A magazine is a great way to educate, inform, and entertain a particular audience. It is a popular medium to showcase your ideas, creativity, and thoughts. Starting a magazine from scratch however can be an expensive endeavor.
These include print and publication costs, office overheads, and even advertising. This article has provided some key tips to ensure that you launch your magazine properly.
Go Officeless
Although many magazines run out of offices, you should consider running your magazine from a home office. Office space will be one of the most expensive costs, especially if you are locked into a long-term lease. Unless you have many employees, consider starting off at home.
Most transactions can be done over the internet or at remote destinations. You can hire journalist freelancers or out-source articles to ensure a constant stream of content. By outsourcing even design-work, you can limit office space that you need.
Watch Your Monthly Expenses
If you are running your magazine out of an office, or even a home office, you will have monthly expenses on software, hardware, paper, and other items that you need.
In addition to the cost of printing the magazine, you will need content. Those type of expenses range from journalistic travel, the costs of running a website, printing, and postage and purchasing illustrations and photography.
If you have your own printer and other high-energy use items, one expense you may not consider are utilities. To find an affordable energy supplier for business gas, you should use energy comparison websites such as Utility Bidder which gives you multiple quotes from top brands in a matter of seconds.
In addition to the start-up costs for starting a magazine, the monthly costs can become high. It is important to plan for the different costs, and to be safe, add another 50%. Then use comparison shopping to find the lowest cost while not compromising your value.
Work Out Payment Options – Both Revenue and Expenses
You need to decide where your money will be coming from. You could offer a subscription service for your magazine, make money selling ads, or make money through affiliate marketing or selling your own products.
If you are getting started, you may also want to consider controlled circulation, which is where you hand out free copies to a targeted audience.
For your expenses, instead of having to pay your costs all at once, you can look for terms and pay on a monthly basis. This will lower your monthly costs, giving you more monthly profit to reinvest into your magazine.
Create a Prototype
A prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP) will help you to launch your magazine using minimal costs. Then measure the response of your readers, get feedback, and improve for the next edition.
Some companies have spent too much money for the first edition, only to find it wasn’t what the market wanted. By creating your MVP, you can get instant feedback without breaking the bank, iterate quickly, and then continue to improve.
Not only this, but a prototype or MVP can be shown to potential investors, partners, freelancers, and potential advertisers. You can get feedback from them, also get funding sources by presenting a viable product instead of just an idea.
Find Advertisers
You also need to find advertising as a sustainable way of making money from your magazine. You can find advertisers by contacting relevant brands that may have an interest in being promoted in your magazines, being reviewed, or even in having a full page spread.
These are called endemic advertisers as they are brands whose products correlate with the theme of your magazine. You can find potential advertisers through ‘Advertising Red Books’ which give you contact information for regional advertisers.
Cut Down on Print Costs
Print costs will be one of the main expenses, especially if you want full color on high quality paper. You should also consider the best way to cut down on print costs. Creating an MVP for just a limited audience will help cut costs while get the feedback you need.
The first several issues should be for ways to improve your magazine and then every edition thereafter increase the number you print. By then hopefully you have more readers and in turn more advertisers. This bootstrapping method will help keep costs low.
You could also consider the benefits of starting an online-only magazine whereby you will be able to forego print costs altogether and attract a broad online audience.