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!

Reading has rapidly moved to the web. I personally do a lot of reading online every single day across a variety of personal interests from aquascaping, music theory, travel to social media, marketing and more. Even if i’m experimenting with dishes in the kitchen I have a recipe open on my netbook nearby. It’s only natural that we’re all going to take to e-readers and tablets sooner or later. From the current buzz, my guess would be sooner. So the question to start asking is not “should I go in for the iPad or Kindle? The question that urgently needs to be answered is “is my business publishing online and is it ready for the tablet boom?”

Online magazines, blogs and online publications are bound to be consumed that much more. If currently most reading is done while at your pc or at work, e-readers are simply going to ensure reading happens on the bus, on the subway, at airport waiting lounges and in bed. In marketing terms, it just opens a wider window of opportunity to have wider audiences discover your business. Online publications with compelling content will be key to engaging consumers and the earlier you can establish a leading publication within your industry space, the better prepared you can be for the inevitable boom. So how ready is your business on the online publication front?

Business vertical based blogs are a great alternative to high ad spend and are one of the most valuable mediums of inbound marketing. It’s important to note the main objective of such a blog or online publication is not outright push selling to a customer simply using the blog as a tool to do that. The objective is to create the most engaging and useful publication with great content for targeted audience in your business vertical. If you can publish a blog or online magazine which can do that, you will build a community of followers who will be pulled to your business website eventually simply because they enjoy your publication. It’s non-intrusive pull marketing. For example, if you’re reading this article on online content marketing and value the articles we publish, the chances are, sooner or later you will be curious enough to explore what we do and what we offer at Buzzfactory.net. The objective is: this article you find useful will lead you to our website and perhaps even contact us to see if we may be able to work together.

Thinking out-of-the-box and not restricting your content to revolve only around your business can play an important part in how others perceive your publication. For example, if you are hotel or resort located in Miami, a blog which talks about the hotel property itself may be interesting but can you really build a long term reader base around it? Instead, if you could build a blog with great articles on “Travel in Miami” which has tips, guides, advice and articles on what those visiting the city could do, that could scale into a widely read travel blog. In effect, the branding space on such a blog would be more valuable and the reader base perfect for those who may be interested in checking out the resort website and perhaps making an online booking. An adventure sports blog for an adventure sports apparel company, an automotive blog for a a car dealership or a boat & yachting online publication for a boat manufacturer are all along the right lines to attract attention online and build a good platform. In the B2B space the objective is the same. Create a publication that the audience finds useful and ask yourself, as someone interested in this vertical, what would you like to read?

Finally the success of an online publication for any business  comes down to it’s planning and execution. While many set of to create a vertical or industry blog or publication, few actually manage to keep up the momentum and publish fresh content as frequently as it should be. The way we approach completely managed publications for our customers is much the way a magazine would. Setting monthly objectives for both content and traffic goals is important as is a weekly plan of the articles that need to be done for the week. Once articles are published they need to be promoted on social networks shared through social bookmarking and the process needs a dedicated effort. It’s a gradual learning process which needs experimenting and constant review to understand what is working, what the audience respond to and how to stay creative and continue to make it valuable. It calls for a dedicated effort where you can consistently publish fresh content and continue to keep readers happy.

If you’ve looked at the best blogs and online magazines in your industry and have made up your mind to take them on with your own, our advice is “Go for it!”