Why YUDU for your digital magazines?
YUDU Publisher transforms your print magazines into slick digital publications that improve reader experience, increase circulation and save on print and distribution costs.
Read on to discover a selection of the features available when you publish your digital magazines with YUDU!
Image: (Above) Cover of a digital magazine with an intro page and custom page turn arrows.
Custom Branding
With YUDU there are no third-party adverts and no rival magazines to be seen. You have full control of the published content and this includes control of the branding, with the option to customise the loading icon, overlay colours, toolbar logo (which you can link to your website), background colours (you can even add a background image!) and toolbar icons and colour scheme, ensuring you always stay on brand. Everything is fully customisable, including the text prompts, which can even be translated into a different language for non-English content.
Top Tip: For that authentic magazine look, enable the page turn animation and centre shadow. You can even add a page turn sound effect.
Intro PageStart your magazine with an Intro Page to the left of the cover. This is prime real estate and can be used for a number of different purposes - sponsorship page, interactive questionnaire, navigation instructions. Top Tip: Maxmise this page by making it interactive. You can enhance it with multimedia elements, such as video and audio, or interactive elements, such as surveys. Image: (Right) Example of an intro page featuring a promotional advert for an exhibition with an embedded video and registration link.
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Email Collection
If you're publishing a free magazine, this is a great tool for building up a database of contact details for your marketing campaigns. Customise the message and inform your readers how their details will be used. You'll also need a link through to a privacy policy. Email address collection can be enabled and customised in Settings > General.
Top Tip: Due to GDPR guidelines, we no longer enforce email collection but you can always entice your readers with a promotional offer or by outlining the benefits of signing up.
Image: (Above) Example of the email address collection feature with custom message.
Navigation
Customers have multiple options when navigating your magazine. They can turn the page with a swipe, click or tap of their keypad. Alternatively, they can launch the page carousel and jump straight to a page of their choice...
Images: (Above) The page carousel - click or tap a page to jump to it
...or you can add a table of contents menu - the latter is especially powerful since it can be accessed from anywhere within your magazine.
Image: (Above) The table of contents menu - select an item to jump to that section.
Top Tip: Don't forget to embed internal page links using page link overlays on your magazine's actual table of contents page too! If you have a large contents menu or index page, be sure to use our auto-linking feature.
Search
If your readers are looking for something in particular, then what better way to simply search for it? When you upload your magazine to Publisher, its plain text is stripped out and stored, making your entire magazine searchable using the inbuilt search tool. Not only that but the plain text is indexed and made visible to search engines, meaning your magazine can show up in search results on platforms like Google or Bing.
Top Tip: If you're publishing an archive of magazines in the same publication group on YUDU Publisher, you may want to think about leveraging our archive search tool to allow your readers to search across your entire back catalogue of content.
SharingTo reach the maximum possible audience, don't forget that everyone is only six degrees of separation away and so make sure you have sharing enabled. Your readers can share the entire magazine or a direct link to their current page and a fantastic article, whether by email or social media. Top Tip: Don't forget to customise the sharing email's subject line and message template in your magazine's settings on Publisher. Image: (Right) The sharing options from the toolbar menu.
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Multimedia
If you want to fully leverage the benefits of digital, you can't ignore the power of multimedia. Why not add videos and audio to your magazine?
Top Tip: You have multiple options when adding video or audio. You can embed on the page, trigger content to appear within lightbox pop-ups or link out to an external website like YouTube or Vimeo.
Image: (Above) Example of an embedded cover video.
Advertising
We understand how important advertising is for our magazine publishers and at YUDU our digital solution offers you a broad range of options when it comes to including adverts and sponsor information, all above and beyond what is possible with print.
We've already mentioned the intro page and multimedia options, and it's simple enough to add extra advert pages to your digital magazines, but what about ticker tapes, automatic call-to-action pop ups, and animations? You could even include advert carousels that display multiple adverts in a transitioning banner! Anything is possible with our on-page HTML overlays and HTML lightbox overlays.
Top Tip: Leverage the unique strengths of digital when selling your magazine space to advertisers. You're no longer restricted to the usual quarter, half, full or double-page advertising spaces - you've got the traditional options and the option for new, eye-catching enhancements that will allow ambitious advertisers to stand out from the crowd!
Images: (Above) Examples of animated adverts and a ticker tape that can be embedded at the top and/or bottom of your magazine pages.
Archive View
We've already touched upon Archive Search and one of the big advantages of digital publishing is the convenience of creating a readily available digital archive for your readers that requires zero physical maintenance or storage space. At YUDU, not only do we make it easy to create such an archive (see here for our article on enabling the Archive View) but we also give you the tools to search through your archive quickly.
Top Tip: Ensure all your magazines are grouped by publication title in a common publication group to ensure they are all visible within the same archive.
Image: (Above) A snapshot of a digital archive.
App Solution
We can't talk about digital archives without talking about our app solution. Although publishing to Web Browser and distributing a live link is by far the most popular way of publishing magazines these days, our Apple iOS and Android app solutions offer another avenue to grow your reach and promote your content across as many platforms as possible. It's also an excellent way to create a readily available digital archive that can be accessed from a mobile device at the tap of a button. You can even create categories for your content; whether by year or publication title or something else entirely, it's completely up to you.
Image: (Above) YUDU apps are available for iPad, iPhone, Android tablets, Android mobiles and Windows device.
Top Tip: The app is the perfect way to create a hub of information for your readers. Link out to social media and pull in dynamic feeds; send out custom push notifications; include extra advertising and sponsorship space that's only available within the apps - there are lots of reasons to consider investing in your own custom-branded application.
Accessibility
You may already be aware of government guidelines regarding accessibility in relation to official websites and digital documents, while the Marrakesh Treaty means that a broader range of digital publishers also need to think about how they can offer accessible versions of their content too. At the end of the day, Accessibility is all about our responsibility to our readers and ensuring content is available to the largest possible audience.
At YUDU, we've been working hard to ensure our content is mobile-friendly for many years. This began when we launched our mobile apps and advanced dramatically with PhoneView (Reflowable Mode) but continues today as we work hard to ensure our platform adheres to WCAG guidelines in light of the upcoming deadline for the Marrakesh Treaty in 2025.
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Image: (Above) Re-sized text using toolbar icons from smaller to larger (L-R) in Reflowable (PhoneView) Mode.
Reflowable Mode (also known as PhoneView) is a responsive HTML-based format that improves the readability of your publications on smaller screen sizes and can be leveraged to achieve levels of Accessibility in your publications that aren't possible with the standard, fixed-layout format. This is possible because the html-based format allows for the incorporation of ALT-Text, Image Descriptions, screen reading, ARIA tagging and so on, as you seek to meet WCAG standards.
Reflowable Mode can handle multimedia elements such as video and audio, while larger images and graphs can be viewed in pop-out lightboxes to make for easy viewing.
If you would like to convert your magazines to Reflowable Mode for a superior reading experience on mobile devices or if you would like to make your content more Accessible and have questions about Accessibility and WCAG requirements, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Top Tip: We also have reporting available specifically for this format, so you can see how many users are reading this mode vs the standard layout.
Subscription Management
One of our mantras here at YUDU is "know your subscriber base". If your content is open access, then feel free to skip this section but, otherwise, please read on...
While other digital publishing platforms handle subscriber information for you, and take a cut of the revenue as a result, we believe our publishers should keep full control of both. This is why we've developed a sophisticated subscription management system for handling subscriber data and subscription groups. This might look daunting at first but a little extra work can go a long way to maintaining your long-term independence, and our team are at hand to guide you through the set up process.
Top Tip: You have multiple options for adding subscribers - individual subscriber management, bulk csv uploads and API integrations, whether with third-party subscription houses or using YUDU's very own API. You can choose the method that suits you best but be sure to speak to your account manager for guidance.
Subscriber Emails
As part of your subscription set up, you're given the option of editing the email templates that your subscribers will receive whenever a new magazine becomes available or when their subscription period is coming to an end.
Top Tip: Make sure you maxmise the potential of these emails by including the latest edition link in the "New Edition Available" email or a link back to your website so that your readers can re-subscribe in the expiry email.
Latest Edition Link
You're all set up with subscribers in your subscription group(s) on Publisher and you're ready to publish your magazine. Now you need to start thinking about distributing the live link and/or embedding the latest magazine on your website.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a single link that always updated to take your readers to the most recent magazine? Something you could embed on your website without constantly needing to update the iFrame?
Top Tip: The latest edition link is exactly that; one link to rule them all. Just speak to a member of our support team to get this set up for you.
Magazine Analytics
You've enhanced your magazine with multimedia and interactive overlays, launched an app to maximise your audience, added a reflowable version for accessibility purposes and mobile-friendliness, and finally published live. You promote the app and send out your latest magazine's live link in email and social media campaigns.
Top Tip: You can even distribute links to specific articles!
You give it a few days and you're finally ready to check your magazine's performance. YUDU gives you the tools to get all the information that you need - whether that's via our inbuilt YUDU Reporting, with its wide range of reports, including total and unique visits, or by integrating with Google Analytics. You can choose whichever option suits you best.
Happy Publishing!
Thank you for reading, we really hope you found this information useful and we look forward to working with you as we have done with so many magazine publishers over the years.
Remember, don't hesitate to contact YUDU support or your Account Manager if you have any questions or feature suggestions.
- YUDU Team