Should a local newsletter launch a print magazine?

Eventually, yes. Not first. I'm thinking a lot about launching a print product, and I'm not doing it yet. At the start I wrote print off completely. Now I think a local media company should become a print business at some point, once the digital side works.

"It's the combo that's the gold. It's both. That's when you have gold, when you're doing both."

Why would a digital brand add print at all?

Because it's what business owners want. Many local advertisers are still slow to value digital, and a lot of them want print because they want to touch things. A consultant's advice I passed to an operator was to go all in on three things: newsletter, short-form social, and print. The reason for print isn't that tons of people will read it. It's specifically that business owners want it.

Print also gets advertisers to pay instead of readers. Models that depend on readers paying are hard. A magazine is an advertiser product.

Why start with the newsletter and add print later?

Most local media went print first, then websites in the 2010s, and now they're all moving to newsletters. They started with print because that's what you had to do back then. It's a high-expense way to start. I'm doing the opposite: newsletter first because it's cheaper, more engaging and trackable, then website, then print once the audience, brand and advertiser list exist.

The math is the reason. In the newsletter I only need to sell a few ads because my costs aren't that high. A magazine or paper needs a lot more. I put website, newsletter and social at about 90% less money than print. Picture covering a $2,000 or $3,000 monthly cost instead of selling $10,000 to $12,000 in magazine ads before you make a dollar.

Print also doesn't give you the data. With our signup survey we get data on about 80% of subscribers. That's the gold, and you don't get it with a magazine.

How does targeted print work?

You choose who gets it. One publisher mails 5,000 magazines only to four zip codes, and only to the houses in the wealthy part of town. Advertisers say: I want to be in front of those people. You're selling a specific audience, not a circulation number.

My own pitch would sound like this: a business used to paying about $500 for a quarter page asks who you're sending it to. You say 6,000 addresses in that part of town. For a seniors edition, it could be 10,000 magazines mailed to the 10,000 richest homes in the senior areas of a region.

From what guests on my show have described, print works when it's advertiser-funded: saturation mail into chosen routes, or a magazine that features the advertisers. Never reader-paid.

What's the smallest way to start print?

Baby-step into it. Skip the 50-page glossy with journalists and heavy costs. My ladder looks like this:

1. A postcard. One card with about four ads on each side, as an add-on for advertisers who still want print.
2. A pamphlet. 16 to 20 pages, where 16 of them are basically ads and you write a couple of short pieces. Treat it almost like a postcard with more room.
3. A lifestyle magazine. The better vision, and for me that's a year or two away.

The pamphlet idea came from someone in my area who used to sell ads for a local magazine. When he went out on his own he started small for exactly this reason. It's way less work because it's way smaller.

Print makes the most sense once you have the sales arm down. When businesses know you've got a salesperson, more sales come in.

What about a done-for-you magazine?

My hesitation with print was always creating the content. Then at a local media conference in Dallas I met a vendor who makes white-label senior magazines. The articles are already written and timeless: Thanksgiving recipes for the fall issue, health tips, scam tips, technology tips, interesting stories. The pages even have empty slots marked for ads, so you don't have to design it. You add five or ten pages of local stories, change the cover, and she ships it. I called it entrepreneurship in a box: just go sell the ads.

Because generic content has no time issue, you can set a hard rule: don't print until you've sold out. If it costs $5,000 to do and you've sold $3,000, you don't launch. You wait until you get to $8,000 or $10,000. I haven't talked to that printer yet. It's an option, not a plan.

I guess a done-for-you seniors magazine could be a $200,000 to $300,000 business in Williamson County alone. I've heard of a woman running a seniors magazine in a college town in Georgia making something like $10,000 to $20,000 a month, though that's secondhand. The catch with every one of these is the same: it only works if you go crazy on sales, and that's not work I want to do myself.

What does the money look like?

• A legacy publisher on my show still gets over 70% of his revenue from print, even while saying daily print has no future.
• A two-person real estate magazine operation reportedly does about $10 million a year.
• A magazine company with about 40 titles was said to make about $10 million a year.
• A Texas local media company that mails papers to homes unrequested reportedly does about $35 million a year.

Those are other people's numbers, secondhand. The cost side is real too: about $7 per copy to print and mail in one franchisee's case. See print magazine franchise costs.

Could print work across many newsletters?

That's the version that excites me. If I get to 50 or 100 locations, a print product as part of the offering in each one is huge. The local operator sells the ads and submits pages in Canva from our templates. We handle fulfillment and printing, or for extra we talk to the advertisers and design the ads. Instead of spending money launching new newsletters, you'd be making money building the brand, and you end up doing both. The downside is simple: it's a lot of work.

Where does print rank?

1. Newsletter.
2. Short-form social.
3. Print, once the first two work and advertisers ask for it.

For a national senior brand I'd flip part of that: website first, magazine second, newsletter third. For a regular local brand, it stays third.