If you like the idea of having your own business and you enjoy being creative, running a magazine might be exactly the kind of career that would suit you down to the ground. You can choose to create a magazine about anything from shopping to skateboarding, from celebrities to bird watching. As long as the magazine is about something you’re interested in, it will be a fun and potentially profitable endeavor. Here’s how to get started.

Choose A Topic

Until you have chosen the topic or niche of your magazine, you can’t do a lot more, so this needs to be the first thing you do. The topic should be something you know well so that you can position your magazine as an authority on the subject. If you are interested in the topic, it will come across as much more engaging and authentic than if you pick something just because it is ‘of the moment.’

Who Is Your Audience?

Once you know what you’re writing about, you will need to understand who you’re writing for. Knowing this will help you to focus on the style and concept that you need to come up with and stick with throughout your publishing career. If you decide to write for girls under 20, then the style would be different than if you wanted to write for men over 60, for example. Getting the tone right from the start will make your magazine a lot more popular with a wide audience.

Define Your Content

What kind of content are you going to have in your magazine? Will it be news stories, human interest stories, fiction, photographic stories, or lots of facts and figures? Will it be serious or tongue in cheek? You might have a mixture of all of these things which could draw in many more people, but there must be a common thread running throughout. Don’t just rush into designing your first issue if you don’t know what you’re going to be including or you might come across difficulties.

What Tools Do You Need?

Although you might initially only need to use a laptop and the internet to get ideas and start writing the content of the magazine, soon enough you will also need design software and a way to collate all your information; something like the Superdesk headless CMS can help you here. There is software available for all budgets, and when you’re just starting out you might not have the funds to be able to buy top of the line software. However, you should always buy the best that you can afford as it will give you a better end product.

Who Do You Need?

It’s unlikely that you’re going to want to (or be able to) create all the content for your magazine yourself. Therefore you are going to need to reach out to experts in whichever topic it is you want information about to see if they would be willing to give you an interview, give you some advice, or even write a guest piece for your magazine. Remember that sometimes this will be available for free, but in other cases, depending on who you are speaking to, you will need to pay, so your budget has to be able to cope.