Hey there and welcome to your Weekend Takeaways for this week!

A particularly warm welcome to everyone who’s joining us thanks to my Pre-Black Friday/my daughter’s birthday sale.

It’s good to have you along for the ride and you’ll find here a selection of weekly tips and information that is all…free!

This week I want to focus first on a business model I know can benefit all of us, whatever field of marketing you focus on, and that is online magazines.

I’ve been wanting to take a deeper look into this for a while as I think it’s an excellent way to promote yourself as well as your products and services, including, for affiliate marketers, those provided by other people.

Publishing an online magazine may sound challenging but it really is not because there are a number of really good free services that will enable you to create and publish a really professional looking magazine for free.

Yes, you can upgrade for more options but I’ve been trying out the free options first and I am pretty impressed.

First up here is a selection of the best sites where you can create an online magazine for free:

http://www.joomag.com/

http://www.jilster.com (free online – pay to physically publish)

http://glossi.com/about/

http://fun.kyti.me/index.php/2012/05/create-your-own-online-magazine/

Yudu is slightly broader in its approach as you can also make use of its free online library which contains a wealth of content and publish more extensive content yourself, including ebooks and multimedia:

http://free.yudu.com/

For an excellent free ebook on how to do all of this go to MakeUseOf (another site I love) and download the PDF or ePub version of this:

http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/design-and-publish-your-own-free-digital-magazine

MakeUseOf also publish a great free guide to Feedly which is a great way to gather content speedily and easily for your publication:

http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/unofficial-guide-to-feedly-better-than-google-reader

So how would you promote and distribute your magazine? One great way is through social media and I particularly like Mashable’s case studies on the subject, showing how real life online and offline companies are taken in hand by an expert and given advice on ramping up their efforts:

http://mashable.com/2013/08/08/social-makeover-baby-sense/

http://mashable.com/2013/07/12/social-makeover-exterminator/

Just to keep you on top of social media, it’s not too early to look at the trends for 2014 – note how short form social media such as Twitter and Vine is hot and so is (I’m resisting that ‘I told you so’ urge 🙂 ) video:

http://fredericgonzalo.com/en/2013/11/03/5-social-media-marketing-trends-for-2014/

For our Kindle freebie this week, I found a great little book that answers a question so many people ask: Why is my website not making money? I like the authors of this because they favour strategy over tactics.

Here’s a quote from a review to give you more insight:

“What the McDermotts do well is teach the business person how to think beyond personal emotion, while tapping into the unspoken desires and fears of clients and potential clients alike. The result must be, more effective communication and satisfaction, which leads to completely satisfied customers.”

And you can grab the book here (if you are not in the US, change the suffix to your country suffix, i.e. to amazon.co.uk/Hook etc)

http://www.amazon.com/Hook-Websites-Fail-Make-Money-ebook/dp/B00FJMBNVO/

Finally, our TED talk and this week I am not ashamed to admit this made me cry. A truly inspiring talk from Ric Elias, CEO of Red Ventures, who was on the plane that crashed into the Hudson:

3 things I learned while my plane crashed

 

 

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