Why It Can Be Hard To Find Magalog Samples Online

A lot of people new to magalog marketing find my site when searching for magalog samples. This article is specifically for those folks.

Full-blown magalog samples are a bit hard to find online. Over time, that may change. But let me tell you one reason why that’s the case these days.

Businesses using the sales-letter style of magalog use them because they work. But what these businesses started discovering in the Internet age was that something online rarely, if ever, goes away.

So picture yourself as a business with a magalog. You’ve got an order form on the last page offering your product for a great price. So far, so good.

The designer, as is common practice, puts the magalog in his/her online portfolio. Again, so far, so good. Businesses don’t mind extra publicity of their product, so being in a portfolio is looked at as a good thing.

Now jump ahead a year or two.

The product in that magalog is no longer sold, or sold for a different price. But in researching the product, a prospect found the old magalog on the designer’s site, printed off the order form and sent it in. Or called a toll-free number that has since been changed. Not good.

If at all possible, the business will do what they can to honor the out-dated order form. But obviously that can be a bit of a pain, especially if the product has been replaced by something else, or there’s been a dramatic change in price. And if the phone number has changed, you can only hope the buyer will not give up, and instead search for the correct number.

For that reason, many designers will not put full magalogs on their site. They’ll put up just enough to give other prospects an idea of the work that was done.

That’s a compromise between the designer and the client and usually works pretty well. But it can be frustrating for someone new to magalogs who is looking for a lot of samples.

In my case, where it’s an issue with a client, I may block-out contact info or prices. Or I might put a watermark on the order form to ensure it can’t be printed and used. In other cases, I may only release certain pages of the magalog.

As magalogs have found their way into new industries – where the format is more in the magazine style – businesses are still figuring out what to do with them online. They’re not always called a magalog, so searching for them doesn’t yield many results. And some of those businesses think of them as print-only pieces. (Which is usually a mistake, by the way. But that’s another topic.)

This might seem a little narrow in it’s interest level to most readers here. But it’s come up enough that I just wanted to take a moment to address it.

If you have questions about magalogs, always feel free to contact me. And if you’re serious about moving forward with a magalog, take advantage of my free project consultation by phone where we can talk about your marketing goals and how a magalog might fit in.