On Tuesday, BlueToad’s Paul DeHart gave one of our webinars, entitled ‘5 top tips for creating a successful digital edition’ and you can view a recording here.
Listening to Paul, four things stood out for me:
1. Don’t treat it as a box-ticking exercise. Simply having a digital edition is no guarantee of success, having a fit-for-purpose digital edition might be. Put as much care and attention into all aspects of your digital edition as you would your print edition.
2. Get the content experience right. Considerations that come as second nature to a print magazine editor need to be applied to the digital edition too. Intelligent use of font, colour, layout and graphics apply no less on a digital edition.
3. Shout it from the rooftops. Would you consider launching a new print magazine onto the newsstand without any promotion? Of course not. Digital editions do not come with any inherent powers of self-promotion – you need to tell everyone about it: when it’s being published, how it can be accessed, what’s great about it. (NB. If you don’t know what’s great about it, then it’s worth spending a few minutes working it out.)
4. Rethink the ad proposition. Digital edition ads are different to print and website ads, however much we might like to pretend otherwise. Publishers need to think creatively and come up with compelling new commercial offerings. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, but you just need to stop trying to shoehorn commercial solutions meant for one platform into another.
In short, if you’re not sweating the detail of your digital edition every bit as much as you would your print edition, then you’re probably not doing it right. The route to success is to love digital as much as you love print.
