A good friend of mine approached me at South by Southwest earlier this year in Austin. He’d been milling around the Exhibition Hall for the Interactive part of the tri-fest experience (music+film+interactive) and one of the first things he mentioned when seeing me for the first time was, “…If one more person uses the phrase ‘this economy,’ I’m going to scream!” Because of this, I have bitten my lips and not uttered that phrase for nearly six months. Now it’s time to say it…
Indeed, “this economy” has had its impact on magazines — and music magazines in particular. Metal Edge, Metal Maniacs, Blender, Remix, R&R, Jazz Times, Vibe and a few more have bit the dust in recent past. Ad sales in general (in pretty much every genre) have taken a dip in the last couple of years. And there’s probably been a thousand blogs that have elaborated ad nauseam about the woes of the music industry, CD sales, file-sharing, the whole bit. I’ve even seen a poll somewhere that hinted that evangelical numbers were going down in the US. Not quite sure I buy that last one, but my job at HM has certainly gotten harder in the past two years. It’s made me realize how one of the three major wheels of income (subscriptions + newsstand sales + advertising sales) is quite larger than the other two. With a large 5-digit print bill due every two months, large ad sales have consistently paid those bills and other overhead costs over the years. We’ve had a certain quota for ad sales that I don’t think has been met since last September.
So, what have I done to keep HM Magazine going?
1. Well, first of all, I had to look inward and see if I still wanted to, see if I believed God was still calling me to this, and figuring out if I had the energy to keep going. The answer is “Yes!” I am committed to HM Magazine, full tilt. I have very strong opinions and convictions that there will always be a need for print magazines. Bring on the Kindles and the readable online webzines! There is something special and tangible about holding a magazine in your hand. How else are you going to get that dog to stop jumping on you? Swat that fly? Or pass the time while you’re passing something else (ewww!)?
2. I have had to work really hard, easily doubling my efforts. We scaled back, reluctantly laying off our marketing/advertising sales team. We even had a couple of writers donate their writers fees for a couple issues earlier this year. We’ve lowered our overhead at the HM office and basically “streamlined” our operations.
3. I’ve had to stay innovative. Part of my job description is to stay on top of things, trends, changes and make necessary changes and being adept when necessary. A couple years ago, when online/digital issues were coming out, I jumped on board. We’ve had an online or digital issue of some sort since.
4. I’ve attempted to learn the ropes on making my own online magazine. This latest issue (Sep/Oct) is the first one I’ve made available (to subscribers) as a PDF, which is open-able with a password. I’ve recently discovered how to make webpages secure in this way, too, so I will be rolling out the editorial from this issue in that format soon.
5. We re-designed our website. Our previous website served us well and was really appealing to my eyes, but it seemed time for a change. One of the guys on our proofreading team made an offer to redesign in and we contracted him to do so. I’m really pleased with the results.
6. We’ve also added more interactivity to HM Magazine. I stay in touch with whoever wants to via twitter, facebook, and myspace. This has been an improvement to the old message board format, which has seemed to die off slightly in activity. But whenever I post something juicy on twitter, I’ll get 40-50 comments on the www.facebook.com/HM.Magazine site. I’m digging that.
7. We recently started posting news as it comes in — whether that’s daily or whatever. In addition to the “News Collection” that we post up weekly, now the bigger, edgier and timely-er posts go up almost immediately. Hopefully, this will get our web traffic back up to the 300,000 unique visits per month we were averaging about two years ago.
8. I am starting to produce the HM Magazine Podcast myself. In letting our marketing department go, I had to figure out a way to keep the Podcast going. I hope to nail this format down and crank one out per month. Hopefully, consistency will keep the 50,000 listeners per episode we’ve been averaging.
9. The HM Enewsletter comes out once per week, which includes blurbs from the 12 updated news stories from our “News Collection” on the website, along with a trivia question with prizes, and the occasional “e-nouncement” about pertinent news and services.
10. We’re rocking the content. We’re making sure the product stays good and always improves. Now we need to market ourselves more. Back in the peak of HM Magazine’s heyday (when it was called Heaven’s Metal Magazine), we had a lot of momentum and, even though we were advertising (in mags like CCM, Guitar World, Rip and Metal Edge), we had “word of mouth” marketing. It seemed like most kids into bands like Whitecross, Vengeance, Believer, Living Sacrifice and Styper also knew about this magazine called Heaven’s Metal. Now, since the scene has exploded, with so many bands growing beyond the Christian bookstore market (aka CBA), it seems our need to market ourselves more has grown. We’ve sponsored tours, like this year’s Scream The Prayer Tour and the upcoming Showbread tour, and we did something that we used to do all the time. In the latest Red CD that came out last February, we had an insert that promoted HM Magazine subscriptions. It’s seemed to have worked well. Last time I checked we had 177 subscriptions come in as a result of that.
11. I’m bringing back “The Hard Music Cabinet,” where we get locals out there to report on what’s going on. It was a brilliant feature that former Managing Editor Jason Dodd came up with, but over the years it became difficult to manage, so we scrapped it. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to keep it fresh and keep it coming.
12. The HM commercial spots that we had done in 2008 are rocking in high-definition. Those are on youtube on the playlist that we try to keep updated and fresh — here.
13. The HM-branded web browser is totally cool. In addition to the HM graphics being on the Mozilla Firefox browser skin, there’s buttons for news, podcasts, and this video playlist.
I’d share more here, but frankly I’ve got to get to work selling ads for the next issue. It’s got two fantastic bands on the cover — Living Sacrifice and Flyleaf. I hope it turns out as fantastic as I’m thinking it might…
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