31DBBB Day 24: How To Use a Magazine To Improve Your Blog

This is Day 24 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project 60+ of us bloggers are doing together in an effort to help each other become better bloggers. You can read an overview here.

One of my favorite parts of going to the grocery store (aside from sampling anything that I’m allowed to try) is checking out. There’s something about the display of magazines and tabloids that I just have a hard time pulling my attention away from. Those magazine folks must be doing something right if I struggle to tear myself away from the headlines that captivate me!

As we have through other parts of this project, it’s important for us to look at other ‘experts’ in marketing and see what we can learn from them. This time it’s print media that gets put under the microscope.

The cool thing about this one is that I believe that magazines are more similar to blogs than any other offline example that we could be looking at. We both run regular ‘articles’. We both strive to get more subscribers. And in some cases, we may both try to monetize our work based of our [impressive] numbers.

By looking at magazines, we learn some cool things that we can apply to our own blogs:

• Marketing Ideas
• Design Ideas
• Post Ideas
• Monetization Ideas
• Reader Engagement Ideas

While there are certainly many differences between magazines (offline media) and blogs (online media), it won’t take long evaluating a magazine to walk away with long list of things that you’ll want to try right away.

In addition to looking at the print versions of magazines, you may also find it helpful to look at websites for magazines. A good magazine website will take the print version and apply online concepts that may translate into more ideas for your blog. But if you decide to also look at what magazines are doing online, I would recommend having the print version in hand at the same time. This will allow you to see how the print ideas manifest themselves into online formats.

A couple of good Christian magazines (our primary niche) that I would suggest are:

• Christianity Today
• Relevant
• Charisma
• WORLD
• CCM
• Guideposts

Finally, there’s also some wisdom in looking at non-faith based magazines. There’s a lot of great work being done out there that we can glean from, and it would be a shame to not learn from others who are doing great work in media.

Discussion

1. What general lessons have you already learned from observing how magazines do things?
2. What magazines do you think would provide the most value for you as a blogger trying to learn from them?
3. What magazine websites do you think are particularly impressive, and what techniques are you able to identify that might be valuable to you?

The Extra Mile

A few other things you can do to take your blog, other bloggers, and this project even further today…

• Reply & give other bloggers feedback on the little things they do.
• When other bloggers include a link to a new article they’ve posted today, click, read, and comment on it.
• Tweet, share, & bookmark this post.

Dan King is… Christ-follower. husband. father. corporate training development guru. bible college instructor. blogger at bibledude.net. social media editor for highcallingblogs.com. occasional contributor for the 8-BIT network.