With an tongue in cheek and colourful approach, this zine seeks to celebrate the creative people of colour that are a bit offbeat, weird and dramatic. We choose to explore the multifaceted experiences, ideas and creations by and for people of colour with an overarching theme of the internet and technology.
When we were creating our Diaspora Drama zine, we faced a lot of obstacles that we were not aware of when the idea of running a publication about people of color first came to our mind. Thus, we collected a few tips for aspiring publishers so that they could know what to avoid when starting an online platform for sharing stories. If you want to make your own zine, feel free to make use of our experience and learn from our mistakes.
Understand your mission
Once we decided to launch our zine, we did not think about the particular mission. We just wanted to create a publication about people of color and their impact on modern technologies, IT and the Internet. Yet we did not even understand that we need to have a certain goal to make our publication successful. As a result, we often lacked the ideas for writing and even turned to the essay writing service to have texts to add to our zine pages.
Thus, to get your online newspaper or magazine move forward and get popular, brainstorm your reasons for doing it first. Understand what benefit it will bring to your audience and how you will make a difference in the existing competition for readers’ attention.
If you publish in a journal and you do not have enough time to study, you can ask for the Essay Keeper Essay Helper service that can help you with writing papers for college or university. By turning to the professional authors for help in writing an essay, you will be able to appreciate the benefits of cooperation, including prompt execution of work by a professional linguist who knows how to formulate his thoughts in a quality manner and express them on paper.
Journalism is an extremely important element of democracy, because it helps a person to understand and solve important life issues correctly, efficiently, and consistently. Journalism is more than a profession. Journalism is a very important job, and if people doing such an important thing as journalism do not have enough time to improve their skills with writing the papers, the essay writing service with the most qualified essay writers will help. The company regularly offers discount programs, which makes them available to its customers. In addition, the content created by the service of professional essay writers is not plagiarism of factual and reliable information.
Create a business plan
Since we did not brainstorm our mission and goals at the beginning of our way, we did not develop any business plan for our start-up. Due to this mistake, probably, we lost a few thousand visitors to our website in the first months after the website launching and thousands of dollars as well.
Consequently, if you want to start your online publication and keep it growing and bringing monetization, write a business plan. Turn to a college paper help service if you have no idea of how it should look. Include all the information about your project there, from a zine definition to the expenditures on the targeted advertising. There is no unimportant thing when it comes to planning a large long-term project.
Find out the needs of your audience
The Diaspora Drama idea assumed that our zine would be about people of color and for them, but we did not think about the particular benefit it would bring. All we wanted is just to amuse the audience with our creative zine ideas, but that was not enough.
To make your project grow, you have to understand the needs, wishes, and problems of your target audience. Thus, you will be able to resolve all of them with your content and stand out from the crowd. If you want to leave your competitors behind, having a detailed audience portrait is key.
Be consecutive
Due to the absence of a clear plan and goals, our Diaspora Drama development was pretty chaotic and irregular. We did what seemed to be right and faced a lot of fuckups until we understood how we should work on this project. Do not repeat this mistake and follow the tip below.
Once you have a business plan and your reader’s portrait with you, all you have to do is be consistent. Now, you do not need to worry about the strategy of your startup, it is already developed in your project plan. Just take the logical steps that you outlined earlier, delegate tasks to your team, and control how things go. Do not disperse your efforts on doubtful ideas that were not included in your initial plan: if the risks were not counted, you may lose a lot of money and followers.
Create user-friendly content
As we talk about developing a web magazine, it is important to create content that your followers will love. The first Diaspora Drama posts were not very nice to look at and read, and, probably, that was a reason why we did not grow at the start at all. Thus, we surveyed a few college students groups to find out what was wrong with our content and how to change it. Once we got the results, we immediately came up with a few zine theme ideas in mind that we eventually developed and noticed our blog growth.
Do not expect fast profit
Finally, when it comes to launching an online startup, you should not hope for a fast reward. Our expectations of getting rich and famous were too high as we found out later: our blog did not bring any money for a few months after the launching. If we had a business plan, the results would be better or, at least, we would know what to expect. Still, once we reviewed our zine strategy, we started to gain profit. Of course, it was not growing exponentially, but after some time, our sales boosted significantly.
As you can see, the road to digital success is not fast and easy, but it is possible to make it smooth and predictable. Do not overlook planning and strategy creation, and your results will surprise you.
POC (people of colour) from the beginning of the PC revolution have been participators and innovators in shaping and transforming what is now internet and tech culture. This space allows for us to continue our legacy and explore every part of our identities as we navigate the world IRL and URL.
The zine is 100% contributor based. The physical copies can be bought online and also read for free through our issuu page. If you are poc with a story to tell then your work is Diaspora Drama material.
Submit to: [email protected] (Read our FAQ first)
Editor-in-chief: Isaac Kariuki (nokiabae)
Senior expert: Kyle Yates (Kyle Yates)
Assistant Editor: Amal Hassan (Aman 3rdwrldgrl)