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Your website is a social magazine

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Is your website a monologue or an ever changing social magazine? In this Vlog, Grant explains why it should be the latter.

You’ve probably never thought of your website as a magazine but actually, it’s a great way of thinking of it – a social magazine.

Firstly it should be social, because in a world where everybody owns a channel, people expect to be able to make comments, rate content, contribute to ideas and generally have their say.

Secondly, a magazine because it should be highly visual – just like magazines are – and have lots of contributors to make it rich and interesting. There are volumes with one contributor, but they are called books.

The reason why you don’t want to recreate a book, online, is books are one off engagements, whereas, magazines are designed for people to keep coming back and exploring and buying new issues.

Thinking of your site as a magazine, will allow you to have the credibility of working with other contributors and industry experts. You could do guest webinars, get them to write articles or interview them. Having put together a rich array of content, your home page should then be like a shop window.

Just as a shop window tries to highlight the wonderful things inside and, therefore, entices you to come into the store your web site should give a rich array of videos and articles that people can click on, inviting them to explore further. If you do this right people will spend time on your website, lost in the virtual magazine that you’ve created.

And now… how do I get out of here?

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English

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Comments

  1. Thanks Grant. Very thought provoking post….two question. Do you think the days of the blog are over as more websites become more like blogs / magazines? And do you recommend supporting your magazine style website with an evergreen pdf/ printed brochure /ebook? Many thanks for taking the time to respond.

    1. Author

      Hi Austin, these are great questions. I don’t think the days of the blog/vlog are over. It is a useful navigation tool on a website, because people know what it is. It also provides a mechanism for a person/company to give their thoughts on a variety of relevant issues and post regularly. However, I do think that only having a blog/vlog on a website with no other regularly updated material is rather one dimensional. Therefore, these days I don’t think a blog/vlog is good enough on its own (of course there are exceptions).

      With regard to supporting materials such as a pdf/printed brochure I think one size does not fit all. It really depends on what the company does, who the audience is etc. In general, materials that provide value e.g.ebooks, articles, how to guides, podcasts etc. are a good idea and allow for a company to give prospects and customers a multimedia experience that can assist a purchasing decision.

  2. Thanks Grant. I guess the boundary between a blog/vlog and website is getting quite hazy, especially as more and more companies are using social media to give an impression of what goes on behind the scenes. This was previously the domain of a blog, to share ideas & opinions etc!!

    1. Author

      Thanks Austin. I think organisations today simply have to provide a much richer media experience!

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