Writers Who interview talent and write articles that tell the tales you want them to, in the way you want – whether that’s fascinating, witty, informative or just a downright good read. Glossy, bright and engaging, there’s nothing more eye-catching than a magazine article.
There are several reasons why a company might want to produce their own magazine. For one, a company magazine can serve as an effective marketing tool, helping to increase brand awareness and reach a wider audience. It can also be a great way to showcase the company's products and services, and to share news and updates with customers and clients. Additionally, a company magazine can help to establish the company as a thought leader in its industry, and can provide a platform for sharing company culture and values with employees and stakeholders. Producing a company magazine can be a valuable investment that can help to support and enhance the overall brand and reputation of the organisation.
As a company, producing your own magazine can be a valuable investment that can help to increase brand awareness, showcase your products and services, and establish your organization as a thought leader in your industry. At Writers Who, we have years of experience curating magazine content for our clients and have compiled our top tips for making a successful magazine. These include keeping it brief, using pictures to illustrate your points, understanding your audience, finding the right angle, and keeping it simple. By following these tips, you can create compelling and engaging magazine content that will have your audience coming back for more.
Whether it’s a story about 12-steps to success, a how-to guide, an opinion piece on a topical issue or an in-depth profile of a figure in the industry, magazines are a compelling format for engaging your membership base, stakeholders, prospective clients or the general public.
While the topics can range from silly to taboo to incredibly informative, there is a fine art to crafting a magazine article that will have copies flying off the shelves, or article clicks aplenty.
When choosing topics for a magazine, it's important to consider the interests and needs of your target audience. This will help to ensure that the topics you choose will be relevant and engaging to the people who will be reading your magazine. Here are some tips for choosing topics for a magazine:
By following these tips, you can write a great magazine article that will be enjoyable and valuable to your readers. Some of these articles will be feature length (1500 words or more), while others will be sharper extracts or columns (250-500 words).
With years of experience curating magazine content for our clients, Writers Who know exactly which steps to take to create the perfect magazine content. Here, we’ve compiled our top tips for making a successful magazine come to life.
There’s a reason magazine audiences aren’t picking up a book or searching up academic articles. While there is a market for that, magazine audiences want to be delivered what they need to know on a shiny silver platter, rather than having to wade through information to find the golden nugget they’re looking for.
This is why it’s important to choose a topic that you can eloquently get your point across in short-form paragraphs, dot points or subheads.
A magazine article is different from other types of content in several ways. For one, it is typically shorter and more concise than other forms of writing, such as a book, white paper or academic article. Magazine articles are also typically written for a specific audience and are designed to be engaging and entertaining, rather than purely informative.
Magazine articles often feature a range of visual elements, such as pictures and graphics, to help illustrate the points being made and to make the content more appealing to readers. The main difference between a magazine article and other types of content is that it is designed to be a quick and enjoyable read that provides value to the reader without requiring a lot of time or effort.
Magazine layouts are bright and colourful, like a picture book for adults. Rather than predominantly rely on the article like a newspaper, magazines place great emphasis on the layout as a whole. This includes a range of beautiful photos and pictures to illustrate your point.
Whether you’re looking at a glossy interior design magazine, or a trade publication, every picture selected has a purpose and is meticulously curated. When approaching your article, make sure you can source photos that add value and meaning to your topic, and that you have the legal rights to use them. These can be sourced from websites such as Shutterstock and Getty, or free use Creative Commons content from websites such as Unsplash.
Before you begin to plan the topic of your next magazine article, it’s imperative that you understand who your audience is, and what they’re looking for. There’s no point in delivering niche content to audiences who are uninterested. If you have an online presence such as Instagram or Facebook which shows measures analytics, it’s important to refer to what content receives the most engagement. Better yet, if you’ve conducted research, keep it in mind at all times. The main key points to decipher are your readers' gender, age range, interests, hobbies, financial/ socioeconomic status and marital/family situation.
When in doubt, ask yourself the following questions;
Once you’ve nailed down your demographic, and your topic, it’s important to decipher the angle you’re going to take. Why do you care about this topic, and more importantly, why should the reader? The beauty of this is that dozens of writers could approach the same topic but from a completely different perspective. They’re all valid, but by checking in with your audience and analytics, it should point you in the right direction as to what angle will be most applicable for them.
One of the hardest things about writing magazine content is sticking to the word count. While concise language is easier to read, it’s much harder to get your point across in a few sentences than paragraph after paragraph. To make sure you’re saying exactly what you need to in a clear, succinct way, write yourself an outline or structure to follow, allocating the word count at each stage.
Even if you know your topic inside and out, research is an incredibly important part of any magazine article. Whether you need more recent information, or more examples, research makes any article more informative and valuable for readers and clients.
Ultimately, for your publication to be a trusted source by readers, you need to use trusted sources such as or peer-reviewed scholarly articles. To keep your article relevant, make sure to use credible experts, and scholarly articles from within the last few years.
Sometimes after the research stage, your article might benefit from first-hand accounts or interviews. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people for a chat to further strengthen your article. You can source experts of people with first-hand accounts of your topic through websites like Sourcebottle. You can choose to either quote them directly, or use their information as background to help contextualise your topic.
For many writers and journalists, this is the most daunting bit, but the sooner you sit down and get started, the sooner you’ll have your content. It doesn’t have to be perfect right away, but putting words down on the page is a great place to start.
Here are some things to remember:
There’s nothing worse than great content that reads terribly. Wordy sentences, typos and bad formatting can affect the way audiences interpret, and trust, your content. Before you go to print, or hit publish, it’s important to have a read over it to check for any errors or typos. If you’ve spent hours pouring over your article, it’s easy to skim over any mistakes. To avoid that, you can wait until the next day to edit so you have fresh eyes when looking for errors, or put it through a text to speech generator so you can listen if anything sounds clunky or incorrect. But the best way to ensure your copy is clean and error-free is to appoint an editor to review before publication.
Admittedly, there are a lot of steps involved when creating quality magazine content. While it can be time consuming, convoluted and tricky to create quality pieces for your magazine, it’s a great way to connect to your audience in an easily digestible, clear way.
Writers Who are journalists who write copy for a wide range of clients and publications every day. We understand content and know exactly which steps to take to ensure your message is delivered clearly and effectively. If you get stuck, we’re always here to help.
