Content is all important in any magazine, even a community magazine.

You will be reliant on advertisers for your income. Ask yourself why they would want to advertise in your publication? The answer has to be, ‘Because it’s a nice, entertaining read with articles slanted towards encouraging the reader to use their services.’

No-one is going to read a magazine which consists solely of pages and pages of advertisements and if a reader isn’t going to flick through the magazine then what’s the point of anyone advertising in it.

The householder to whom you’re delivering your publication has to have a reason for opening it so you have to give them one…or several.

These could include:

Many people who set up a magazine are reluctant to put editorial pages into their publication; after all, editorial content isn’t earning them money is it?

In my magazine I produced a history article once a month in collaboration with the local historical society. Every month I had several advertisers requesting they were opposite or near that particular page because everyone in the village always read that page first. Hence any adverts I placed on adjacent pages could be charged for at premium rates.

Likewise if there was a particular advertiser I was trying to sign up I’d write a targeted article. The editorial ‘club’ I had access to through my franchise was good but didn’t always have exactly what I needed.

For instance, I’d had no luck trying to get one of the two butchers or the garden centre to advertise with me so I wrote an article about barbecuing and used it to sell space to one of the butchers and the garden centre (which sold barbecues). And of course once one butcher was in, the other one wanted to be in too…on a better page and was willing to pay more money for the privilege.

Before long I had other local magazine publishers wanting to purchase my articles and the idea for thewritecontent site was born.

Some editorial content, a community page or a letters page for instance, is not difficult to produce yourself. Some other content might suggest itself through local societies (historical societies / church groups etc), there are always budding writers willing to help out for the chance to see themselves in print. There's no doubt about it though, if you want to encourage people to read all through your magazine (thus encouraging advertisers) you will have to provide a few nice, well produced articles. The main problem with editorial content for a one-man community magazine set-up is the time it takes to write it.

Editorial content takes time to produce it well and when you run a magazine on your own you really need to spend that time selling your advertising space.

So I’ve set up the content club. Every month I produce five fresh ful-page and three half-page articles plus a recipe, book reviews, puzzles and a children's page for you to use in your magazine.