Our top tips to improve your publications’ reading time!

In PUBLISHING
20 August 2020
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Making a strong connection between your audience and your brand is a key goal for digital publishers everywhere. In this article, get our tips on how to keep your audience engaged with your publications and improve reading time.

What is reading time?

Reading time is a metric that shows how long people spend viewing your content. On Calaméo, this information is available as part of your account statistics.

You can toggle between the total reading time of your publications and the average reading time per view. The total reading time represents the combined amount across all views. The average reading time represents how long a typical view of your publication lasts.


Thanks to your Calaméo statistics, it’s easy to explore daily, monthly and yearly trends in reading time. Plus, see mobile and desktop breakdown, sources and more.


Reading time can be an especially valuable way to measure audience engagement with your digital publications. The more time people spend reading, the more interested they are in your content—and the more likely they are to keep coming back.

With no further ado, here are four tips to improve reading time for your ditgital publications!

How can I improve reading time?

Use Bold Graphics

Grab your readers’ attention with lively layouts, like in this example from Mixte magazine:

This large, colorful image paired with a pull quote invites the reader to dig into the article and find out more. Clean fonts and plenty of white space make the text easy to read. Fun fonts, new colors and infographics are other great ideas to try.

Index Key Terms

Some readers will view your publication to look for specific information. You can help them find it painlessly by optimizing your document for internal search. All of the text in your publication is automatically indexed for the search function inside our viewer. To benefit, make sure that essential terms are included as text rather than images.

💡TIP: Creating a table of contents for your publication can also make it easier to navigate. Then readers can spend less time in search frustration and more time enjoying your content!

Check External Links

Publishing digitally allows your readers to shop products, visit advertisers and learn more about your business, all from their browser. Although it’s simple to add external links to your publications with the Calaméo Editor, don’t forget to check the “Open in a new window” box. That way, the publication won’t close when readers click your links and they can return to your content effortlessly. Seamless browsing is good UX and is a quick fix to improve reading time for your publications!

Get Interactive

Since video and audio have proven to be enormously engaging to today’s internet users, you can use them to good effect in your online publications. For example, in this catalog from Samedia, a video clip provides a product illustration:

These interactive elements encourage your audience to watch, listen and dive deeper into your content. Result: higher reading times!

💡TIP: Calaméo’s PLATINUM plan lets you include audio from SoundCloud and video from YouTube directly on the page.

Equipped with our tips, you’re ready to improve reading time for your publications. But to go even further, evaluate which of your content performs best and adapt to your audience’s interests. Your advanced statistics includes pages with the longest reading times so you can identify areas to focus on—and keep growing audience engagement!

If you’re ready to give these tips a try, it’s time to request your PLATINUM Demo. During your two-week free trial, access the full range of unlimited statistics on Calaméo and test out the great features of our professional publishing plan.

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Essential resolutions for even better digital publications

In PUBLISHING
13 January 2022

Happy New Year from Calaméo!

To kick off the year, we’ve prepared a few ideas to help you with essential New Year’s resolutions for even better digital publications. These good habits will help your online publications reach the best of their potential all year long!

Polish your account page

Take five minutes to update the information in your Calaméo account page. By making sure that your account name, website and description are as accurate and relevant as possible, you can quickly and easily boost your business’s digital presence. (Remember to use your logo as an avatar, too!) Optimizing your account page will help you take advantage of our SEO and allow more readers to find your digital publications.

Account page

Publish regularly

In a digital world brimming with content, it’s important to establish consistency for your online publications. If your audience knows when to expect your publication, they are more likely to make a habit of enjoying it whether you bring out issues weekly, monthly or quarterly. Scheduling your publications in advance on Calaméo can be a powerful tool to manage deadlines and build a loyal readership.

Think big picture

The visual identity of your business is an important part of its online presence. Whether you link to your digital publications on Calaméo or embed them in your own site, you can customize the viewer to ensure a seamless fit between your documents and your brand. First, you can choose the best theme to display your publication or create your own to achieve that perfect look. Next, set a background image or add your company’s logo, as in the example below from Espace Publications. Strengthening the visual connection between your digital documents and your business can really help your publications shine!

Tell a story

Make good use of social media to get the biggest impact out of sharing your digital publications. Keep storytelling in mind on Facebook, LinkedIn and more! A post on any of these platforms can introduce your publication to the world, so be sure to communicate the part it plays in your business’s mission and why your audience should check it out. This tweet from the New York University Alumni Magazine is a great example:

Dig into your statistics

Calaméo’s readership statistics provide you with key information about your audience and the success of your online publications. For a refresher, check out our tips for updating your approach to analytics and make a habit out of tracking your statistics on Calaméo in 2022.

With these New Year’s digital publishing resolutions, you’ll be in great shape to start a stellar year.

Have you made your own resolutions this year for your digital publications? Let us know on Twitter @calameo! Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube for all the latest Calaméo news and updates.

PUBLISHING

How to Start a Magazine: A Practical Guide

In PUBLISHING
26 March 2020

Have you ever wanted to start your own magazine? We here at Calaméo did—way back at the beginning of last year, when we had the idea to create our CALAMEO Magazine. Since that first issue was released in February 2019 we’ve learned a lot about how to start a magazine from scratch. For example, what you’ll need to get organized, get creating and get out there.

Keep reading to find our complete guide to start your own magazine, plus three great reasons to opt for digital distribution.

Big-Picture Planning

The first and most important step when you start a magazine is to decide on your subject matter. Maybe there’s an idea you’re passionate about and want to share with others. Or maybe you’re part of a group interested in exploring new ways to communicate. No matter where you’re coming from, take a few minutes to write down the main topic for your magazine. Some possible topics are:

  • A hobby or activity, like birding
  • A place or institution, like a town or local museum
  • An industry, like higher education
  • An organization or association, like a sports club or charity
  • A business or institution, like your company

For example, we decided right away that CALAMEO Magazine would be about the digital publishing sector as well as about our company. We wanted to give readers a deeper look at Calaméo’s history, people and news. But we also knew that we wanted to provide insight into the digital publishing world and analyze key trends.

Once you’ve defined your subject, it’s time to consider the goals you have for your magazine. These can be business goals, such as selling advertisements or making new contacts. They might also include personal goals like challenging yourself creatively and growing a collaborative community. In other words, write down the reasons why you want to start a magazine. This will help you focus on what’s most valuable and, a little farther down the road, help you evaluate your success.

Finally, think about the scope of your project. Some magazines come out once a week and have hundreds of employees; some magazines only put out one issue every six months. Here at Calaméo, we chose to make four issues of CALAMEO Magazine during our first year of publication. How many times would you ideally like to publish this year to work toward your goals? Pick a number before you move on to planning the actual content of your magazine.

Building Your Team

Now the fun part of how to start a magazine begins! That’s right—it’s the “getting the team together” stage of the project. The size of your team can vary depending on the resources that are available for your magazine. But even limited resources don’t mean you’ll have to sacrifice on quality. At a minimum, you should count on filling three primary roles: Editor, Lead writer and Designer.

Each of these three roles comes with a different responsibility that is essential to creating your magazine.

  • The Editor is in charge of decision-making. He or she has final say on the topics to cover, assigning stories and approving design.
  • The Lead writer is generally asked to produce the text content of the magazine, including features, interviews and opinion pieces.
  • And last but not least, the Designer creates the finished publication. This can involve making page templates, developing a graphic identity for your magazine and illustrating its content. 

Finding collaborators to help you start a magazine can mean getting creative. For instance, you may want to put out a call for volunteers, either within your organization or your community. If you have a budget, you can get in touch with freelance writers and designers on platforms like Behance and Fiverr. On the other hand, if you plan to be your own designer, the templates available in sites like Canva allow you to handle basic graphics and layout.

Inside this Issue

After you’ve assembled your core team, it’s time to work on the first issue of your magazine! Above all, you’ll want to think carefully about the way your content is structured. That’s because you can use this same structure in every issue of your magazine. As a result, you’ll save yourself time and the stress of making such fundamental decisions for each new release.

Begin with your ideas for the main rubrics, or categories, of content that you would like to feature in your magazine. Be careful not to confuse content categories with actual, specific stories that you might already have in mind! For example, our CALAMEO Magazine has nine rubrics: our Editors’ Note, a table of contents, Stats, News, Highlights, Interview, Tips and Editors’ Picks. While the subjects change from issue to issue, the structure stays the same.

With your magazine’s rubrics figured out, the Editor can begin to assign topics to your contributors. Your Lead writer should take on the most important stories, but you can consider asking additional writers and creators to contribute content or even ask for submissions. (Just make sure to explain the topic well enough to receive relevant responses!) Meanwhile, discuss the upcoming issue and its subjects with your Designer so that he or she can prepare layouts and other graphic elements.  

Now all that’s left is to set some deadlines! The Editor of your magazine should let everyone else involved in its creation know when their content is due. Plus, the Lead writer and Designer will need a schedule for completing the layout, making edits, finalizing the publication and the planned release date. Stick to your schedule as closely as possible and voilà—the first issue of your magazine is done!

Getting to Readers

There are still a few more choices to make before you get your publication in front of readers. Perhaps the most crucial question when you decide to start a magazine is whether to publish in print, online or both. In the past, print was the only option for new projects and came with lots of built-in costs, from paper to postage. However, it’s now both easy and common for magazines to be available in a digital format.

Besides the lower costs associated with online publication, digital magazines can benefit from incorporating interactive content. You can add links to other websites to cite sources, promote products and events or support advertisers. Spice up your stories with videos from YouTube, audio tracks or even GIFs. Thanks to digital publishing platforms like Calaméo, it only takes a few minutes to make your magazine fully interactive online.

Plus, a digital magazine offers you key information about your readership that print distribution can’t match. Instead of relying on the number of printed copies you’ve ordered, you can effortlessly access analytics showing how many views your magazine is receiving online. (And if you need further details about how readers interact with your content, advanced statistics can provide insights.) This data will help you evaluate the progress you’re making toward your goals as you create the next issues of your new magazine!

We hope that this practical guide to how to start a magazine has given you the right tools for taking on such an exciting project. We loved creating CALAMEO Magazine and are happy to announce that a brand-new issue will be coming your way this spring. Ready to try out publishing your own digital magazine? Join Calaméo today and publish for free.

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