There are pure play bloggers out there that have never been printed in a physical magazine but whose blogs drive 4-5 million unique visitors every month and bring in more than $500,000 per year on a single website advertisement.
Voodoo, you say?
If you consider working from home in your pyjamas and generating more traffic and per-ad revenue than most print magazines voodoo, then yes.
In reality, any good, profitable blogger has hustle.
A tech blogger can’t enjoy a leisurely Apple keynote during their lunch break because they’re busy live-blogging from their seat.
Food bloggers let every meal get cold while they take the perfect macro photo of their dish and log all of the steps and ingredients, then make mini-versions for their Instagram and Pinterest accounts.
Mommy bloggers don’t get to sit on the couch and watch soap operas while their newborn finally naps, they’re blogging about how baby Violet is finally napping.
The most successful bloggers don’t just blog about a topic, they give up all of their personal time to turn simple events into entertaining stories.
So how does this fit into the corporate world of magazine publishing? The truth is that most magazine employees won’t give up a hot lunch for a good photo or a first-time maternity nap for a blog post.
But, you can emulate those stories on a one-off basis and create rapport with your readers just the same. Columnists have always been good at sticking to their niches and building a loyal readership, and you can always recruit freelancers who have fascinating stories to tell.
Why you should blog when you’re already publishing
In the kind of world where any Joe Schmo can sign up for a Blogger or Wordpress account and call himself a reporter, you have the duty as a content veteran to pave the road ahead.
Bloggers came on the scene and became rapidly popular and successful because publishers simply weren’t doing it right.
The first thing most publishers did when they came online was start re-publishing old magazine articles and then hiding them behind a paywall.
They created a digitised and searchable back-issue archive for print subscribers. Or, they created an online periodical that was back-dated with digital copies of their old articles. Sometimes they even started re-publishing old articles with new dates.
In all of these cases, you were taking old content and making it new again. This was a good starter strategy, except for the fact that the paywall obliterated your chance of getting found in search engines.
So basically, the people who you wanted to buy your magazine would never come across your website in a Google search because you were hiding it.
And while you were clinging to your dusty old articles for dear life, mommy bloggers and tech enthusiasts came on the scene and took on the role of “free content”.
I don’t have to tell you that they did very well for themselves. Some even got music, TV and movie deals out of it.
My point? If they can do it, so can you.
Why you should give content away for free when you have paying subscribers
Running a blog on your website does not mean you have to give away all of your paid content. It means you might need to start creating more free content.
The benefit of giving content away is simple: website traffic.
The more free blogs you post, the more website traffic you’ll receive. Work with your editors on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to make sure all of your blog posts include a keyword phrase people are looking for, and you’ll continually receive free traffic.
The more website traffic you get, the more magazine subscribers you’ll get. Only you can say whether direct mail still works for your publication, but direct mail is expensive. Website traffic is essentially free.
And I’m a big advocate of turning website traffic into a big email list, too. Sending traffic to your site is most valuable when you can capture those visitors and turn them into email subscribers – whether you’re giving them a free ebook to download or some other incentive.
Then, once they’re on your email list, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to sell them a magazine subscription.
Think of your blog as a way to generate leads to your magazine and your email list and you’ll find that it’s suddenly much more valuable to you.
How to create blog content for your website
Creating content for the web isn’t exactly the same as creating it for your publication. Here’s the basic structure of a good blog post, which includes room for search engine optimisation.
* 500 words
* Subhead that you can also use in the meta description field for your article
* 1 researched keyword in the title of the article
* 1-2 researched keywords in the body of the article
The latest fad in content is to forget SEO and “just write good content”, but that’s just simply idealistic and not good business.
If you ever want your article to see the light of day again after the first day it was published, you must optimise it. If you title your blog “OMG More Apples Please!” when it’s a post about apple pie recipes, then nobody looking for the “apple pie recipes” will ever find it in a search engine.
Your OMG apple post might get more clicks on its first day when you promote it via social media, but that’s where it stops. If you title it “10 Best Apple Pie Recipes”, you have a good shot at people finding it tomorrow, next month and even years from now when they look for “apple pie recipes”.
There are lots of ways to come up with blog content, whether it’s developed in-house or outsourced.
Write Original Material
There are no credentials for becoming a blogger and most would rather be called an editor or a writer. I’ve trained traditional print editors and writers to be bloggers for the past seven years and so I’ll be honest when I tell you that it’s not easy.
Many print editors think writing for the web, and especially optimising content, will compromise the integrity of their work. My advice, for the future of your company, is to find new editors that have more of an interest in your growth than their misguided pride.
Editors who I’ve trained that are curious and willing to optimise their blogs for search have done wonders for their companies. The others have been replaced by “newer models”.
Writing original content for the web is simple. It’s often shorter than a traditional print editorial, typically a little more loosely written and easy to digest. The most basic types of blog formats are:
Short form: A blog post that is 300-500 words, focuses on a single topic, and energetically gets from beginning to end with a single take-away.
Long form: Long form blogging is making a comeback incidentally right after the term TLDR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) started haggling the comment section of blog posts that readers thought were too long.
Lists: Editors hate lists, but readers love them. In the online world, what can be digested quickly should be.
Step-by-Step: Informational content can be more easily understood with a good step-by-step blog template where you can upload an image to go with each step.
When writing original content, you can still source ideas from your magazine by publishing posts about behind-the-scenes events, like interview outtakes, for example.
Recycle Old Content
Think you need to start from scratch? Here are two ways you can recycle old content into new blog posts:
* Issue Review: Write a blog post about your newest issue. Pull excerpts and images from the issue. Use this to build buzz around each new issue that bloggers can link to.
* Article Review: Take an old article from your magazine and talk about it. Pull an excerpt from the article and talk about how things have changed (or haven’t). I saw Glamour do this with an article about braiding your hair. They excerpted the original technique then used a simple point and shoot camera to take photos and turn it into a step-by-step post. It was informal, but useful.
Don’t forget that you can actually recycle entire articles into blogs, too. You’ll want to include the byline of the original author with the original publication date.
Hire Someone
I manage the blogs of several niche publishers and start-ups, so if you think outsourcing isn’t an option – it is. Decide whether you want to hire a ghostblogger that you’ll have to manage day-to-day, or invest in something more all-inclusive where the company develops a style guide for you, creates and optimises your content and even publishes the content for you on a monthly retainer basis.
Commission Guest Bloggers
Many pure play blogs hire guest bloggers, so why can’t you? If you have the resources, you might also consider setting up a user-generated blog that’s moderated by your editors.
For example, Forbes now gives contributors their own “sites” where they allow them to blog about topics they’re experts in. As part of an application, Forbes asks writers to submit their LinkedIn profile, Twitter handle and even their Klout score, presumably to determine how viral the articles may become and how much traffic they might drive.
Ask for Content From Manufacturers
Five years ago, Stuart Hochwert at Prime Publishing, LLC launched his craft and food blogs from scratch with no content. Now his blogs compete with some of the top legacy craft and food publishers.
One of the ways he produced content when he was first getting started was by asking for content from manufacturers. These days, I believe they call that “Native Advertising”.
Yes, you can ask your advertisers to write content for your blog. You can also charge them for it. They might ask you to write the content for them, but the key words here are: “you can charge them for it.” Just as long as you tell the readers that the content is sponsored.
Final Tips for Launching Your First Blog
If you’re launching a blog on your magazine website, then there are a few things you should know.
1. Use Your Reputation: Install the blog on the same domain as you use currently. If you install the blog on a different domain, then all the good link ju-ju you’ve built won’t pass on to your blog. The difference in SEO results from those blog posts will be dramatic.
2. Convert Visitors: A good blog has great content and does a good job of converting blog visitors into email subscribers or magazine subscribers. Keep track of these conversion rates as one of the many metrics that make a good, profitable blog. Other metrics to watch are social media shares, comments and website traffic.
3. Plan Ahead: Plan a monthly editorial meeting to stay on track and make sure you’re only writing about the topics native to your brand. Line this up with your magazine editorial meetings so that you can cross-promote and come up with related blog post ideas.
4. Publish Great Content: To keep publishing high-quality content, make sure you’re not publishing just for the sake of publishing. If you’ll have more time and resources to write better content by reducing your publishing schedule from five days a week to three days a week, do it!
5. Do Your Research: A good blog requires keyword research. Hire an SEO firm or do it yourself, but do it. Use keyword research to develop your topic categories and to come up with ideas for your editorial calendar. Knowing what your customers are searching for online is a highly under-used secret blogging weapon.
A blog is a fairly simple extension of your magazine website and your magazine itself. The major difference is that it’s updated more frequently and it doesn’t give away the whole cow for free. It does, however, give away enough to build a loyal readership that will convert into happy magazine subscribers.
