What will 2021 bring? Will it be the continuation of already known digital publishing trends or the arrival of surprising novelties?<\/p>\n
One thing\u2019s for sure \u2013 news technologies will play first fiddle again, so \u2013 stay tuned!<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The end of the year is often the time full of compiling summaries of the last months, but also looking ahead and drawing up plans for the future. Who of us doesn\u2019t know (or doesn\u2019t make) New Year\u2019s resolutions? \u201cI\u2019ll start jogging\u201d, \u201cI\u2019ll stop smoking\u201d, \u201cI\u2019ll be a better man\u201d, etc. Well, keeping your resolutions is the one thing we can\u2019t help you with \u2013 but we can definitely keep our fingers crossed for you!<\/p>\n There\u2019s yet another side to the coin of making plans for the future if you\u2019re a publisher \u2013 following trends which can help you understand readers\u2019 needs, react to them quickly and stay ahead of the competition.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to get to know those trends.<\/p>\n One of the most frequently used words in terms of trends for the coming year is a podcast \u2013 an audio show usually spread across a series of episodes, which can be downloaded from the Internet and listened to on portable players. Although this term was formed in 2004 (as a connection of \u201ciPod\u201d and \u201cbroadcast\u201d), the utter podcasts craziness has only recently started for good.<\/p>\n Podcast mastered like the storm many different industries including publishing, and people fell in love with them. More than half (51 percent) of the U.S. population has already listened to a podcast<\/a> and this tendency will continue to grow.<\/p>\n Well, it\u2019s a much better idea to listen to news, comments or interviews in a podcast form than, for instance, trying to read an article while driving a car.<\/p>\n Leon Neyfakh, an American journalist describes podcasts as follows:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cInsofar as most podcasts are fundamentally journalistic undertakings, it\u2019s because they provide a unique \u2014 and uniquely pliable \u2014 vessel for news coverage. It can take the form of an ensemble-led talk show, a story, a magazine, or \u2014 more simply \u2014 a conversation between two people.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Publishers have the upper hand in creating podcasts.<\/strong><\/p>\n Firstly, their industry experience is full of valuable subject resources to make podcast content from it. Secondly, they have existing channels for the promotion and distribution: newsletters, emails, social media \u2013 thanks to them they can change magazine readers and website visitors into listeners and\u2026 vice versa.<\/p>\n Where can publishers share their podcasts?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, there are a number of possibilities. With the boost in popularity of audio form content, we observe a huge rise in the number of platforms where they can be published. You can simply upload completed recordings into services dedicated to podcasts sharing such as:<\/p>\n These kinds of websites \u2013 with the Spotify at the head \u2013 create algorithms thanks to which listeners get lists of suggested, unknown content similar to what they listened to in the past. It means that your podcast can be discovered and listened to by someone interested in the subject you are dealing with. A good practice is to put recordings on a few websites \u2013 platform diversification is important because it has the potential to present your podcasts to a wider and diverse public. The information about all the places you put your podcasts should be visible also for your current followers.<\/p>\n Digital publishing offers much more joy of absorbing content than printed publications, and people expect these exciting impressions from magazines today.<\/p>\n Get ready to tell your stories in 2021 through visual content: videos, infographics, and presentations. It doesn\u2019t mean resignation from written articles \u2013 all of these forms should coexist inside your publications and on your social media channels:<\/p>\n What profits will visual content usage bring?<\/strong><\/p>\n According to Cisco studies<\/a>, by the year 2022 82% of all online content will be video \u2013 the video domination is more than a prediction, it\u2019s something that will come for sure. Live videos on social media, short movies created just from pictures or fragments of interviews are the most engaging form of content you can offer your readers (or, in this case, viewers).<\/p>\n At the beginning, you can start by transforming your existing articles into presentations. This is a strategy which PressPad<\/a> adopted to present their blog content in a more visual and condensed form. To give you an example, their article entitled \u201c6 Golden Rules To Design Successful Digital Magazine\u201d<\/a> became a base to prepare a presentation related to creating online publications<\/a> which was published on SlideShare.<\/p>\n Choose these of your articles which have a potential to be transformed into a presentation – they should include many tips, describe a path to some goal, show a cause-and-effect-relationship; content easy to spread out into points, steps, slides. The first stage of your job should be content placement, the second \u2013 graphic design.<\/p>\n To prepare a presentation you can use free tools like Canva<\/a> or Google Slides<\/a> – both of them are really intuitive and easy to use even for beginners. They offer a variety of ready-made themes, hundreds of fonts, and the possibility of embedding videos or animations. You can also upload exterior stock goods to your project. There are many resource-rich websites allowing for browsing and downloading high-quality visuals without paying, ready for personal and commercial use. In search of free to use images, illustrations, icons, vector graphics or videos, go to the following graphic resources:<\/p>\n When your presentation will be done, you can download it in PDF and put it basically\u2026 everywhere: inside the article, on a SlideShare, on a blog or social media channels.<\/p>\n Every time you prepare content, keep in mind that it will be viewed on mobile devices \u2013 it especially applies to newsletter checking, but also social media scrolling and, on an increasing scale, articles reading.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also something more than people’s habits that will have a huge impact on the expansion of mobile-friendly content in 2021 and this is Google mobile-first indexing.<\/p>\n Google saw that over half of the pages shown in global search results are from Google indexing, and that they mainly come from mobile devices. As a consequence, they decided to use the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking the website. It means nothing less than the fact that only if your desktop pages are similar to your mobile pages both in terms of content and structured data, then Google ranking may be unimpacted. Otherwise, it can down the position of the website. Publishers who, despite Google’s announcement which have been around for a long time, have not yet prepared mobile version of their websites, are lagging behind the competition and are slowly losing their “visibility”.<\/p>\n This shift forces website designers to think about the mobile version first, before the desktop one. It also has an impact on content creators.<\/p>\n Scrolling mobile content is what we all do in public transport, in queues, while waiting for something: we feel the need to repeatedly look into our smartphones \u2013 but only for a moment \u2013 unless something catches our attention.<\/p>\n How to make people stop and focus on your post when they scroll tones of content on a small screen?<\/strong><\/p>\n Now imagine: you scroll your social media feed, and suddenly, you find something interesting, click on it and\u2026 wait forever for a website or photo to upload. Then, you leave it or, at best, you still wait \u2013 slightly annoyed.<\/p>\n Is this something you want to offer your readers, supporters and future customers?<\/p>\n Fast, responsive website design is obviously a must today. But we\u2019re talking about digital publishing trends which will dominate the future and it belongs to mobile apps.<\/strong><\/p>\n They guarantee the comfort of reading every type of content, without losing its quality on smartphones; the photos and videos are adjusted to the screen size and they just look great. Anyway, see for yourself.<\/p>\nDigital publishing trends for 2021<\/h2>\n
1. Podcasts on the rise<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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2. Visual content total domination<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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3. Only mobile-friendly content will be the king<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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