It might feel like conferences might not be the most effective way to gain journal readership, but they’re an amazing resource.
In truth, there are more effective ways to just gain readers. But, there are numerous factors that you should keep in mind when it comes to readers beyond just “number of clicks on articles”.
There are a lot of reasons how you can leverage an academic conference to improve your readership, so let’s take a look at them.
What are academic conferences?
Academic conferences are gatherings of professionals, researchers. All of these constitute your journal readership.
Conferences are held all around the world and often deal with specific subject matter. You may have an academic conference on organic chemistry, but you’ll probably never see a conference about plant biology and interpretive dance together. This is one of the reasons why an academic conference can be incredibly important to your business. By finding academic conferences with subject matter that is adjacent to your journal, you have an enormous pool of potential readers at your disposal.
How you participate in an academic conference can also help you to establish your journal. Because academic conferences are an important part of the academic sphere, we’ve written an article all about them that we recommend you read.
Regardless of whether or not you’re participating in a conference as a sponsor or volunteer or in some other capacity, they’re extremely valuable experiences.
How a conference can grow your journal’s readership
Your journal’s reputation is going to be one of the most crucial factors when it comes to authors wanting to submit their work. Your reputation can increase or decrease based on a number of different factors.
Being actively involved in the academic community, and supporting events that further knowledge in your journal’s field is one way to accomplish this task. Remember though, that engaging with academics, supporting their work, and promoting academic research (through your journal, for example) is only one of the potential paths for improving journal readership.
To better understand how your journal’s reputation is connected to its success one only needs to consider their own perceptions of brand-name awareness.
Nike. Porsche. Apple.
These are brands that most people generally have a favourable view of, largely because of how they’ve cultivated their image over the years. How these companies did this, however, is simple. Producing work that people see as being of a high quality. As your reputation increases and people become more and more aware of your “brand”, readers will come to you and want to publish with you. They will promote your journal through word of mouth.
How can readers find you?
One of the most important benefits of going to conferences is that you can connect with your journal readership directly. You can speak with them face-to-face and you can foster a positive relationship with them.
Conferences allow you access to a constant stream of academics and researchers in the specific field you’re interested in. But it isn’t the only way to go about this important task. Making sure that readers can find you might actually hinge on other factors. For example, is your journal something that they can easily find on the internet? Do you have an easy to remember URL? Are you using SEO best practices to ensure that you’re showing up at the top of search engine result pages?
SEO is still a somewhat new (and not completely well-understood) tool. But a critical one you can use to find readers, so it pays to learn a bit more about this.
There are many different tools that you can use to help authors to find your journal.
What does growing your journal readership mean?
Briefly, there are two things that you always want to keep in mind when it comes to your readership.
First, your readership will ultimately be the ones who cite your research. This is what then will affect things like whether or not you get an impact factor, and if they will want to submit to your journal in the future. These are critical factors to your long-term success.
The second thing that this impacts is your bottom line. At the end of the day, you are running a business and the way that you grow your business is by growing your journal readership. To learn more about the details of the finances of running a journal, we’ve written a handy article for you to review.
Make sure that you’re remembering that at the end of the day, your reputation translates into submissions, and this is what pays the bills.
Using conferences are one way for you to grow your business.