Sell Digital Magazines with Issuu

The hardest is behind you. You’ve filled your pages with thought-provoking content and designed it beautifully. Your brand has established a social media presence, and your website is looking great. The content is there, you’ve got the audience–– but how about making the sales?

With Issuu, the opportunity to sell your magazine digitally is at your fingertips. All you need to do is set it up! We’ve split it up into three parts to get to the basics of selling a digital magazine.

Part 1: Create a Digital Magazine

This part is something you might have already done, and it just involves uploading all your content to Issuu in the first place. But the important part isn’t the uploading, it’s all the details that you might skip over. It’s important to put all your information on your account to optimize your SEO. We’re talking social media, website, publication date, profile picture – all things that are important to introduce people to your publication.

On the flip side of this is the way you incorporate Issuu on your own website. You might already be embedding your digital publication onto your website, but if you’re not, we highly encourage it. It’s going to help guide people to purchasing your publication digitally.

Part 2: Selling a Digital Magazine

The next thing you have to do is link your Stripe account (or, if you don’t have one, let Issuu make one for you). Stripe is Issuu’s payment partner, and beyond being super easy to use, they also provide you with nifty sales statistics to help you gauge your digital sales progress.

After you set up and connect your Stripe account, all you have to do is set your default currency and price. Your prices are totally up to you and what your business needs. We’ve also got some pricing tips for selling digital magazines with Issuu if you’re not sure where to start.

Putting your digital magazine up for sale isn’t the end of the story, however–– it’s time to boost those sales with marketing.

Part 3: Market Your Digital Magazine

Marketing is important if you want to sell a digital magazine. Without making your audience aware that your digital magazine is for sale, they won’t know to purchase your publication. Issuu has plenty of sharing tools you can use to market your content. Start by creating Issuu Stories from your content to preview your content. Stories are a format optimized for both mobile and desktop to give your readers the best experience possible. Use Issuu’s preview pages effectively. With preview pages for your publication, you can show as many or as few as you’d like, but sharing a few Stories will help entice readers to continue consuming your content. You can show off some impressive spreads, or pull them in with one or two captivating Stories.

Once your content is set up, make sure you embed your Issuu publication on your website and using our Facebook app. It’s important to make sure that your digital magazine and Stories are in as many places as possible in order to capture attention. Stories are the perfect tool for social sharing to give mobile viewers a taste of your publication across platforms and devices.

Just like that, you’ve monetized your content and created a new source of income for your publication while avoiding printing costs.

Ready to give digital publishing a try? Head over to the Issuu Creator Hub to see how Issuu can work for your brand.