CAN YOU ACHIEVE HIGH CIRCULATION
FOR YOUR PUBLISHED MAGAZINE?

The number of copies of your own community magazine that you can realistically distribute around your home community is directly proportional to your towns population and the interest that your published magazine contains. You should aim for a figure in relation to 10% of your towns population without exerting yourself too much and perhaps much more depending on the amount of effort you are prepared to devote to the task.

Promoting your magazine within your community might seem an easy task but from experience, it is surprising how some people living within the community can go for months or even years before they first encounter a copy of your magazine. Reaching out to people from your community who now live further afield will take some time but before long you will begin receiving subscriptions from all around the world.

Initially you need to promote your community magazine within your home community. Aim to gain the support of all local shopkeepers and have copies on display throughout the month. If you have a website, then use that to promote your magazine, or better still, construct a website for your home town if one is not available already and use that to also promote the publication and availability of your magazine.

Word of mouth is one of the best forms of promotion.  People will purchase copies of your magazine to send to friends and family and very soon you will begin generating more and more interest.

Try to provide something in your magazines that will appeal to all age groups or think of special projects that would involve the younger generations.  The more people you can get involved the higher your circulation rates will become.

You will find that a lot of people pass copies around, but the format of a community magazine lends itself ideally to collection. Your magazines will form a valuable record of your towns past and many people will begin collecting them to save for their future generations. At the present time, community magazines devoted to single communities are few and far between and there certainly will hardly have been anything like it before. They are a unique record of the towns history.

Your community magazine will contain something of interest to every single member within your community.  It is up to you to provide that variety of interest and to persuade your readers that they need to purchase your magazine every month. It must give them something they cannot obtain elsewhere and must contain something that is useful or of interest to them. The price of your magazine will be easily affordable, it's not going to break anyone's bank, so go out there and sell it to them.  Make them want it.

Michael Norfolk

[INDEX]