So have you always wanted to started a magazine, or is it just a a passing whim? Either ways, this post should help you understand the costs involved with the starting of a magazine in a much better way.

This post of mine is a continuation of How Much does it Cost to Start a Magazine? So if you’ve come by without reading the earlier posts, I’d suggest you start all the way from the beginning, The Beginners Guide to Starting a Magazine.

To the more informed ones who’ve followed my earlier posts, in this part of the post, we’ll continue with where we’ve left off. I’ve told you about the expenses involved with the editorial, marketing and the photography already, and here, I’ll tell you about the rest of the essentials and how much it could cost you.

Design Team

A design team comprises of designers, creative directors, and at times, illustrators. For a magazine to run successfully, the design team has to be competent enough to coordinate with the editor and the writers. But at the same time, they also have to be creative enough to come up with unique designs that aren’t just cut and pasted from other magazines.

Creativity, unique design creation and understanding of colour combinations are of utmost importance while hiring a design team. But most designers don’t really understand the most important aspect, that the designs created on the computer screen and the final design that appear in the magazine usually don’t look the same. Absorption of colours on paper can create significantly different looking colour combinations on paper, especially while working on gradients, or on CMYK and RGB options. And all these little tips and ideas actually make a big difference between a good magazine and a fabulous one. While hiring a design team, try to get people who have experience in print magazines. Expenses-wise, a good design team would cost you around the same as your editorial team.

Airbrushing and Colour Testing

Great magazines boast of having the perfect airbrush artists. Usually, it is the design team that works on airbrushing images and making images and people in the magazine look great. One tip you really should know is that every single image you use in your magazine definitely has to be airbrushed. It may look stunningly good on the computer screen, but it’s always going to lose almost half of that quality when you transfer it to paper.

Unless your design team is exceptional, outsource a very good airbrushing artist or top-notch designer to airbrush your images, especially your cover page. Remember, airbrushing is not an option, it is a definite requirement. Airbrushing artists can cost you quite a lot based on their experience and knowledge of print media. But then again, if you have a great design team, you wouldn’t be requiring an airbrush artist anyway.

Circulation Team

Just like advertising and branding a magazine, circulation too is an extremely variable expense. Depending upon how aggressively you want to promote a magazine at the point of purchase, you can spend the bare minimum or go all out and spend millions on a national scale. Basically, circulation of a magazine involves more than just distributing a magazine to newsstands and stores across your country. It also involves sticking of magazine posters, manufacturing little fancy magazine stands and clips with your magazine’s logo on it, and banners and small hoardings that can be hung over the newsstand. Along with this, some publishing houses also create branded shade umbrellas, and fancy awnings that are branded with the magazine logo. Additionally, you can also pay a significantly higher commission to the vendor for selling your magazines, or pay a bonus for every magazine sold, or just pay a retainer fee for displaying your magazine upfront in newsstands.

But all these methods are just like grains of sand in the ocean. Every day, circulation managers and executives come up with more unique ways to advertise and promote their magazine sales. To have a successful team that can come up with innovative ideas, you need to have at least one experienced circulation head or manager, and a few people to work on the circulation needs. Circulation expenses wouldn’t really be as high as your marketing expenses, but it would be a good option to hire an experienced team that already has a good rapport with the local newsstands and vendors.

Click here to read the last part on How much will you have to spend to launch a Magazine?

What are the expenses involved with the running of a magazine? How much does it cost to start a magazine and run it successfully? Find out here.

Over the last few posts, I’ve elaborated on all the requirements of launching a magazine, and now, you’re probably ready to read the part where we talk about the involved expenses. In either case, the last few posts of mine should help you understand everything there is about launching your own magazine even if you’re just a fresh entrepreneur who knows nothing about magazines, or how to go about starting them. Here is a list of posts I’ve written earlier that you definitely should read to understand everything there is about launching your own magazine.

1. The Beginners Guide to Starting your Own Magazine

2. How to Start a Magazine? The Requirements

3. Starting a Magazine – Planning and Execution

4. Partners you need when you Launch your own Magazine

5. Six Essentials to Start your own Magazine

With this information, you are probably ready to launch a magazine by yourself. And if anything does scare you even now, it’s probably just your nerves or your lack of experience. But we all have to start somewhere, don’t we? Do remember an important pointer that I’ve said before, running a magazine is expensive business. And to make matters worse, there’s a lot of competition. And money, at least in the beginning, comes in trickles. Unless you’re an exceptionally clever and shrewd entrepreneur who can make all the right associations, it is going to be a difficult journey ahead. And you need to put in a lot of effort, and need all the dedication and passion you can muster.

Now coming to the expenses involved with the running of a magazine, I’ve listed most of the generic expenses that you would definitely have to spend on. Any other expenses that may come across your way would probably be the added expenses involved with running a particular niche magazine like a travel magazine (which involves travel expenses) or a celebrity magazine (clicking celebs in compromising postures doesn’t come cheap, really!).

The different expenses that you would have to deal with, issue after issue, include:

An Editor

Just like how a ship needs a captain and an airplane needs a pilot, you need a great editor to steer your magazine in the right direction. Pick an editor with a lot of experience, or if you can’t afford a great one, hire an editor on freelance basis as a Consulting Editor. But yeah, even a consultant will cost you an arm. After all, a great editor can be the difference between a successful magazine and a miserable one.

Editorial Team

An editor may steer your magazine in the right direction, but you still need a great crew to assist the editor. A typical editorial team involves a lot of people, but for starters, you could do with a couple of feature writers, a copywriter and an executive editor. You could also take in a few interns on a stipend basis to help your short-staffed team, at least at the beginning.

Marketing Team

Marketing is the life-blood of any publishing company. And the faster you understand this, and harness the power of a great marketing team, the bigger your advantage of sustaining and profiting from your magazine. Most shrewd start-up entrepreneurs spend more on a powerful marketing team than on any other division involved in the magazine business. It’s a clever move, but could also backfire if the focus is shifted away from the real reason behind the success of a magazine, its editorial. For starters, get in touch with the biggest marketing man you can afford to hire, and see if you can work out a deal. Beyond this, hire a few fresh or less experienced marketing professionals from the city you’re based out of. And about other cities across your country, partner with freelance marketing professionals until you can afford them on a full-time basis.

Photography Team

We’ve been through this part in my earlier posts in this series, so this should come off as a clear pointer. Every magazine needs good photography to stand out of the crowd. If you’re alright with sharing images, and don’t really care if you use images that are also used by other low budget magazines, then stock images may be a decent option to start off with. Even stock options can turn out pretty expensive based on the exclusivity of the images you intend to use. When the money does come in, spend some money on producing your own photoshoots so you can move away from the tag of a low-budget magazine. Another way by which you could get good images for less is by creating partnerships with local photographers. Strike a retainer fee agreement for a certain number of images every month, and as long as you get good images, you’re going to have a good thing going on for you.

Click here to continue reading about How Expensive is it to Start a Magazine?

What are the most important requirements to start a magazine? There are quite a few, and you need to focus on all of them if you want to make a difference in the media industry.

I’ve written quite a few posts in this series on starting a magazine and running a media house successfully. And if you would like to read everything there is about launching a new magazine, I would recommend that you start this series with this post, The Beginners Guide to Starting a Magazine.

After you’ve read my earlier posts and understood all the details, you should now be ready to know the real requirements of a magazine, not a publishing house, but a real magazine. So what are the different teams that you would require to run a magazine successfully? There are a lot of people and teams that you would need in the long run, but for starters, you could split the requirements into six basic essentials. In this post, I will briefly explain about each requirement. If you need any information about any of these details, or would like to partner with my organisation on the same, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Editorial Requirements

Content is King. It’s been said before and it’s still something that’s of utmost importance. Pay a lot of attention to good content because a magazine won’t have any faithful readers even after a series of well branded advertising campaigns if the content’s no good. Unless you are an excellent editor, it would be advisable to hire an editor. The problem with most writers is that they can’t judge their own writing skills without spell check, let alone edit other writers’ work. It’s always difficult to edit your own work, unless you’re really good at what you do. Every magazine needs a few writers, a copywriter, and a couple of editors to work on the editorial content. You could skip a few people here to start off, but then again, can the others cope with the burden of overworking while maintaining the quality at the same time?

You have to think as a businessperson here, and not take someone’s word in this case. Think about it, you must have come across several magazines with atrocious editorial content and grammatical errors. Does that mean the boss is a loser? Nope, it just means that he or she trusts their employees way too much, and allows their writers to cloud their judgement. Don’t fall in this trap. Always get second opinions and surveys to understand what people want and how good your writers and editors really are.

Photography Requirements

If Content is King, then I can safely say that Photography is Queen. Just as magazines need good content to connect with a reader, magazines also need great photography to complement the content and enhance the visual appeal. Some magazines also do focus a lot more on the visual appeal of photographic images to sell their magazines. There are so many magazines that actually sell only because of the titillating images that are splashed on the pages of the magazine. Half the men’s magazines belong in this category. But its importance and requirements depends on the content and type of magazine you wish to start. You would be a better judge of the kind of photographic requirements, so plan your steps to cater to your magazine’s needs. Hire at least a couple of photographers, or partner with a photography agency to obtain the images for your new magazine.

Design Requirements

Good content may be king, and great photography may be queen. But they really can’t look their best unless they’re dressed up for the occasion. And for that, you need an excellent design team. Just like a great editorial team, you also need to invest in a quality editorial team that involves designers, creative minds, and art directors. The editorial and the design team usually works closely together, so unfortunately for your money, the design team is a requirement that you just can’t afford to miss out on.

Marketing Requirements

A business is only as good as the money it brings in. That sucks, because it just shows that creative minds can’t really make money without being shrewd and street smart. But unfortunately for the creative people, this fact is true and truly harsh. The golden goose of every magazine publishing company is the division that brings in the money, i.e., the marketing department. You could run the magazine on your personal funds for the first couple of years, but if you can’t sustain the magazine with external funds even after a while, then there’s no use of launching a magazine, is there? You really aren’t performing a charity service for your readers. Hire a good marketing team to bring in the advertisements to fill your pages, or partner with a good marketing agency to help you during your start-up phase.

Distribution and Circulation Requirements

You could publish a great magazine, but you also need to distribute the magazine to newsstands across your state or country so people can get a chance to read it. Partner with a few distribution agencies to circulate your magazine to the newsstands, and also hire an internal team to ensure that the magazine is delivered from the printing press to the distributors. Additionally, your internal team should also keep track of the magazines and ensure that the magazines are distributed well to all the stands, and are prominently displayed in the magazine stalls. Getting the magazines to be displayed prominently is dirty business, and can also cost you a lot of money. You’ll understand this in first person when you start your publication. Every country has its own circulation strategies and involved expenses, so talk to a few newsstands and you’ll know how to go about it.

Printing Requirements

Quality of the paper plays an important part, depending on the type of magazine you intend to launch. If you’re looking at a weekly news magazine, a newsletter, or a tabloid, your readers may not really care about paper and colour quality as long as you provide your readers with great content. On the other hand, if you’re planning to launch a monthly lifestyle magazine, your readers will obviously expect you to bring out a glossy, colourful magazine that can be shown off! So based on your requirements, hire a printing press that can satisfy your requirements, and your delivery deadlines.

You do have to understand that all of these above essentials are equally important, even if I may have given unfair attention to a few essentials. After all, a spacecraft may have thousands of parts, but there’s no way it can complete an expedition with total efficiency even if a single part is missing.

So if you really do want your new magazine to go straight ahead on the road to success, don’t miss any of these steps. Do all this, and you just may have a good chance of making it big in the media business.

Next Recommended Read: How much does it cost to start a magazine?

You may want to start a magazine yourself, but a little help from the outside can help you go a long way. Here are a few partners that could help you run your new magazine successfully.

In another post of mine, Starting a Magazine – Planning and Execution, I’ve mentioned the two most important partners that you would need when you launch a magazine by yourself. Here are a few other partners that you are quite necessary for a start-up company that wants to launch its own magazine.

Circulation Agencies

Creating a magazine is a difficult task, and requires a lot of effort. But all that effort can go to waste if you don’t know how to circulate your magazine. Magazine Circulation is to a magazine what SEO is to a website. You can have the best content money can buy on your pages, but what good is great content unless you optimise it enough so people can read it, enjoy it, and come back for more. The next time you go to a newsstand vendor or a magazine stall, ask the vendor to recommend a few good circulation agencies to help distribute your magazines. Once you speak to a few stalls, you’ll have a list of five to ten good circulation agencies you can contact and partner with. Speak with different circulation agencies and find out the terms and conditions on which they work.

Remember though, that circulation is a dirty job with a lot of secret hidden agendas and dark paths, and you usually never get paid for your magazines at the scheduled time of month. So maintain an aggressive yet good rapport with your circulation team, or chances are, a rival magazine may pay someone to keep your magazine off the stands! But no matter what, be wary of your dealings with circulation agencies and always have a backup plan, unless you want to risk storing all your magazines in a storeroom for the rats to read. There’s a lot more you need to know too, but I guess time will teach you all the strategies and secrets of circulation.

Subscription Agencies

A magazine breathes and gets its life through marketing activities, but for spurts of “pocket money” especially at the early months of your company, magazine subscriptions can play a lifesaver. To someone who doesn’t understand how subscriptions work, it may seem mysterious considering the low costs at which the magazines are given away and the additional gifts that come with them, but every move involved in the magazine industry is a strategy, and getting a high number of subscriptions can actually give the publisher a lot more than just money. If you can’t get subscriptions yourself, partner with a good subscription agency and let them handle all the activities for you. A good agency will also be able to bring in a lot of subscribers for you, at a small commission fee, of course.

Delivery and Mailing Agencies

When you start a magazine, you would be mailing a significant number of copies of your magazine every month to subscribers, agencies, clients, prospective clients, and a lot of other people. Sometimes, the number of copies distributed every month can number in thousands of copies. Partner with a good courier agency or mailing agency, so they can save your time, and also reduce the costs by a huge extent. And once you’ve partnered on a long term with a good delivery agency, not only will you ensure that your copies are delivered efficiently and on time, you can also save a lot of time on the inserting of magazines and pasting the addresses. After all, time is money, and every minute saved is a minute earned!

Digital Printing and Colour Testing Agencies

You may think you could spend an entire month working on your magazine, and take the magazine straight to your printer at the end of the month and have a ready magazine waiting for you on your next visit back to the printer. But it really doesn’t work this way.  If you want to create beautiful, well designed magazines every month, you need to spend a lot of time to ensure that your magazine looks good.  Partner with a good digital printing agency and colour test your prints every few days. A few good digital printers even have options to set the colours to match the original bulk printing colour and quality of printing presses, be it web or offset types. It may cost more, but it’s worth the money. This way, you can ensure that your digital prints will look exactly the same as your final prints. By tying up with a digital printer, and working on a contract basis, you can get better rates and also ensure that your regular digital printer knows your exact requirements, which can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

You would also require screen printers or digital printers as per your preferences and requirements to print your business cards and envelopes.

Hardware and Systems Agency

When you start a publishing house, you need many systems and software to ensure that your team can stay in tune with the current innovations and available software. This isn’t really a critical requirement if you or one of your team members know their way around new innovations in technology and how to install hardware and software. If you can handle this yourself, then you can skip this requirement.

Legal Advisors

Depending on the type of magazine you intend to start, this can play a crucial part in the process. If you intend to start a political or news magazine, then you would definitely need to partner with a good legal advisory or even hire a team full time. But on the other hand, if it’s a typical lifestyle magazine, you may need a legal team mostly to prepare your contracts, employment terms and conditions, etc.

The different partners that I have mentioned here would include almost all the media partners you would need to ensure that you have a publication free of worries and troubles in the long run. But then again, every individual magazine has its own requirements. Most media houses already have internal teams for each of these requirements. But as a fresh start-up magazine, ask yourself what you would require internally and externally, as a media partner, to ensure that your magazine takes off and runs successfully without any glitches.

Click here to read about the Six Essentials and Requirements to Start a Successful Magazine.

What are the requirements of starting a magazine? What is the planning behind a successful magazine, and how do you execute it well? Find out here.

If you’ve read my two earlier posts on starting a magazine, The Beginners Guide to Starting Magazines and Understanding Publishing Requirements, you would be able to set a good foundation, and would be ready to launch a magazine, and a publishing house. A firm foundation is always a good start, but foundations are no good unless you have a good plan to make use of the foundation. Starting a publishing house involves legal procedures and official documents, but starting a magazine requires great planning and perfect execution. In this post, I’ll tell you the most important criteria to run a successful magazine business.

There are two primary requirements, other than passion and determination, to run a good media house. You will need the Right Team, and the Right Partners.

The Right Team

You may have watched a lot of movies over the years, and you may have seen a lot of one-man army movies where the good guy vanquishes an entire army of bad guys in one and a half hours of screen time. Those scripts make for great movies, but reality is far different from those scenarios. If you intend to start a magazine, you can’t do it all by yourself. I’m not saying it’s not possible. All I’m trying to say is that it is inefficient. You could start a magazine yourself, or with a friend, and you could spend endless nights and long days working on all aspects of the magazine production yourselves, and may still be able to bring out a great magazine. It works, believe me, I’ve been there and done that.

But over time, you’ll understand that your talent can be put to better use by focussing on a particular aspect like writing, or designing, or perhaps, marketing. By doing this, not only would you be able to learn more about a particular niche of magazine publishing in detail, but you also have a responsibility to achieve the targets and follow deadlines. If you’re writing and marketing a magazine, chances are, you may spend more time writing and less time running around making money, or vice versa. And this could lead to imbalances in successful magazine requirements. Sometimes, great multitasking capabilities can actually turn out to be a shot in your own foot.

Use one-man or one-woman army tactics only if you have no choice, or can’t afford an exhaustive team. But then again, I’ve said this earlier, running a magazine is expensive business. If you don’t have the money or don’t think you can be successful soon enough, it’s better not to enter this field in the first place. But then again, don’t let me stop you from pursuing your dream. Think about your options, and ask yourself if you’re ready to take the leap.

Get in touch with people you know for recommendations, or talk to a good hiring firm, and hire people that you can gel with. But you have to be careful about your first set of employees. After all, they are going to be the benchmarks in their particular fields. You need leaders who are passionate and willing to trust you to lead them to greener pastures. But at the same time, they should be independent enough to take great decisions for the benefit of your company. This is crucial, and in most cases, can go awfully wrong.

One bad apple can spoil your entire basket, and a month later, every single one of your employees may walk out on you if you pick the wrong team. I could go on here, but you know what they say, you’re not going to know what the Sistine Chapel smells like unless you’ve been there. So, you’ve got great tips on picking a team in this post, go figure the rest. It’s your world, your dream, and your instincts that should guide you to your dreams.

The Right Partners

Running a magazine requires a lot of effort from several divisions. And chances are, you wouldn’t be able to handle all those requirements internally. There are two important partners that you could use, and I’ve mentioned them below. For any other partners you may need, you can see the link that I’ve added at the bottom of this post.

Printing Press

Printing of a magazine is one of the primary divisions that is almost always outsourced to a printing press. A good printing machine can cost millions of dollars, and as a start-up company, instead of investing in a low-cost printing machine, partner with a high-quality printing press. Speak with a few printers in your city and find out if you can look at them as long term partners.

Find out about their delivery timelines, the sort of machines they use, and the paper options they offer, and the other printing options like number of colours, effects, etc., and the different fancy paper cutting options they can provide. One of the easier ways to find a good printer is by flipping through the pages of leading magazines available in your city. Find out where they get their magazine published, and there’s a good chance that you may be able to pick a good printer right away.

Marketing Agencies

You have to understand this well, you cannot run a magazine on your personal investment forever. If you intend to do that, you’re really not cut out to be a businessman. You need to create a source of revenue generation that can bring back money to your office, and sustain your daily bread and butter. For this, you need an excellent marketing team, and the best marketing teams are really expensive, even if they’re worth it.

To save costs on marketing teams, you can partner with another media house, or with a marketing agency, and pay them a monthly commission and perhaps, even a retainer fee, to generate revenues for your magazine. But not all of them are good, so be wise when you go on a selecting spree. But as a word of caution, know that marketing agencies will also work with other magazines just like yours, and you can actually end up killing your own company if you’re not careful about the other magazines that are marketed by your marketing agencies. My tip to you is this, hire a marketing agency when you start a magazine, but only until your company is established enough to have its own marketing team.

These are two of the most important partners that you would need when you start a magazine, on a lower budget. But the list doesn’t end there, in fact, there are several other partners that you would need to ensure that your magazine runs smoothly, and at a lower cost than regular publishing houses.

Click here to read the next part of this article on Partners that you would need when you Start a Magazine.

So are you ready to start a magazine? Here are all the tips that anyone could ever need to start a magazine.

If you’re still convinced that you’re ready to start a magazine after reading my introductory post on The Beginners Guide to Starting a Magazine, and just as enthusiastic about launching your magazine, then this post will definitely help you further in starting your own successful magazine. My earlier post would surely have revealed the high odds of owning a successful magazine, but fret not, if you know how to go about it, you’d definitely be able to launch and run a successful magazine.

Before I go into the technical requirements of starting a magazine, I really must tell any entrepreneur about the emotional and physical needs of starting a magazine. On the other hand, if you’re an entrepreneur that’s backed well by a long, glowing resume, and a big venture capitalist, well then, good for you, life can be just a bit softer on you. But wherever the money comes from, you’ve got sleepless nights and tough decisions to take in the years to come, and sometimes, even hard work may not give you the positive results you expect or want.

Unfortunately, passion alone isn’t enough to run a successful magazine. Sometimes, your core team may have differences with you and you may have to sever ties, which can make circumstances quite ugly. I’ve been there and done that, and the road’s tough. There were days when I had to partner with companies even if it wasn’t profitable for me. But I had to take on the opportunity in the hope of continuing my dream. But years down the lane, it would all be worth it. At times, it is completely acceptable to take one step back, to jump three steps ahead.

Today, I can actually decline a proposition to partner with a company if I want to, and I’ve walked away from several prospective clients just because our business ethics and communication styles aren’t compatible. Running a magazine isn’t only about the money. It’s a lot about crucial associations and partnerships. And it’s always about long term plans. What might seem easy and perfect today isn’t really the best option unless you can project a positive growth curve in the years to come. So what are the real issues that you need to look into when you start a magazine? Here are a few tips that can help you take the first few baby steps.

Legal Requirements

This is a very important part of launching a media publishing house. Amidst the enthusiasm and the eagerness to bring out a magazine, some people forget these crucial requirements. If you really are planning on staying around and playing the game for a long time, build the right foundation. If you’re partnering with a few friends, then have all the details including the expenses shared and the revenue sharing ratios recorded. Create exit options in the contracts between the partners, just in case things aren’t going to be cushy and nice in the years to come. And most importantly, register a company name and copyright all the relevant logos, etc. Speak with a legal advisor who knows and understands the working of a publishing house so you don’t end up with the short end of the stick.

Title and Magazine Registration

Almost all people who want a start a magazine don’t know this crucial piece of information. You cannot start a magazine legally unless you have registered the magazine with your country’s newspaper and magazine council or registrar. Now each country has its own government body overlooking these procedures, so I can’t really advise everyone here. In India, we have the Registrar for Newspapers in India (RNI) which overlooks all these procedures.

Your first move would be to verify the name or title of your prospective publication. Most government bodies have their own websites where wannabe publishers can find out if a magazine title is available for use in their country. This process is similar to looking for new domain names on the internet. You would have to apply for your title and get an approval to go ahead with the process. After the Title Verification, the next process is the Registration of the magazine. In India, as I said previously, you would have to obtain a registration number before launching a magazine from your local district commissioner’s office. Only after you receive at least a temporary registration number can you launch your first issue. But it doesn’t end here, there are a few more processes that you would have to involve in. But once you get the first step right, the respective authorities would be able to help you further and tell you how to go about the other formalities in detail.

The only case when you have the option of skipping a registration number is if you don’t intend to sell the magazine. You may find this anomaly in a few internally distributed company magazines, that are not sold on stands and don’t have a price tag on the magazine. The only risk in such cases is if someone else applies for a title that is the same as an unregistered company magazine, and gets all rights associated with that title. Under such circumstances, all the legal rights of the title ownership would pass on to the person who has registered the title under their name, and guess what, the legal owner of the title could also sue the company!

These are the two basic steps that you would have to cover in detail, before you give a thought about working on the magazine. So even before you sit down to work on your content, or hire teams, hold the thought and finish these two steps.

So what next? Well, it’s launching a magazine! Click here to read about Planning, Executing and Launching a Magazine.

How to start a magazine, and run it successfully? In this complete Guide to Starting a Magazine, I will tell you everything you need to know and understand, to start a magazine and run it successfully all by yourself.

Let’s face it, we’ve all wanted to write a book or start a magazine at some point in our lives. If you haven’t experienced that epiphany yet, don’t worry, you’ve still got a lot of time to mull over it. Getting to the point, starting a magazine isn’t easy. In fact, it’s actually one of the most difficult things you could ever do on a professional level. You may have had a conversation with your friends about launching a magazine, and soon enough, you may be convinced that you were born to launch a magazine. That’s all great. I’m happy for you. Now, I will not tell you not to start a magazine. If you really are determined, I know you probably wouldn’t care even if I told you not to start one. So before we go any further into this, I’ll tell you this. Go ahead, start a magazine! I’ll even help you along the way if you need the help.

Several years ago, when I was still just into my twenties, my friend and I started our first magazine too. People all around told us it we wouldn’t be able to make it. Well, you know people! Today, I’m happy I didn’t listen to all those naysayers.

Over the years, I have started several successful magazines, and partnered with innumerable organisations as their custom media partner, and let me tell you this, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze. I hope I’ve motivated you enough to now talk about the real truth and business of starting a magazine. Buckle up, and “gird your loins”. We’re going in deep.

Let me start with a few key facts about launching a magazine for your benefit. Every single day, hundreds of people start a new magazine across the world. Read the statistics in your own country, and you’ll be shocked to see the number of new magazine titles that are out on stands every single month. But the bitter truth is that not all of these enthusiastic magazines survive. On an average across the world, of every 100 magazines that are launched by a new publishing house, less than 30 magazine titles survive the first six months, and less than 10 magazine titles get past a year. And only 2 magazines get past a year and a half, and finally just one magazine survives the two year figure.

Truth hurts, and what hurts even more is the hole-riddled bucket of funds that a new magazine can drain out of you. So the bitter truth is that of every hundred magazines that are launched, just one magazine actually survives a two year period. Now when I say survive, I don’t mean the magazine makes enough money to buy swanky cars and mansions for yourself, I literally mean “survive”. Making hundreds of thousands of dollars is another topic entirely. But on a positive note, a few of these newly launched magazines do make a lot of money, so you still have a fighting chance.

I didn’t really have any intention of writing this post, but I received a mail from an enthusiastic entrepreneur a few days ago, and he wanted to start a magazine. She seemed extremely eager and was completely certain that publishing magazines was her life’s calling. But unfortunately though, she knew nothing about magazines and she knew nothing about the business end of the glossy pages filled with fashionably skimpy women and puffy pouts. She told me that she had been googling for information, but she just wasn’t getting enough, and she was understanding even less. It seemed like no one really wanted to share any trade secrets! But any media person would be able to help you understand the nitty gritties of launching a magazine. The logic is simple, the execution is excruciatingly difficult. After all, starting a magazine is a simple mix of business strategies and creativity. Get it right, and heck, you’ve got the money. Get it wrong, and you’ll wish you never would have entered this business.

Moving on, let’s get one fact straight, running a magazine isn’t easy. And you can write this pointer down because most people have a tendency of forgetting it. And running a magazine is expensive business. Period.

In fact, starting a magazine is one of the most expensive businesses you could ever step into. It’s rich, and unfortunately, you are not going to even smell money for quite a while, maybe even a year or two!  But then again, I’ve been there and done that. Successfully. So don’t sweat your pants just yet. There’s a lot of good in starting a magazine, and there are just as many difficulties involved in the running of a magazine. So if you indeed are still convinced that you can launch that lone successful magazine that can survive the odds of a 1 in 100, then go right ahead and click the link I’ve provided below, to read the second part of this series.

How to start a magazine? Understanding the Requirements of Starting a Magazine

What are the most important requirements of every successful hotel and hospitality website?

Recommended Introductory Reads: Marketing Strategies using Hotel Websites

Here are a few tips that you could use to create your hotel website, and ensure that your internet marketing strategies take you full speed ahead.

Keep the Website Unique

All companies want to be the best, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And when they decide to start a website, they hire a team or delegate an internal team that spends days online trying to find the perfect template to use, or copy a good one and fake as their own. And then, they show the best copied template to the management, and what do we have? A great looking website that’s not unique at all. On the other hand, some websites are so boring and confusing with plain white screens of boring content, a user might as well test their keyboard for drool resistance.

The bottom line, if you want to have a great website, work with a good team, and make it clear that you don’t want a “cut-and-paste” job. You want it to be unique, and you also want to know about all the websites that your design team has used for “inspiration”. It’s better to tell the design team straight up rather than find out much later from a guest that your hotel website template is the same as a fan page website template of Katie Price! And perhaps, at the same time your design team would also appreciate the fact that you understand all about inspiring ideas. And the best part is, you can also provide the feedback after you see a few other good looking websites and tell your design team what other additions and changes you would like to see in your own website. After all, you’re trying to make a good looking website and you should try to keep it as unique as it possibly can be.

Have Great Content in the Website

Great content is like great wine. An amateur won’t know the difference between a wine bottled in the vineyards of Mendoza or a bottle of grandma’s grape wine. And what you need, just like wine, depends on the occasion. Are you branding your hotel like a glitzy restaurant, or as a pay-by-the-hour joint? Be prepared to let your customers know that your hotel policy has always stressed on perfection, by having well written and interesting content that’s relevant to your hotel. Will you be having content about Golf Weekend Getaways or PaintBall Frenzy Fridays for the guests at your hotel? Write relevant content based on the type of packages your offer and the type of guests that are expected at your hotel. Mix and Match content can be turn out to be a big downpour for any hotel.

Another pointer that I would like to remind you here is the usage of big words in your website. You really don’t want a potential customer juggling between a dictionary page and your hotel page while surfing the net, do you? Use simple words unless the big words rhyme and line better. Keep it simple, and you’ll get your message across better.

Photography and Images

Hire the best photographers you can afford and use them well. Your potential guests do want to know where they’re going to be staying while vacationing at a faraway city. And good photography can thicken your chances of being the chosen one by a large extent. Pictures speak a thousand words, but a great hotel picture speaks a lot more. And pays the bills a lot better! Always try to be the best you can be, hire the best you can hire, and indulge your guests in the best way you can if you really are serious about making a difference in the hotel and hospitality industry.

Great Search Engine Optimization

Well, we are talking about the internet here, aren’t we? All the glorious content in the world can’t help sell your hotel suites unless people are going to know you exist or visit your website. Always associate your hotel website information with all your communication exchanges like business cards, emails, social media sites, etc. And beyond all that, hire a media partner who can overlook your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You do need the Big G (google, for the less informed), Bing and the other search engines to find you and help internet users find you. So if you have or want a website, SEO comes hand in hand with your hotel’s glory or doom.

Contact Form

When you have a hotel, logic should remind you to put up all your contact details in the most prominent positions on your website. After all, prospective guests do want to contact you, and you do want them to call you. In this business, time is money. If they can’t get in touch with you easily, they’ll go somewhere else.

Live Chat

Today, the best form of contact isn’t the contact form. Contact information is a basic necessity indeed, but not the most efficient one. The best way to show off your customer-friendly hospitality services is to have a live-chat option in your website. It’s easy to set up, and almost always free, unless you want to take live chatting to the next level. Live chat can help your potential guests get in touch with you “anonymously” and ask the silliest questions that nag their mind, without worrying about sounding stupid. If you use this service well, there’s a good chance you’d be able to convert a lot of surfing passer-bys into faithful guests and evangelists.

Social Links

If you’ve read my earlier post on social media tips for hotels, you’d know the importance of having an active social media presence. And if you’re spending quality time in social media interaction, you’d better let your website visitors know all about it. Display your Facebook, Twitter and Blog links in your sidebar, so your curious visitors can know all about your hotel and its social interactions.

Recommendations and Links to Reviews

If you’ve participated actively in travel portals, and have been ranked highly by a few of them, make sure you put that information to good use. Most hotels misunderstand the use of internet rankings and reviews. Showing them off on your hotel website isn’t a bad thing, nor does it make you look like you’re showing off. On the contrary, good reviews and ranks can actually add to your credibility and convince a potential guest more easily.

And More?

Well, the ones I’ve mentioned here are just few of the basic features that any good website should have as a minimum requirement. But if you want to take it all the way to the best levels of hotel websites, well, there’s just no limit to excellence and imagination. At the end of the day, a great website is a better investment than most other investments you may have done to brand your company. And it’s something that will be market and brand your hotel 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Now really, how many marketing teams and marketing campaigns can better that figure?

An initiative to have a good hotel website will definitely show positive results. But a great initiative will bring in a lot more. Where do you see your hotel website?

What does it take to create a perfect hotel website that would help in branding? How can a hotel create a perfect marketing strategy using a website? Read this post to find out.

Over the last few posts, I’ve written a considerable number of ideas about hotel online marketing strategies and advertising strategies. For those of you who’d like to understand more about hotel marketing and branding ideas, here’s a list of my earlier posts that could help you understand almost all the most important internet marketing strategies that can be used to turn your new hotel into an internet marketing savvy ka-ching machine!

Introduction: Custom Media Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality Businesses

Successful Marketing Strategies Checklist: Internet Marketing Strategies for Hotels

Successful Hotel Marketing Strategies Part 1 of 4: Inhouse Hotel Magazines and Brochures

Successful Hotel Marketing Strategies Part 2 of 4: Social Media Networking for Hotels

Successful Hotel Marketing Strategies Part 3 of 4: Hotel Marketing Ideas with User Reviews and Feedback

Successful Hotel Marketing Strategies Part 4 of 4: Branding and Marketing with the Best Hotel Websites

In this fourth part, I’ll be telling you almost all there is to know about marketing hotels using websites as a promotional tool.

Marketing your Hotel using the Company Website

I’ve seen a lot of hotel websites over the years, and most of them don’t leave me happy. When you’re one of the frequent travellers, calling friends and asking for hotel recommendations isn’t really the most comfortable thing to do. And spending more than an hour on hotel reviews, especially if you’re only going to spend a night as a business traveller isn’t the most time-efficient way to go about checking into a hotel. For a casual traveller or if you intend to spend a vacation, it pays to spend time looking for the best options. But for a quick decision, nothing beats the hotel website.

But most hotel websites just suck! It’s just terrible to see swanky hotels with glittering stars using basic free website templates and descriptive words in their website content that could make a well read person barf to death. One basic piece of advice from me as an editor, skip the big words unless you really need it. And when you use it, use it well! Don’t go hiring a team that assumes that big words which are copied straight out a thesaurus will make the hotel seem more sophisticated and rich. It really doesn’t work that way. Most people and customers can see right through the idiocy of overstuffed, meaningless sentences.

Here’s a great example of “overstuffed meaningless content” that I came across at one of the really good hotels that I stayed in, based on a recommendation. Of course, I told them, and those stupid words left the hotel forever, along with their thesaurus-loving agency!

“Come, enjoy your holiday with in our abode. Swim through the rich, luxurious satin sheets that adorn our gargantuan, lush beds. Awake to the mind-calming chatter of the morning flora and fauna, and bask in the soft caress of our well trained staff and hospitality. Live life blissfully, in high spirits. Stay at The xxxxxxxx Hotel for the best and most glorious days of your life…”

To tell you the truth, had I come across that line myself in their hotel website, I would never have set foot in that hotel. And that’s how most people see hotels. People are critical when it comes to hotels and hospitality. You’ve read about that in my introductory post on hotel marketing strategies. And that’s the harsh truth. Unless you’re blessed with luck and a flawless marketing and editorial agency, chances are, you’ll find yourself being the butt of jokes by customers and potential customers. And all the riches and Italian marbles can’t stop your hotel guests from having a good laugh, and spreading the funny word. And funny words aren’t really going to help your hotel’s image and branding campaign.

Continue Reading Here: The 8 Most Important Requirements of  a Hotel Website

Learn to use websites’ user reviews and feedback to brand and promote your company easily. The best internet marketing strategies to advertise and market hotels. Without spending more money!

After discussing marketing strategies for hotels in detail, and explaining web advertising using Inhouse Magazine and Brochure Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality, and Social Media Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality, this would be the perfect time to talk about the third part of the Internet Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Hotels series. In this post, I will talk about hotel marketing strategies and advertising ideas using the internet, user reviews and user feedback.

Part 3 of 4: Word of Mouth via The Internet a.k.a. User Reviews and Feedback

The internet is a great medium for marketing campaigns to promote brands and reach out to any specific audience, no matter how wide or niche it may be. Internet advertising has come a long way, and the regular PPC and CPM campaigns of hotel internet marketing are a thing of the past. Of course, web advertising is still a really good thing, and can also give back a lot of dividends. But today’s traveller isn’t one to fall for great, flashy ads that are splashed across the computer screens, unless you’ve got the goods to back it up. On a one-off occasion, browsing travellers may book a hotel through a clicked ad, but in almost all cases, internet savvy travellers always look for user reviews and feedback from other travellers who’ve stayed at the hotel previously.

The internet is scattered with travel portals, and it really is one of the biggest money spinners in the world of online content. Millions of people search online and spend time in travel portals to get a better idea about hotels, restaurants and hospitality industries from across the world. If you know how to use this aspect of internet hotel advertising, you can brand your company as a customer-friendly one better than most other means.

Viral Marketing Strategies are great to spread the word about your hotel, and email marketing too can be effective. But the biggest criterion for these mediums to work is the existence of a brand. If you already are a big brand, or have associated with a big brand to create a glitzy hotel that is talked about by everyone, then you’re bound to have a lot of people coming by to your hotel irrespective of feedback or reviews, but for the hotels that are still out there trying to reach out to people and show off their customer-centric work atmosphere, it’s time to participate actively in reputation management and user reviews.

User Reviews on the Internet

There are several sites on the web like Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist that cater to travellers, and provide information on hotels, hospitality industries, and restaurants. For starters, make sure you find a cushy spot in as many of these hotel and hospitality review sites as you possibly can. It may take a while, but as long as you put in a conscious effort to represent yourself well in all or most of these sites, you can sit back and wait to be noticed, and talked about. Submit your best images, professionally written introduction pieces, and all the works. This the first and most important step in ensuring that you get noticed and reviewed by people. But this isn’t the end, this is but only the first step.

Good and Bad Feedback

Once you’ve added your hotel into the website directories, don’t sit back and relax, and forget all about it. This is one of the biggest mistakes that almost all hotels make when they enter the world of social media and user reviews. Only a few good hotels maintain an active interest in these online directories. After all, you’ve entered your hotel information into these directories so you could be reviewed. That’s like spending months preparing for an exam, and not bothering with the results after you’re done with the exam. Crazy, isn’t it? But some people do that, either because they’ve got something better to do, or know they’ve screwed up so bad they just don’t care! So unless you’ve left the hotel industry to pursue something else, make sure you stay back and spend quality time surfing through these websites.

Responding to Feedback

Read your user reviews, and thank the good reviews, and apologise to the posters of the bad ones. Give away free discounts to a few reviewers who’ve praised you, and a few free dessert coupons to the ones that hated you. That way, you’re making up with the ones that hate you, and graciously showing your gratitude to the ones that liked you. And while you’re doing this, try and make sure others see the efforts you’re taking to please your customers.

Business Tip: Always do these things in the public domain, and let others see all this. Comment back on reviews and ask for more! Lap it all up, the good and the bad, and always serve with a smile.

When you’re online, remember that there’s always someone watching you. And judging you. If they see you as a gracious host, more people will want to come by to your restaurant or hotel to enjoy your company and that of your staff.

Taking an Initiative

Now, I’ve told you about responding to user reviews. But what else can you do to keep a happy online presence? Use your mind, and bring out your fancy discount coupons! Spend a couple of hours online in blog directories and pick out a handful of great bloggers from your city. Get in touch with them by email and invite them to your restaurant for a special review. Tell them you’d also like to gift them with a special discount coupon for accepting the invitation. Please a few people, and get them to review your hotel and write about it in their blogs. Some of them have huge credibility, and chance are, you’ll have your entire city talking about you in a couple of weeks. And all this, without spending a penny on huge advertising hoardings or newspaper inserts!

Making the Difference with User Reviews

Remember the rule of social media. It’s always a two-sided conversation, not a one-sided monologue. And if you know how to use it well, you’ll be able to reach out to thousands of people without even spending a dime on advertising.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Get in touch with me, there’s a whole lot of ideas where this came from!