It's free to publish your own magazine and it's great for your PR. Sharing 3 platforms for e-publ...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR, the podcast for business owners who have value to unlock in their own businesses and will do so with better communications. And my name is Jim James, and I'm here to share the experience that I've had from over 25 years of getting my own businesses noticed and that of over 500 clients as I run my own PR firm around Asia and the UK. Now I'd like to just share some tactics that I have used, especially when I was launching Morgan Cars in China, and that was the use of digital print. Now often we start to get excited about social media, but we're ignoring one of the largest categories of public relations, and that is in print, and what has now happened to print, which is to go online to digital printing. Now, the audience across the media for magazines in America has continued to grow, and in 2019 it was up 6.6% to 1.5 billion in terms of readership. So the average readership of the top 3 magazine publishers in America is actually equal to that of Google and Facebook and Amazon. Or Apple, for example, as a result of the sort of the growing loyalty for long-form reading of publications. Not everybody is dashing to social media, and especially in business-to-business, where printing in the past of industry magazines and even trade publications by companies was an established and very effective way of reaching particular audience. So in this day and age when we have long-form content to share, press releases are good for getting into the media, but it's actually possible to start to manage your own publications by using some of these tools. And today I'd like to share what some of those tools are. In the past, Creating an in-house newsletter, as I did for Morgan, for example, in China, where I took the license from a UK publisher who was making a 48-page full-color A4-size magazine and distributing it to subscribers and in newsagents. I took that into China, and I would change some of the content to be relevant for my Chinese readers, and then take some of the long-form technical articles and history articles, for example, and include those alongside my China customer stories. Now, the, the big cost in the old days was printing, and in China, when I launched the MOG China magazine, I actually printed 5,000 per issue of these magazines as a desire to have something tangible and credible for this new brand. So printing a publication gives a sort of a, a sense of gravity and weight to the publication. We would give those out at trade shows and when we displayed the cars in stores, for example, or at events like the British Motorsport Festival that I started in China. But the downside of printing magazines, of course, is the cost. Both of printing and of distribution. And of course, as I found at the end of the term with Morgan, I had leftover copies. I had printed 4 different issues of MOG Magazine, and I had leftovers that were aging. So the beauty of e-publishing is that these publications can stay online at no cost whatsoever to to publish and no cost whatsoever to distribute. And they also benefit from the long tail. In fact, on issuu.com, we still have our Morgan Cars China issues of MOG Magazine, and you can even see them as you like now for free. I mentioned Issuu because this is a platform that I used for publishing in China because it wasn't blocked in any way at the time. Now Issuu, which is issuu.com, is one of the leading platforms, probably the top 2 or 3 depending on how you rate them. But they claim to have over a billion page views with 50 million publications and 100 million unique visitors and 2.5 million brands represented. So you can do the maths yourselves other than For me, it just means that it's obviously a very well-established player. Now, the thing with Issuu is that they can take our PDFs and our images and our text and transform them using the Issuu templates. Now, the templates then are a real nice solution if you haven't got a graphic designer, but you do have images and content text that you can embed into their template. By clicking on Publish, then you're getting a desktop-ready, mobile-ready, and their own issue app-ready magazine. And what's good about that is, of course, that then you can share that on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media, either as an embedded link or as a link, or in some cases as the magazine itself. So it means that if you've got a lot of content, let's say for example you have a boutique for your, for your product, maybe for fashion items or for food or for clothing, or even for your own health practice, and you've got pictures and text, and even video now can be embedded with links to Vimeo and YouTube, you could use Issuu.com. And by issuing the publications out as they are, the search engines automatically will be searching the content inside of your Issuu magazines, which is great for your SEO. So what you could do is create an Issuu magazine always in, in obviously multiples of 4 because it's still the old traditional front page, back page, and 2 inside pages. You can create your own title and you can create your own masthead, and then you can publish it either unlisted if you want it to be, for example, just for your own internal community. Let's say it's an in-house newsletter, for example. You could make it public And you could also make it scheduled. So this makes it really nice because in the old days, for example, when I worked for companies like Philips, they would have their own staff newsletter. Now it's getting harder and harder to do that, and people are relying on the— on sort of social media. But because those social media formats are all dedicated really to very short snippets, it's very hard to communicate anything of length or of sophistication in those articles. The long-form in-house newsletter by print isn't a good— is not a good idea. And especially now that we have, you know, remote working, it'd be even more expensive and frankly probably impossible to distribute by post to everybody. So e-publishing represents a very good opportunity. Now, Issuu has an entry-level publishing offer at no dollars per month. Okay, so you can issue out a certain number of pages per month, and that is funded through advertising for other publications and other, other advertisers and brands that will go alongside your content. If you want to make it an undistracted experience for your readers, then it'll cost you $19 a month. But if you'd like to monetize the content that you've got, which is a great opportunity, of course, it's only $40 per month to sell subscriptions. So if you do that at $40 a month and then you start to sell some advertising, you've got content where people will willingly pay for that. It could complement, for example, a video channel or a membership organization that you might host on a platform like Mighty Networks, for example. Now there are a couple of other alternatives to Issuu.com. Issuu.com, I think, was probably one of the first ones A new one is called Yunpu, which sounds Chinese, yunpu.com, but it's actually from Switzerland. And this is offering a lifetime free, 100% free editor. Now, they claim to have some 897,000 companies using their Yunpu platform. When you sign up, you get to add in content or videos, audio, slideshares from SlideShare, for example, for free. And you can embed those graphics into your website. And they also claim to have some 75 extra powerful features, including social media sharing tools. And they're claiming 50 million— sorry, 12 million readers. So also a very powerful platform. I haven't subscribed to that platform yet. Um, it looks very interesting, but I'm just wondering how they're making their money. It must be through, for example, online advertising or a freemium model in some way. But certainly to start with, it's coming very highly rated, and some big brands are using it. A third one is called Uniflip. Uh, Uniflip says on its website that it is an IT company, and frankly, that's what it looks like. It converts documents and reports and catalogues into a multi-page PDF with turnable pages, so much like you might get, for example, on your Kindle or in your iBooks. It's looking a fairly difficult platform. The interface is not that nice. Actually comes from Denmark, of all places. So functional, also has a really complicated pricing structure, which frankly I lost track of and also interest in because Yunfu and Issuu both make it incredibly easy to understand the offer. They obviously have a great deal of existing customers, and they also make it very easy to sign up. So when I created the magazines for Morgan Cars in China, I found that creating an e-publication was a really great way of sharing information to people that I didn't just want to commit to sending print to because geography was difficult, the cost. For example, like for students, it was a great thing to send them free e-publications. And the market has moved on, and plainly As I put in at the top of the report here, publishing, long-form publishing is still a major part of the marketing mix and public relations mix. You know, in America, periodical publishing still employs some 83,000 people. Okay, so printing in terms of traditional going to the newsagents and picking up a magazine, may or may not have a long future. There are still some in our local stores, and people still like to buy those. So in the same way that newspapers have gone online, publishers of long-form magazines have started to also go online. Obviously, news is all about speed, and publications, magazines of 48, 56 pages or so on, are not about speed. They're about user experience and about engagement and long-form reading and articles. But as we have tablets now that enable us to scroll, and we have things like Kindle, for example, or the iPad for reading, people are getting used to reading long-form content in this kind of way, which is all digital. So as we're looking at public relations activities for our own businesses, where we used to publish newsletters, we still can. If you've got the content, what's beautiful now is that we can embed video, slides, audio files, and links to homepages or to social media in a way that we never could have dreamt of before. So I, for one, I'm going to be looking at creating e-publishing for magazines for the kind of content we're creating for our Speak PR program. Currently, that's all listed on our website at eastwestpr.com and also shared through this podcast. So e-publishing is part of the A for amplification, and as we look around us, I can recommend Issuu and Yunpu as 2 options for you to consider if you've got long-form content that you could share with a subscriber base that goes beyond a newsletter and beyond 800 to 900 words. So with that, I thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and I hope that you have great health, that you are enjoying a bounce back in terms of your business, and that you keep on communicating and quite possibly e-publishing.