The 12 Most Important Things to Consider When Starting an Online Magazine
If you’re planning to start an online magazine, this feature checklist will help you make sure it’s built on a solid foundation. Simple feature omissions early on can lead to costly and time-consuming upgrades later.
Trait #1 – Excellent content management
As the publisher of an online magazine, you should have full control over how to add, edit, and delete your content, preferably without knowledge of HTML or other technical skills.
Feature #2 – Enable Multiple Streams of Income
Just like offline magazines, you need to make sure that implementing multiple sources of income is simple, including placing ads, adding links, charging for subscriptions, and selling affiliate products through your own store. online.
Feature #3 – Member database
Every online magazine, whether free or paid subscription, should have a way of collecting visitors’ names and other personal details. The database must be searchable, exportable and easy to customize.
Feature #4 – Integrated payment processing
Payment processing is often added as an afterthought. It shouldn’t be. It’s essential to have the ability to process credit cards tightly integrated into your website so that you can use this feature to collect subscriptions and product sales and generate revenue from other services.
Feature #5 – Flexible Functionality
When you start an online magazine, you can never be sure how it will develop. Therefore, you should start with a website that can be easily updated and add new features.
Feature #6 – Search Engine Optimization
Much is said about search engine optimization, but the truth is very simple. You must have a website that is very easy for search engines to index. If it’s easy to find and you keep adding great quality content, search engines will include you on their results pages. Make sure search engines can index all pages, including pages in password-protected member areas.
Feature #7 – Multimedia Content
Today’s specialized information websites must have content in multiple formats, including text, images, audio, and video. Even if you don’t plan to use these formats today, make sure your website is enabled to use them in the future.
Trait #8 – Relationship Building Apps
Once you get visitors to your online magazine, you need to start building a relationship with them to encourage them to come back. Applications that enable relationship building include email newsletters, forums, and comment fields below articles.
Feature #9 – Integrated login and password access
Most publishers launching an online magazine build the website first and then try to add login and password protection later. This is a recipe for disaster. Password protection, which gives members access to premium content, needs to be seamlessly integrated with the member database and content management service from the start.
Feature #10 – Management information
You should be able to easily access all of your website performance information in a single web analytics management report. This should include the number of visitors and page views; the time spent on the website and the most popular pages; where your traffic is coming from and much more. Only when you have this information at your fingertips will you be able to understand the needs of your customers.
Feature #11 – Monitoring, Security and Backup
Publishers often overlook the importance of having secure and flexible hosting with automated backups. Most websites, including the leaders like eBay and Amazon, have downtime. You should minimize the risk of failure by regularly backing up all your content.
Feature #12 – Simple control panel
As you’ll see in the above list of features, a good online magazine is made up of many different applications. If possible, the service you choose should have all (or most) of your applications running from a single, easy-to-use control panel.