How To Start And Scale Your Online Magazine
By Dillon Kivo
I’d just finished my normal day’s tasks: Handling client projects, engaging with my audience on social media, prospecting for more clients, pitching authoritative bloggers in my industry, promoting my guest posts, and a host of other tasks that are typical of an internet entrepreneur in the digital marketing industry.
March 2018, one chilly Tuesday evening as I was winding down after a long and successful day’s work and reading an article on Inc.com, an idea occurred to me.
“ How about starting my own online magazine?”
Kivo Daily is a business and entrepreneurship online magazine dedicated to serving digital startup founders with practical solutions to accelerate their growth.
In this chapter, I’ll show you how to start and scale your own online magazine without breaking the bank or losing your mind in the process. First, let’s start with the most important question: Why an online magazine?
Why Should You Start an Online Magazine?
Well, like any other business, starting an online magazine isn’t easy.
When you begin to talk about your new project, your friends and family might try to talk you out of it. I was told, “ It’s such a time-consuming and money-sucking enterprise. Don’t do it.” Every business is difficult to build, but the truth is, getting an online magazine off the ground is not as difficult as you may think.
I would say that an online magazine is difficult to manage. I can also say that it’s actually simple to start. There’s a reason more and more people are going into magazine publication.
There are 20,000 consumer and trade publications in North America alone, according to the National Directory of Magazines, and 1,000 new magazines are launched every year! If you have great leadership and management skills, you can build an impressive magazine that will help you make great money for yourself.
Another reason you should build your own online magazine is because people love them. The interest is already there. With the rise of the Internet and mobile phones, more and more people of all ages are reading news and author opinion content from their favorite online magazines rather than from print media. People have turned into digital content consumers.
Of course, the challenge many publishers face is how to get readers to their digital magazine regularly. To do this, you have to give your readers what they want. As Zig Ziglar puts it beautifully:
“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar
Consequently, catering to your audience should be your main source of motivation. If you tailor your energy around your audience’s needs, desires, goals and pain points, I believe you can create a very successful online publication.
My own magazine, Kivo Daily, was actually born out of my desire to serve my audience and offer them valuable content. I wanted to provide a platform where entrepreneurs could share their visions and goals without having to jump through the hurdles of trying to climb what I call “ the publication ladder,” which are a series of steps that bloggers and publishers need to take before they finally get featured in top tier publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur and CNN.
Essentially, I wanted to give everyone an equal opportunity to offer their solutions, successes and failures so others could learn from them. That’s what the Kivo Daily is about, and the comments and results we’re getting from our readers have proven to us that we’re on the right track.
Your biggest priority shouldn’t be your domain name, a microphone or the musical jingle you’ll use in your opening. Your biggest priority should be the topics you’ll cover.#TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay”
Once you’ve done your research about launching your own online magazine, you need to take next steps:
Step 1: Pick a niche that you’re passionate about
Your biggest priority shouldn’t be your domain name, a microphone or the musical jingle you’ll use in your opening. Your biggest priority should be the topics you’ll cover.
A lot of folks make the mistake of picking the wrong topic. Just because a successful publisher has picked, ‘LA celebrity news’ as their topic and they’re killing it, doesn’t mean it’s the right topic for you. That’s the wrong approach to picking a niche. That particular publisher might be passionate about Los Angeles and celebrity news and that’s the reason why they chose that niche.
The best thing to do is to focus on covering what you love. Pick a niche you’re passionate about, that way, you’ll never run out of ideas. You’ll always feed your readers compelling content that informs and entertains.
For example, I chose business, entrepreneurship and technology for my online magazine because I love those topics. These are the topics I’m always reading about. I’m an entrepreneur, so I love entrepreneurship stories. This makes me knowledgeable about my niche and helps me publish the best content in the business and entrepreneurship niche and in turn, makes Kivo Daily readers flock to the site to consume and share my stories.
Step 2: Content is the only currency you need
You might think to build your own media company you’ll need a lot of start-up capital. Well, you don’t need huge sums of money to start your digital publishing company. One of the fundamental lessons I learned from running Kivo Daily is this: Money is secondary when it comes to creating your online magazine.
Great content is really the king of online publishing. It’s the only currency you’ll need to grow your media empire. Your primary focus should be your content. Simply put, content is the fuel that will power your magazine.
Not just any content: superior quality and valuable content that educates and entertains, and captivating posts that touch readers on an emotional level. I don’t care about appealing to advertisers or making more profit. I prefer to publish valuable articles that solve my audience’s problems and answer their questions.
I remember how people pressed me to monetize Kivo Daily when I started getting traction. I didn’t succumb to this pressure because I knew that the content would bring in a steady flow of readers and those readers would spread the word about my digital publication and bring in the money.
My strategy, even before I launched the Kivo Daily, was to have about 20 high quality articles ready for publication. I published them all at once on the very day I launched the site and I recommend you do the same.
Having between 10 to 20 articles on your site will give you credibility from day one. This will also help your magazine do well on search engines and establish your site as authority in your niche, all from the start!
Step 3: Launch a minimum viable magazine
You don’t have to wait. You have to move fast.
Concentrate on getting your first 30-40 posts published, don’t worry about having a perfect website with expensive web design, custom landing pages, or fancy writing from a pricey copywriting agency. Just launch a minimum viable magazine or prototype that offers the features that your ideal readers crave.
That’s exactly how I launched Kivo Daily, very lean, without injecting huge amounts of money into it. Here’s how I did it:
That’s all it took to launch Kivo Daily. I didn’t invest lots of money. I built it based on a lean startup philosophy.
Launching your media company this way will allow you to start your business fast and generate quick feedback from your readers that will help you test your ideas. It will also help you measure and scale your magazine to the next level.
Step 4: To scale, partner with professional freelancers and content creators
It can make sense to grow your digital magazine by spending money on advertising, but I really don’t recommend that strategy. I also don’t recommend that you look for funding from an investor either. The smart way to go and the way many editors have grown their readership, is to partner, not invest, with smart, professional content creators in a similar, relevant niche.
Brian Clark, the founder and CEO of CopyBlogger Media, the digital marketing magazine that some industry insiders call the ‘Bible of Content Marketing,’ bootstrapped his business with $1000 and partnered with Darren Rowse, the founder and CEO of ProBlogger, to share each other’s articles through guest posting. The word guest posting was not known when they started their businesses.
I used the same strategy with my own online publishing business:
Money matters less in this endeavor. You need to partner more with your stakeholders.
That’s why, as a magazine publisher, your uttermost priority is to identify your stakeholders, which will include:
You’ll need to strategize and work hard to build a mutual and long-term connection with your stakeholders. I recommend you hire professional freelancers and editors to help you with this!
For me, partnering with stakeholders was more important than anything else, that’s why I partnered with freelance writers. I don’t care about the country or region a writer comes from. I care about the ideas they bring to the table. I have contributors from all over the world who are pitching different business stories to inspire Kivo Daily readers and I always make sure their content passes my guidelines, or what I call my “ quality test” before publishing them.
Conclusion
In my opinion, you’ve got to join this lucrative industry. You have to be a publisher. You have got to own your digital media company. Not to use as an avenue to engage with your audience or as a medium to feed your customers with great content, building your own magazine is much more than that. It’s about creating a media asset that pumps cash and generates tons of fans and leads for you.
Before that chilly Tuesday evening in 2018, I dared to think of building my own online magazine. I’d read content from Forbes and Fast Company and I thought; “ this is for the big guys, it’s not for me.”
Seeing how difficult it was to pitch to editors at top magazines, earn guest posting opportunities and build brands through guest blogging and SEO campaigns, I started thinking, “ Why not me?” I began writing and guest blogging and became a columnist for top publications. I encourage you to start somewhere. Maybe you start blogging or guest posting. Maybe you launch a home-based business startup. Just test your crazy ideas in the real world.
That idea, I’m sure, wouldn’t have popped in my head if I had zero digital marketing experience. As soon as the idea developed, I visualized the whole venture, reviewed it and got to work.
Starting your own online magazine isn’t rocket science. There’s no magic trick. All you need is a simple smart plan supported by action, patience and hard work. Show up today. Your readers are hungry for more!