website, then you will be successful in it. Consistency means keeping the pace of quality content publishing in your magazine. Going through consistency will show readers that you are a trustworthy source to pay attention to. Trustworthiness will increase the potential reader base who are going to check your online magazine for daily updates.

How Do Online Magazines Make Money?

This is a frequently asked question by people who are hesitant about bringing an online magazine or not. Everything is done for particular reasons behind it. Starting with an online magazine requires some investment that you have to put in for your good. In return, what will you get from it? Well, here are some ways shown to illustrate how you can make money with your online magazine. It will help you if you are looking for ways to make revenue with your online magazine.

Use Display Ads

You can take the google AdSense service and earn revenue by displaying ads in certain places on your magazine website. When you display ads on your website and any visitors will click on them, you will get a few in return. Those ads can be product video, agency video, or whatever, you can use display ads of your affiliate programs. But remember one thing, you shouldn’t overdo this, keeping so many display ads here and there on your website will reduce the website's loading speed and also the user interface. So, don’t make it that way. Besides, you can also include a section ‘advertise with us to give a few places to your potential clients who have benefited through your magazine. You can directly deal with clients about how you will charge to make display advertising in your magazine. This is an extreme way to make revenue with online magazines.

Make An App

You can also make revenue by making an application for your magazine to allow mobile users to get all your magazine contents, update, and notification when publishing a new edition with easy access through the mobile app. Since mobile users are tremendously increasing because of the handy options that come with smartphones, it is now a great matter to have a mobile application for your magazine. When you have an app for your magazine, you can also create advertising in it as you do on the website. You can also offer a premium account with extra benefits and make revenue through the application service.

Become A Subscription Service

If you are confident enough and become a trusted source to provide news and views with your magazine. You can see most of the popular online magazine services have subscription services that help them to make revenue consistently. Among all subscription-based magazines, The New Yorker has found the most success here, attracting a loyal reader base who can access its 90 years of archive through subscription. To make your online magazine subscription, you have to make it simply a sign-up and login option to be a subscriber after paying the required money.

Endnote

From the above discussion, it is clear that running an online magazine is quite a bit strategic but if you properly step into it, you will surely get success with consistent revenue. If you are a student, a person who is reckoning to grow up on your own, then a magazine is a good option to choose for you.

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