Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

What is your friend's objective for this magazine? Does she have a business plan? Who is her primary target audience? Does she sell subscriptions? Does she have advertisers/sponsors? What would success look like for her magazine?

Usually we ask about the value of a subscriber. What is the revenue stream she expects from a subscriber? Then we take that value and see what we'd be willing to spend to capture that subscriber.

Looking for "free promotion" is likely to get you very little. And it suggests that your friend has not really thought about the business objective. I hope I'm wrong, of course.

As a minimum, your friend should start writing articles for her (online) magazine to build a readership. She may find that she can skip the printed magazine route entirely, and focus her intentions on online visitors.

Let's start with the fact that "free" isn't always free. It all depends on how you define free - my point being that you can spend many hours doing things for nothing. Only when you count up the hours, it would actually represent a substantial financial input.

If you have the time, blogging and article writing are two possibilities. Another is to comment on blogs and get visitors that way - and this is certainly effective.

There are methods that are inexpensive. Google Search (PPC) and their display network are two that offer exceptional value for money. Just learning about these will be as good a use of your time as any blogging activities. What's more, for the price of a cup of coffee each day you get some genuinely interested leads. Not many, however the great thing about PPC is that once things are moving, you can build on this and start to make a profit. You can also gauge very quickly if your ideas are working or not - and if not, change tack. You can then put this information into your blog posts and comments to make them yet more interesting for your better prospects.

There are a few ways to go with a magazine - give it away for free and get the costs covered by ads or sell subscriptions to the readers (and maybe also sell ads). Which way are you going, or is the model something else?

Once this is set, the next question is who does she need to reach?

Then we can start working on ways to reach them (and keep in mind that there are not many free methods, though there are some that are low cost in money but usually require time on her part - like the idea above of writing articles).

I have started and am still running a magazine that is the advertiser supported method. Wrote a little bit about how to set pricing for ads on a blog post at https://expandabroad.blogspot.com/2011/06/ads-in-new-publication.html. At the end, it also provides a link to a book that she may find worth reading.