Publish your own magazine and build your PR - it's free!

I'd like to share some tactics that I have used, especially when I was launching Morgan Cars in China, and that was with the use of digital print. Often, we get excited about social media, but we ignore one of the largest categories of public relations, and that is in print and what has now happened to print which is to go online to digital printing. 

The audience across the media for magazines in America has continued to grow. In 2019, it was up 6.6% to $1.5 billion in terms of readership. The average readership of the top three magazine publishers in America is actually equal to that of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple as a result of the growing loyalty for long-form reading of publications. Not everybody is dashing to social media, especially in business-to-business, where printing in the past of industry magazines and even trade publications by companies was an established and very effective way of reaching a particular audience. In this day and age when we have long-form content to share, press releases are good for getting into the media, but it's actually possible to start to manage your own publications by using some of these tools. 

In the past, creating an in-house newsletter, as I did for Morgan in China, where I took the license from a UK publisher who was making a 48-page, full color, A4 size magazine and distributing it to subscribers and news agents, I brought that into China, and I would change some of the content to be relevant for my Chinese readers, and then take some of the long-form technical articles and history articles and include those alongside my China customer stories.

The big cost in the old days was printing. In China, when I launched the Morgan China magazine, I actually printed 5,000 magazines per issue from a desire to have something tangible and credible for this new brand. Printing a publication gives a sense of gravity and weight to the publication. We would give those out at trade shows and when we displayed the cars in-store or at events like the British Motor Sport Festival that I started in China. The downside, however, of printing magazines, of course, is the cost both of printing and of distribution. As I found at the end of the term with Morgan, I had leftover copies. I had printed four different issues of Morgan magazine, and I had leftovers that were aging. On the other hand, the beauty of e-publishing is that these publications can stay online at no cost whatsoever to publish and no cost whatsoever to distribute, and they also benefit from the long tail. In fact, on Issuu, we still have our Morgan Cars China issues of Morgan magazine, and you can even see them as you like now for free. 

Issuu is a platform that I used for publishing in China, because it wasn't blocked in any way at the time. Now, Issuu is one of the leading platforms, probably the top two or three depending on how you rate them, and they claim to have over a billion page views with 50 million publications, 100 million unique visitors, and two and a half billion brands represented. You can do the math yourselves, but for me, it just means that it's obviously a very well established player. With Issuu, they can take our PDFs, our images, and our text and transform them using the Issuu templates. The templates are a real nice solution if you haven't got a graphic designer, but you do have images and content text that you can then embed into their template.

By clicking on publish, you're getting a desktop-ready, mobile-ready, and their own Issuu app-ready magazine. What's good about that is that then you can share that on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media either as an embedded link, as a link, or in some cases, as the magazine itself. It means that if you've got a lot of content, and you've got pictures, text, or even video which can be embedded with links to Vimeo and YouTube, you could use Issuu. And by issuing the publications out as they are (no pun intended), the search engines automatically will be searching the content inside of your Issuu magazines which is great for your SEO.

What you could do is create an Issuu magazine in multiples of four, because it's still the old traditional front page, back page, and two inside pages. You can then create your own title, your own masthead, and then you can publish it unlisted if you want it to be just for your own internal community, let's say it's an in-house newsletter, for instance. You could also make it public, and you could also make it scheduled. This makes it really nice, because, in the old days, when I worked for companies like Philips, they would have their own staff newsletter. Now, it's getting harder and harder to do that since people rely heavily on social media, and those social media formats are all dedicated, really, to very short snippets. It's hard to communicate anything of length or of sophistication in those articles. The long-form in-house newsletter by print is not a good idea, and especially now that we have remote working, it's even more expensive and, frankly, probably impossible to distribute by post to everybody, so e-publishing represents a very good opportunity.

Issuu has an entry-level publishing offer at no dollars per month. You can issue out a certain number of pages per month, and that is funded through advertising for other publications and other advertisers and brands that will go alongside your content. If you want to make it an undistracted experience for your readers, then it'll cost you $19 a month. If you'd like to monetize the content that you've got, which is a great opportunity, it's only $40 per month to sell subscriptions. If you do that at $40 a month, and then you start to sell some advertising or you've got content where people will willingly pay for that, it could complement, for example, a video channel or a membership organization that you might host on a platform like Mighty Networks. 

Now, there are a couple of other alternatives to Issuu. I think Issuu was probably one of the first ones. A new one is called Yumpu which sounds Chinese but is actually from Switzerland. Yumpu offers a lifetime 100% free editor. They claim to have some 897,000 companies using their platform. When you sign up, you get to add in content, videos, audio, slideshows from SlideShare for free, and you can embed those graphics into your website. They also claim to have some 75 extra powerful features, including social media sharing tools, and they're claiming to have 12 million readers. It seems to also be a very powerful platform. I haven't subscribed to that platform yet, though looks very interesting. I'm just wondering how they're making their money. It must be through online advertising, or a freemium model in some way. But certainly, to start with, it's becoming very highly rated and some big brands are using it.

A third one is called a UniFlip. On the website, it says it is an IT company. Frankly, that's what it looks like. It converts documents and reports and catalogs, into a multi-page PDF with turnable pages, so it's much like what you might get on your Kindle or in your iBooks. It's looking to be a fairly difficult platform. The interface is not that great. It comes from Denmark, of all places. It also has a really complicated pricing structure which I lost track of and interest in, because Yumpu and Issuu both make it incredibly easy to understand their offers. Those two obviously have a great deal of existing customers, and they also make it very easy to sign up. 

When I created the magazines for Morgan Cars in China, I found that creating an e-publication was a really great way of sharing information to people that I didn't want to commit to sending print to, because geography was difficult to cast. For people like students, it was a great thing to send them free e-publications. Nowadays, the market has moved on and plainly, as I said before, long-form publishing is still a major part of the marketing mix and public relations mix. In America, periodical publishing still employs some 83,000 people, so printing in terms of traditional going to the news agents and picking up a magazine may or may not have a long future. There are still some now in local stores, and people still like to buy those. 

In the same way that newspapers have gone online, publishers of long-form magazines have started to also go online. Obviously, news is all about speed, and publications or magazines of 50 pages or so are not about speed. They're about the user experience, about engagement, and about long-form reading and articles. But as we have tablets now that enable us to scroll, and we have things like Kindle or the iPad for reading, people are getting used to reading long-form content in this kind of way, which is all digital.

As we're looking at public relations activities for our own businesses, where we used to publish newsletters, we still can, if we've got the content. What's beautiful now is that we can embed video, slides, audio files, and links to home pages or to social media in a way that we never could have dreamt off before. I, for one, I'm going to be looking at creating e-publishing for magazines for the kind of content we're creating for our SPEAK|pr program. Currently, that's all listed on our website and also shared through my podcast. E-publishing is part of the A for Amplification. And as we look around us, I can recommend Issuu and Yumpu as two options for you to consider if you've got long-form content that you could share with a subscriber base that goes beyond a newsletter and beyond 800-900 words.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash