Digital Magazines from Rightmove and Issuu

Rightmove has started to introduce digital magazines for agents. These automatically created documents list all the properties an agent has on the big daddy of the portals in branded layouts which follow a template for property listings. The listing pages are also interspersed with promotional pages for the agent and for Rightmove.

Just like the good old local newspaper, these digital magazines are unlikely to be of much use in selling properties, but should serve as a handy marketing tool to attract vendors by showing off an agent's market share and aspects of their services. Because the magazines work on their own dedicated URL, there is plenty of potential to link to them on your own website and elsewhere online.

If you've been brave and stopped or reduced your local newspaper advertising, it's not necessarily a good idea to have the paper bin by the front door any more. But to go so far as putting together a proper magazine can be expensive and time consuming. This is probably why plenty of agents do a truly awful job of putting together in house magazines using basic applications like Word. With inbuilt print functions, Rightmove's new feature offers agents an easy way of replacing their own in house efforts and printing off a few copies of the digital brochure to stick by the front door would probably be a distinct improvement on current practice for some.

Coming at it from the other perspective, if you're an agent who already puts together your own magazine, then the Rightmove template may seem a bit basic by comparison. Getting your printed magazine online is very easy too though. There are lots of tools that turn PDF's into interactive e-brochures, but one of the best that I've seen (and the cheapest) is Issuu.

Simply upload a PDF to Issuu and it will create a fabulously feature rich digital magazine. There are a range of tools to help improve the user experience and give you, as the publisher, data and analytics too. One of the best features is the embedding tools which let you and others place your magazine virtually anywhere on the web, just like I've done here with this copy of e-Smart Property Magazine:

Beyond your own magazine, Issuu can be used for any document that you may have previously uploaded to your website as a simple PDF. Marrying web pages with printed pages is something that, when done properly, can dramatically improve the user experience and these freely available tools are worthy of further investigation.