Owning a magazine might pose certain difficulties nowadays. The majority of regular newspapers and magazines are experiencing a significant decrease in demand. That’s the burning issue with paper publications. Why not digitalize your business then? Due to the fact that the lion’s share of traffic comes from smartphones, it makes sense to create a mobile app for your magazine or newspaper. There could be serious pitfalls on the way to success, so, we’d like to walk you through the process.
In order to build a demanded magazine or newspaper app, you shall perform such steps, as:
Table of Contents
#1. Formulate the idea
At the outset, it’s critical to determine what kind of service you’d like to create. Also, make sure you have a clear understanding of what you expect to receive at the end, so you need to define specific requirements. In the process of development, you might require to adjust the strategy to some extend, and it’s a usual practice when it comes to mobile app designing.
#2. Analyze the market
It’s strongly recommended to undertake an extensive analysis to figure out what kind of solutions will most likely win the hearts of the audience. For this purpose, you might need some professional assistance, so you have to know how to find good developers who are also qualified to conduct the marketing analysis. Obviously, you could take care of this stage by yourself. Here are the key aspects to pay attention to:
- define the latest tendencies;
- study your target audience and their essential needs;
- figure out the strong and weak points of your future competitors.
#3. Choose the platform
After having conducted the research and adjusted the strategy in accordance with the obtained results, it’s the right time to make a decision on what platform – iOS and/or Android – your app shall support. The analysis of the future users you will conduct by this point shall guide you on what to select.
In the best-case scenario, you develop an app for both platforms, allowing you to enlarge your audience coverage. With such an approach, you shall decide on whether you go for cross-platform or native development. This choice might be more complicated than it seems, so ask the developers you hire to reveal all advantages and disadvantages of each method to choose wisely.
#4. Designate the feature set
When you understand what potential users expect, you can easily implement corresponding features into your newspaper online service. Moreover, the analysis of the market conditions and what the rivals offer will also give you a few ideas on what your solution has to deliver.
#5. Find expert development agency
Mobile app development involves multiple phases, and you’ll probably need some help from professionals. You have to get serious about finding and hiring those specialists since the future of your platform depends on this choice. You could check the portfolio of a company you’re about to hire, or even get in touch with their previous clients to see if they’re satisfied with the service provided.
#6. Estimate costs
Earlier, your strategy was elaborated based upon the initial analysis, and it’s the perfect moment to make it more relevant, accurate, and effective. Now, you need to correlate it with the budget you have in hand and the amount you need. The idea is to plan to make sure all the interested parties are satisfied.
#7. Prototype
This is when you design an esteemed sketch version of the service you’d like to obtain. Prototyping serves to see how the finished product will “behave”. This phase is for you to take a look at your app features before you code them.
#8. Design UX/UI
The designers shall thoroughly draw every screen of your newspaper solution for the app. At this point, you’ll receive the complete design of the final app, however, with no software yet.
#9. Develop the app
Well, that’s about time to get down to the actual development procedures. The programmers you employ will use all the material collected during the previous stages to turn the app concept into a concrete magazine platform of your own. That would be the most labor-intensive and time-consuming process.
#10. Test what you get
The task of the quality assurance team is to comprehensively test the developed product to ensure it functions trouble-free. You don’t want your users to struggle with some crashes, do you? Bugs and glitches might turn the audience away, thus, testing is a must.
#11. Maintain the app
Advanced services represent living organisms that demand persistent care. Your app needs to be supported and maintained, and regular updates are highly recommended
Monetization options
Without a doubt, every app owner expects his brainchild to drive good revenue. Speaking of online magazine resources, the below options will ensure the best-desired effect:
- paid app;
- subscription;
- freemium model;
- free trial period;
- in-app ads;
- in-app purchases;
- sponsors/partners.
You could try to combine a few approaches to achieve better results, but remember to show some care to your users and not get too greedy.
How to make your Newspaper App special
While working on your platform you shall understand that you’ll have to compete with other similar solutions presented on the market. We’d like to give you several hints and tips to stand out from your competitors:
- Properly-established navigation. Readers shall need to take only several clicks to find what they’re looking for. Smart navigation is an effective tool to turn a one-time visitor into your regular user.
- An accurate portrait of your users. Your key objective is to aim at average users. Such a strategy shall bring you greater results.
- Best possible user experience. The content you offer shall be personalized as much as possible. You need to take certain measures to help the audience enjoy the read.
- App design. It makes sense to apply the corporate style to your online service. Keep the design vivid and eye-catchy.
- Marketing strategy. Smart promotion and advertising are also critical to think through. These days you won’t succeed without marketing.
- Neat pushes. When properly established, push notifications can turn out to be really helpful. Just try not to overdo with them. If you send 5+ notifications every day, people will most likely delete your service for good.
- Multilingual support. In case you’re planning to cover multiple regions, it’s pretty clear that you’ll need to provide support in different languages, so don’t forget about this aspect.
