Can An Old-School Print Newsletter Or Magazine Grow Your Business + Help You Connect More Deeply With Your Audience?

Can An Old-School Print Newsletter Or Magazine Grow Your Business + Help You Connect More Deeply With Your Audience?

Looking for the next revenue stream or advertising media for your online or offline business?

Print media is back with a vengeance. 134 brand new print magazines publishing quarterly or more frequently emerged in the last 2 years alone according to the Magazine Publishers Association.

Print Magazines Are Eating The Internet

Internet companies like AirBnB (which launched AirBnB Magazine), Bumble (which launched Bumble Mag), Dollar Shave Club (which launched Mel), Away (which launched Here Magazine), and Casper (which launched Woolly magazine) are on the forefront of this trend.

Netflix is also printing a magazine to showcase it’s shows to the powers that be in the award community.

Media companies like Meredith are on the trend as well, launching The Magnolia Journal with Real Estate reality TV show Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines in late 2016.

Paid Subscriptions And Reaching Millennials

Just a little over 2 years later Magnolia Journal has 5.6 Million readers and 910,060 PAID subscribers according to Subscription numbers from MRI Starch and Alliance for Audited Media.

Better still, these print magazines are reaching the magical millennial audience that many advertisers find to be so elusive. 29% of Magnolia Journal readers are millennials.

You read that right, 910,060 paid subscribers in just 2 years.

Big Opportunities For Strategic Partnerships With Existing Budgets

Many larger companies already have huge pre-approved and under-utilized print media budgets standing in the wings looking for a place to land.

So, if you are an agency, look there for opportunities to add value and convert high-performing digital content and offers into print content and offers in other people’s magazines.

Taking that from the small company perspective, you could tap into unused budget in larger complementary businesses to co-launch a niche print magazine combining your skill and sweat with their un-deployed budget.

High-Value, Low-Cost Acquisition Opportunities

It might make sense to purchase undervalued established industry magazines. Many venerable print magazines with huge brand name recognition can be purchased for pennies on the dollar to what they would have cost only a few years ago.

You can acquire these well-known branded magazine for little money out of pocket and then breathe new life into them, both through an expanded business model that provides multiple monetization strategies through Online to Offline, Offline to Online, Affiliate, Advertising, Rev-Share, Advertorial, Sponsorship or any other of numerous multiple streams of monetization (MOSOM).

Physical Magazines For Podcasters

A physical magazine would be an excellent additional media modality for podcasters to offer to their listeners as well.

Remember, podcasts, like Facebook groups, YouTube channels and Instagram accounts are properties build on rented land. While it’s great to benefit from the huge traffic that sites iTunes, Facebook YouTube and Instagram offer, you still want to migrate your listeners/viewers/visitors over to your own media properties as well.

Print magazine opt-ins and sign-ups provide an opportunity to give your audience a great reason to step out of those other people’s media channels and come over to hang out with you, give you their email, read your print magazine, give you their physical mailing address.

Capital Doesn’t Have To Be An Issue

If the only thing keeping you out of the physical magazine and traditional print world is capital, consider partnering with someone else who already has it, possibly in the form of un-deployed budget.

Offset costs with subscriptions, advertorials for your own and/or other products and traditional advertising.

But, I Don’t Have An Audience

If the constraint is audience, then consider partnering with people who have them. Meredith, the company that launched Magnolia Journal does that.

Find influencers or companies with niche audiences and partner with them to gain other people’s audiences.

Remember too that the audience does not have to be huge to make this work. We created a print newsletter/magazine for you, our War Room Mastermind members, over a year ago.

It goes out to about 250 members and we also send it to prospective members and audiences we are targeting as content marketing. Given the high value of a new member ($30,000-$40,000) the ROI is huge and also cost to produce and mail is negligible.

How To Get Started

You don’t have to produce a 1,000-page full-bleed September Issue of Vogue to get started. A simple black and white retro-feel newsletter may do the trick. You can expand and increase production value as you evolve and budget permits.

Here are a few ideas on how you might get started with your own print magazine or newsletter.

  1. Get to know the print world. Most magazines accept editorial and advertising. So, reach out and get a media kit and article submissions criteria from other existing print magazines, and explore those options first as a third-party beneficiary of their efforts.
  1. Consider starting a newsletter for your own audience, like this one you’re reading right now, or if you don’t have one, partner with someone who does.
  1. Co-produce your print magazine with a financial sponsor/partner. As I mentioned above, many incumbent businesses have in-deployed or vastly under-deployed print media budgets. Help them spend those budgets by offering the content and labor with them providing the capital and possibly even the audience if they already have one.

  1. If you already have a good-sized list or media property with strong traffic, then create your own magazine and provide your audience with another modality to connect with you. Use War Room member Wayne Deehring’s printing service or War Room member Angela Lauria’s sister’s Perooz service to help create, print and distribute your magazine with a minimum of effort.

What’s the Objective?

The goal of the print media in most cases will be two-fold: First, diversification (multiple touch points for existing audience), and, second, acquisition (new audience).

So, if you currently have a small audience you should think of print as an investment in an audience growth tool rather than an expense.

If I could put on War Room Senior Faculty Member, Jay Abraham’s, hat for a moment, think of it as an opportunity to tap into a highly underutilized resource at a bargain price to apply leverage in your existing vertical.

Or, as mean old Dan Kennedy would say, “you can borrow instant credibility outside your immediate audience by adding a print asset to your existing tools.”

Resources

For printing, check out War Room member, Wayne Deehring’s, USP Fulfillment who handles a lot of printing for us and our events. He can get you a quote on printing and help coordinate production of your magazine or newsletter. We use Wayne’s services for almost all our printing needs for War Room.

Shaun Buck at Newsletter Pro (NewsletterPro.com), also produces newsletters for people who don’t have the time to do it themselves. And, War Room member Angela Lauria’s sister, Gina Lauria Daschbach at Perooz, produces complete done-for-you print magazines.

Case Study

Shaun at Newsletter Pro has been publishing a print newsletter/mini magazine for his company for 8 years. They mail to 9k people every month (they have clients that mail as few as 400 pieces per edition).

They make it a personality-driven piece and last year on leads that had been on their list for greater than 12 months, but until that point hadn’t bought anything, just those prospects were worth over $1.2 million in new revenue into Shaun’s company directly from the newsletter.

Conclusion

If you want to take a page out of several super successful companies’ books, consider starting a print magazine for your brand to better connect uninterruptedly with your audience.

If a print magazine seems too far a stretch, consider looking into this resurgent medium to reach highly segmented audiences with very specific interests.

One thing is for sure, print is definitely on the rebound and created a deeper connection with audience willing to pay for high quality content and an email and social media notification free reading experience.

P.S. We sent this out to War Room members a few weeks ago and is a sliver of the value they share from being inside the program. 

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