I’m the CEO and publisher of the Sketchers Magazine and in this article I’m going to be sharing with you how to create a digital magazine on a budget. So, you’re probably wondering you why am I qualified to share this with you? Well, I’ve actually done it, which is the most important thing for sharing anything.
My company, Sketchers Magazine, I started with three thousand US dollars to launch the first version of the magazine and to this date right now, we’re a multi-million dollar per year company. I’m really pumped to share with you guys, what the first two years looked like for us on a budget and how they have scaled this thing.
So the first thing I want to share with you is you need to actually host your digital magazine somewhere. You’ve got a few different options: we host ours and sell it on iTunes and also Android and I’m going to tell you why in a future point, why that’s really important, how is being able to create the magazine on a budget and get it very profitable fast and then go on to grow it using those platforms (aliexpress chrome extension).
The second thing you want to be thinking about as well for your digital magazine to get it out to people is creating some sort of web version, so the tool that we use for the web version is Flipsnack and that actually allows us to take the PDF of the magazine and host it and turn it into a flip book, so we can put it on a website we can put it you know a paywall behind it or we can put you know username and password behind it – very powerful. That’s what we use to host the magazine on desktop and then Android and iTunes we use a tool called magcast. That tool allows to publish your magazine, build the links to make it interactive so you can click through the table of contents, you can click on audio interviews to listen to them you can click on videos you can do all sorts of things and you can do that in Flip snack as well those were the two platforms that we use to host the magazine and get it out to the masses.
The cost of using a tool like that, when I used magcast, when they launched I started with the $2,000 lifetime license and now it doesn’t exist anymore and we pay on a per monthly basis it’s like fifty bucks a month or something like that and then same with flip snack and I think around fifty dollars per month, so does cost money (about as much money as it costs to purchase aliexpress standard shipping v epacket), it is a small budget though once we get into the swing of things around what you’re actually trying to create – you’re trying to create a business, so that’s very important.
The next thing that you want to be doing when it comes to creating a magazine on a budget is you want to find writers and contributors that will either write for you for free, if you don’t feel comfortable doing that of asking people to write for you for free in exchange for exposure etc; asking people to do you a favor to write for you for free or asking people to write for a nominal rate, so that’s totally up to you how you want to do it.
I definitely recommend paying people and respecting them, but I also recommend when you’re doing something on a budget, you’ve got to work out a fair exchange of value, so you don’t want to rip people off, you want to have some sort of fair exchange of value, so if that person contributes X amount of articles they’ll get you know all this exposure or you know you’re they can you know use you as a resume something along those lines, which can be really powerful.
You’re going to have to work that out, if you want to launch your magazine on a budget, you’re going to have to somehow work out how you work with writers because you need content or alternatively you just write all the content yourself.
You need writers, you need to find writers on a budget you need contributors. When it comes to your magazine, you definitely need to interview people, especially if are you doing it on a budget, because that’s great content it’s easy to write I believe from my experience like an article around someone you’ve interviewed, because hopefully it’s someone you really admire or they’re really passionate about a space you’re passionate about, so it’s easier to write that and you can always get it transcribed and then you can do all sorts of things around creating that article, but what’s important is if you want to do on a budget you’re going to have to interview people to really provide people with value throughout that magazine and also to really fill it out, so you’re going to have contributors to your magazine, then you’re also going to have custom bespoke interviews.
If you’re going to ask someone to pay for your magazine if you are selling it or you want someone to read it you want to be good and you need interviews – majority, like pretty much all magazines they all have interviews, so you have to go out there do those interviews yourself and you’re probably going to have to write those feature articles as well, unless you can use what I shared before and work out some sort of contra deal or work out something with people to get them to contribute.
Also, when it comes to finding writers or contributors, there’s tools that you can use there’s like these cool marketplaces you definitely should look at HARO, which stands for help a reporter out or SourceBottle. What these places are as they peer media outlets, where it’s got supply and demand, so there’s people that want to be featured on websites or magazines or blogs or publications and then there’s people that are pressed, that are looking to interview people, they’re looking for sources which is really cool.
So what you can do is you can do a post on HARO and say “Hey, I’m launching this magazine – do you want to interview anybody for this magazine? Do you want to write content for this magazine for exposure?” – that’s very powerful.