Frequently Asked Questions

VUI stands for voice user interface. This is a layer that allows your readers to find and listen to your periodical content via a skill on Alexa and other emerging services.
When should you consider starting your VUI?

• When your organization is a periodical or puts out one or more periodicals that are crucial to your organizational goals
• OR you publish content frequently
• OR you have a blog you feel passionate about

For more information, see our VUI design service page.

Lead generation for magazines is not truly complicated, but the devil is in the details.
Flip180 focuses on what level you’re at. If you have social platforms, but fewer than 5,000 followers, we can help you to build out real, organic followers that come to you via industry-proven special skill sets and tools we employ.
For more info, go to our LeadGen services page.

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate and viable means for periodicals and other content providers and influencers to generate revenue. Having lots of the right kind of readers is the key.

Flip180 currently has three kinds of affiliates:

1. B2B content publishers with one or more websites with lots of content. They monetize their site content to build a passive revenue stream.
2. Influencers who have a large social media following and want services to recommend to their own B2B / agency audience.
3. Agencies or consultants who consult a steady stream of clients on worthwhile services from reputable companies they happen to believe in and understand.

For full details, see the Affiliate Program page.

Sign up now!

There are a number of ways to attract a new digital audience after converting a periodical from print to digital.

Some of the more effective ways include:

• Advertising (instant and highly scalable audience development method)

Publishing your print issue archive (helps create a body of content that search engines find attractive)

• Publish to popular digital newsstands (opens your digital publication to highly-trafficked marketplaces, such as Google Play, the Apple Apps store, Amazon, and other)
• Develop a multi-publishing network (to start serving your niche with new products, such as community forums, directories, job boards, YouTube channels, etc.)

Need help? For more information about how to market to your audience…

There are actually two common methods to monetize a magazine earlier:
(1) affiliate marketing and (2) the Google AdSense network.

Affiliate marketing is a conversion-based marketing model whereby you sell other people’s products related to your niche and then get paid per sale.
Google AdSense is an ad network wherein you register your website or publication and it starts feeding you different ads. In this model, you get paid per the number of clicks rather than per sale.
Learn how Flip180 can help you monetize a magazine right out of the gate!

Okay. We’re a tiny bit biased on this subject. But the answer would still be yes even if we didn’t design magazine websites.
A website is a must-have component for any successful online periodical for several reasons:

• Your website will be the core of your digital publishing business.
• Your magazine website will be the linchpin that connects your audience to all of your products.
• Your magazine website will also ultimately be the best and easiest way to convert all of your leads to subscribers.
• Most of your audience, if not 100%, will be reading you on a smart phone at some point.
• With a single mobile-first web design, you can capture more of your true audience and be ready for the AI revolution (don’t worry, this is not the skynet part).

For more information on going digital with your print magazine, see our print-to-digital program, or click over to our web design page for just the bits about the magazine website design.

Yes. Our system works well with a paid subscription model.
It allows you to convert print magazine subscriptions to digital subscriptions with ease. We can either

• display free excerpts of your content before requesting a visitor to login/register or
• we can make all content paid, requiring the user to login/register when they visit your issue cover.

On your backend, your subscriber list can compare against the registration info from there, as the first registered user to match with a paid subscriber can then verify the last four digits of the card on file.

Not sure how to do it? We can help with that. and even with finding the right paid subscription model and incentives!

How long does it take to design a magazine? It depends on the number of pages and the complexity of your subject matter, but a minimum of two weeks is needed on even the smallest and simplest magazines.
Want more explicit answers? Take a stroll through our related content on magazine design…

While you can do this, it’s not the best practice to publish your magazine online exactly as it appeared in print. Instead, we recommend a digital overhaul that’s optimized to read and function online.

That said, if your budget doesn’t allow for a redesign right now, that’s no a problem. We offer the more affordable and straightforward Classic Digital Edition. For this option, all we need is your magazine in a PDF file and we can have your publication online the very next day.

A Classic Digital Edition is an easy temporary solution to quickly and affordably get your publication online, but, again, we strongly recommend that you reflow your print edition for digital publication when you’re ready to deal with that.

We often hear this question: What’s the best format for sending content to production teams?

Our answer: The best way to send your content to the production team is via a Cloud service that can hold the above files. We prefer Google Drive or Dropbox exchange files.

Caveat: We prefer text content with hyperlinks to be delivered as a .doc file, images as either .jpg or .png files, and video as .mp4 files.

If we’re currently working on your magazine, don’t be shy, contact us with an invitation to view, download and edit your docs here.

There are two methods we commonly employ to digitize your print magazine.

A replica edition is similar to the print edition of your publication. In fact, the whole design process for the replica edition is very similar to designing your publication for print. We work on US Letter or A4 paper size per page, adjusting the content to look good when printed in actual size and inserting advertisements that are sold by size. However, what’s different from the print process is that we include fields for interactive elements, which are integrated into the replica edition seamlessly. These interactive elements can include links, videos, slideshows, and more, all of which can make your content more vibrant and engaging for your readers.

This is an effective and affordable way to publish your publication in both print and digital editions.

See the replica edition in action.

This may be the best solution for your publishing business, but there are some disadvantages to keep in mind. Foremost among these disadvantages are readability issues across differing devices and screen sizes. While this option displays well on a desktop monitor, mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, are generally smaller than the printed page this option is based off of.

Fortunately, our next method solves this problem and makes the reading experience better for your digital audience.

A reflow edition overhauls your print edition like nothing else. By utilizing responsive content that looks appealing on every screen size without having to zoom, a reflow edition doesn’t have to take the viewing devices of your audience into account. While a reflow edition is often the best bet for transitioning your print content into digital, your layout and design must be created anew due to font considerations. Because the best size for reading varies from 14px to 16px, your digital publication will likely not fit on the exact same number of pages as your print version.

At Flip180 Media, we believe that it’s very important to preserve as many pages in your publication as possible in order to maximize the opportunities to sell ads by page (versus by click) so as to, ultimately, generate more revenue for you.

See them in action:

• reflow edition double page
• reflow edition single page

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NOTE: You may want to pursue a reflow edition if you’re running a digital-only publication. It’s also a great way to add extra value to your print version’s digital edition

1. Get a complete SEO audit of your website’s on-site assets (domain configuration, pages, posts, images, etc.) using the relevant tools and an expert who knows how to use and read the tools.
2. Get a complete competitive intelligence (CI) audit of your niche competitors, again, by an expert preferrably. Choose the top 3-10 relevant competitors. Tracking these competitors over time will help yu learn your niche better, as well.
3. Track organic search results (“SEO”), social media footprint and advertising footprint as your 3 top concerns per competitor within your CI tool (or make sure you get a general report on each dimension from your consultant).
4. Consider your budget and let that help your decide whether to focus on SEO, content marketing, social media, or advertising, or a
5. Develop your content strategy carefully so that you have a multi-faceted plan to get organic search rankings via social and similar popularity signals to Google’s search algortihm. This part depends on that CI we talked about earlier.
6. If you think your brand should be creating steady content flow, create a blog optimized for SEO. Plugins will help with this, but you’ll need high-level expertise on the technical end, such as a PHP coder (WordPress is in PHP, as are most other blog website solutions).
7. Consider carefully your key content distribution channels. Social platforms may apply here but so can other websites like outside blogs, curator sit“es, product review sites. Some apps and videos could be relevant, but so could online retail stores who dropship or referral sites for your niche services.
8. Select your social media platforms carefully and wisely. They’re not all useful your your niche or product/service. A good rule of thumb is consumer platforms for consumer business, B2B-oriented platforms for B2B. For example: Twitter and LinkedIn for a consulting business makes more sense than Facebook and Instagram normally, unless you have multimedia and images that consumers could help you grow your SEO footprint.
9. If advertising, focus on just a few keywords till you get the campaign optimized. Expect to waste a certain percentage of ad spend for the first 3 months while you optimize the campaigns, ads as well as the landing pages on the website itself. It’s unavoidable. Simply put: dn’t advertise if you don’t have “learning capital” to burn (via credit card is the safest bet).
10. For SEO also, focus on promoting pages with just a few keywords also helps you to make progress and build realistic confidence in both SEO as a marketing practice and in your own ability to make those results happen. Build out from there, and by related keyword phrases (having the same core keyword(s) in each suceeding phrase, then on to synonyms, then enytire different phrases.
11. If for any reason you can’t manage the above on your own, get a qualilfied marketing agency with some solid experience in your niche. Use this guide in your project description. If they say they can’t do a part, find the agencies who can. Prefer to go with a single agency whenever possible, as the more you spend with any one source, the better treatment and results you will ultimately receive back on your investment.
12. Never change anything on or about your website without your marketing expert’s express approval and delight. We can’t stress this last part enough. Suffiice it to say that there are hidden obstacles awaiting such changes, specially for SEO but also for ad campaigns (via the ad grouop landing pages). Also, don’t rely on only a single expert. You’ll need some ttechnical insights on the site’s coding language and other things like branding and content strategy input. Sometimes, even your social media strategy could be impacted.

Still have questions about how to market an online magazine?

For more in-depth and detailed information on many of these components, see our blog post on How to Market an Online Magazine.