Imagine advertising a full page advert in a magazine which will cost in excess of $5,000, not to mention the cost that may come from hiring a professional marketer to compile a reasonable advert to get you 5 seconds of the readers’ attention.
You are much better off to promote through “education” than putting together a banner or an advert and hoping someone will take notice. You do not need to be a brilliant writer or rocket scientist to get published. Just be genuine, and offer useful and interesting content to your reader. Most importantly don’t sound like an advertisement; be helpful, practical, and your effort will eventually pay off.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
If you would like to write for a specific magazine, before submitting an article to be considered, take time to do the research first and get to know the publication. If you take the hit and miss approach, you will be spending a lot of time and see no real result. Go to the newsagency, grab hold of the publication, read through it and ask yourself the following questions:
1. Frequency:
Is the target a bi-monthly, monthly or a quarterly publication? If you submit something now and gets accepted, it will not appear in the next issue. Magazines often work 3 to 6 months in advance, so get prepared in advance.
2. Topic/theme:
Flip through the magazine and see what topics they cover. If they already covered staff retention, it’s very unlikely they will consider the same topic again for a while. Also look into their archive and see what they covered in the past. If you can take a new approach to an old topic you’ll still have a good chance.
3. Target audience:
The best way to determine their target audience is by looking at the advertisement, you may not always trust what they say in an ad, but you can be certain they have done their homework in researching the demographics.
4. Length of an article:
Editors prefer an article between 600 - 850 words. Only for a feature article, they will consider something between 1000 to 1500 words.
5. Tone/style:
Some publication prefer a formal approach in the third person, other publication may prefer a more conversational style. For journals, it is always very formal and academic. For magazines, they prefer to use case studies to illustrate a point.
After doing all the home work and before sending your article to be considered, pay 100% attention to the title and the first paragraph. If the first paragraph is not compelling enough, you can certainly expect that the editor is not going to look further.
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