Targeting Your Community Through An Online Magazine

National Geographic magazine has always pulled in readers who have the explorer instinct. Popular Mechanics has managed to retain its fan followings through the decades. Cosmopolitan gets picked off the stands by today’s women fresh off the press and Playboy….well let’s just say has managed to strike a note with men world wide.

The point is, each of these publications has used the power of great content to engage a target audience for years and as a result has been a crucial marketing message platform for the hundreds of businesses that have advertised and connected with readers through them. Thousands of magazines have provided niche audiences with the content they seek and delivered an advertisement platform for the businesses who target these niches…but the magazine game just like newspapers and other publications is changing rapidly. It’s gone online and with iPads and Kindles flying off the shelves in consumer stores, the amount of time an average netizen spends reading online is only bound to climb quicker. Which means,  you better be there when they are searching.

Creating a successful online magazine on the web is a fantastic way to reach out to a very targeted audience and with publication platforms such as wordpress available, it puts everyone on a level playing field as far as being able to start one goes. What sets apart a successful online publication from the rest is the quality of articles and ability to update frequently because unlike a weekly, fortnightly or monthly, online magazines need to keep churning out great content daily. If you can do that and provide valuable content around a subject area, you can build a successful publication and have access to the audience drawn to it. Here are a few tips if you’re considering starting an online magazine to reach out to your target audience:

1. Put yourself in the audiences shoes and think about the kind of articles, layout, categories and sections you would love to see on the publication and structure the content around this
2. Put the reader first, branding second. Don’t base your articles purely on the brand or products that you wish to promote through the site, cover a wider area around the audiences interest and think of ‘what would interest them?’ before ‘what can I say about my products’. For example if you sell time-share vacations in Italy, then it’s better to base the publication on wider Italy Travel magazine idea than to restrict it to only time-share posts.
3. Balance the content by creating a mix of well researched informative articles around the subject along with lighter pieces which people tend to share on the social web. It could do wonders to your traffic.
4. Get readers to contribute to articles and share experiences. The advantage of having a magazine online is you can make it as interactive as you want so audience participation in interviews, discussions, comments and content is great.
5. Offer RSS feed subscription, options for the content to be shared and email updates. If your content is great, it will distribute itself.

All considered, the online magazine or web publication is one of the best content marketing strategies around today. It’s targeted, non-intrusive, effective for SEO and becomes a long term online marketing asset for any business that can manage it consistently. For all you know, you could own the next Forbes, People, Vogue, Newsweek or Good Housekeeping on the web!