Action Step: Go Magazine “Shopping”

Whether you do this at your local library or the bookstore, whether you just browse or actually buy, sometime in the next few days peruse a couple of magazines that you wouldn’t normally buy (you can also do this at a friend’s house if he or she gets magazines you don’t normally look at).

This week I picked up the Oxford American and Fit Pregnancy.

The idea is to look through the magazines with the article idea game in mind. Even if you’d never pitch to these particular magazines, are there articles inside that get you thinking about things you could pitch to other markets? Or is there a department or feature in the magazine that makes you think you might have something to pitch to that publication after all?

Pay attention, too, to the market research aspects we’ve been talking about. What do the ads, stories and tone of the magazine tell you about who reads it? Can you imagine or write up a sketch of the sort of person who might read the magazine?

Thinking about the potential readers of a magazine is really good practice because it will get you thinking of the target audience for any article you migth write for that publication, which should color the way you write your query (which we’ll talk much more about next week).

The Article Idea Game

While we’re looking through magazines this week, I thought I’d share one my favorite ways for getting story ideas, which can be called the article idea game or the game of five.

Playing the game simply involves looking through or reading a magazine and coming up with five story ideas based on what you see. Of course you don’t want to copy articles exactly, but it’s easy to use the articles you read (or the pictures, ads, or letters to the editor in a magazine) to come up with new spins on an article.

The Game in Action

As an example, the only magazine I can reach without getting up right now is the April issue of Health. Flipping through, here are a few ideas for articles I might explore:

1. How does fiber affect energy level and health? (That’s from a Metamucil ad.)
2. How to save money on your exercise routine (from the letter from the editor)
3. How do natural sweeteners stack up against more processed ones? (from an item talking about antioxidants in honey and molasses)
4. Five-minute energy boosters (an article about health issues that could be behind your always feeling tired)
5. How to perfect your posture (a reader asked about what could be behind her slump)

That took me less than 10 minutes and I got to page 80 in the magazine. Those were completely off the top of my head ideas, but they’d all be potentially marketable somewhere.

Getting into the habit of doing something like this not only forces you to pay attention to what you’re reading, it reinforces the fact that ideas are everywhere, which in turn gets you into an abundance mindset on issues beyond your article subject matter.