Crip Life™ is pleased to announce it has been selected as DisabledPreneurs’ Business of the Week. As part of the feature, our co-founder editor Emma Purcell was interviewed discussing her role, her passion for writing and journalism and the triumphs and challenges of running this online disability magazine.
Here is an excerpt of the interview:
What do you do?
I’m the co-founder and editor of the online disability magazine Crip Life™. The publication was launched in May 2023 alongside my colleague, Joanna Baker Rogers, who is our advertising manager.
I am essentially in charge of all content on the website. I write up exclusive features and news stories, conduct interviews, and edit and upload pieces for paid partnerships and personal stories from the community. I also create and send out newsletters, manage our social media channels and maintain all technical aspects of the website.
Since launching almost 18 months ago, Crip Life™ has published over 165 articles, secured exclusive interviews and collaborated with over a dozen companies.
What inspired you to start your business?
I’ve always had a passion for writing and my ambition has always been to be a journalist. I studied for a degree in journalism and went on to try and secure a role either in a publication or broadcasting news outlet. I applied for many graduate schemes at the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and many other organisations but unfortunately, I was unsuccessful on every occasion.
Fortunately, in 2020, after working voluntarily with them since 2012, I was offered freelance work at the online magazine Disability Horizons. For the next three years, I went on to become one of their main writers and editors, publishing hundreds of articles. Sadly, the publication closed down in April 2023.
This then led to Joanna and I coming up with the idea of launching our own publication. With my skills as a writer and editor and her skills as an advertising manager and business owner, we thought we made the perfect team to start our own business together.
What does a typical day look like for you?
I work from home and conduct all my work on my MacBook. I think many people underestimate how much work goes into running this website.
There is the planning and researching for article ideas, reading through and responding to press releases and story pitches, prepping and conducting interviews, negotiating paid partnerships, writing up, proofreading and editing content, uploading and styling content on the website, downloading, resizing and editing images and managing and scheduling social media content.
Thankfully, being freelance, I don’t have strict work hours. Depending on my workload, I usually work from around 8:30am up until 6pm (with toilet breaks, lunch breaks and a few power naps in between). Then, if I have a tight deadline coming up, I sometimes work in the evening up until about 10pm or sometimes continue working in bed past midnight.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in starting your business, and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge we have faced and continue to face is growing our readership. Although we have reached 33K visitors in the past three months, if you look deeper into the statistics, the number of individual article views, retaining visitor numbers and the amount of time people are on our site is still fairly low. In addition, despite thousands of individual visitors, our newsletter subscription numbers are still only in the hundreds. We continue to find different ways to grow our readership, but it can be extremely difficult.
Furthermore, we have the challenge of securing paid partnerships with businesses and organisations. We have a Pay What You Can advertising service, which is a business model that does not insist upon set prices for its goods or services. Instead, it asks clients to pay what they feel the product or service is worth to them. We have taken this one step further by adding what an organisation can afford to pay.
However, many companies and PR agencies expect us to write all our content for free. We understand that businesses have budgets but at the same time, you wouldn’t expect people in other industries to do all their work for free.
Also, we acknowledge that the bigger the readership, the more likely companies will choose to advertise with us, meaning we need to grow our visitor numbers to secure more paid partnerships.
Running an online magazine does cost money with administrative costs such as hosting platforms, video conference platforms, SEO tools, accessibility tools, social media advertising fees, and much more.
We would like to grow the business by taking on more paid employees and freelancers and eventually get a decent income for our co-founders. But so far, it has been on a tight budget and mostly self-funded.
Read the full interview: Business Of The Week – Emma Purcell At Crip Life™
You can also check out our article DisabledPreneurs: Empowering Disabled Entrepreneurs To Succeed And Thrive In Business
Cross-Promotion Opportunities
If you’d like to do cross-promotion with Crip Life™ and have us write content on your site and feature your publication, business or organisation here on Crip Life™, please get in touch.