Fit Pregnancy & Baby Magazine Closes, But Merges In Print With Parent's Magazine

An associate publisher at Meredith Parents Network confirmed that Fit Pregnancy & Baby would be closing the print edition of the magazine with the December/January 2018 issue. Fit Pregnancy & Baby was known as a source for the inside scoop on how celebrities tackle pregnancy, coverage of the latest style trends, and the source for smart advice to millennial moms.

It does get better though! Fit Pregnancy & Baby will move into a special section in Parents, debuting in the March 2018 issue entitled Parents Baby. The sixteen-page section will be printed every other month targeting millennial women, especially expecting and new moms. Its content will focus on three pillars:

• Health
• Gear
• Milestones

Other Family and Parenting Magazines To Keep On Your Radar

Other baby, family and parenting magazines to keep on your radar include:

• Parents
• Family Fun
• Family Circle
• Girl's Life
• Pregnancy & Newborn
• Women's Day
• Boy's Life

"Ack! I Can't Keep Up! I Need A Magazine Closure Cheat Sheet!"

Done! Tin Shingle keeps an updated list of magazines that have folded, shuttered, and even ones that that came back from the print magazine graveyard. You'll get access to it with your All-Access Pass Media Contact Membership with Tin Shingle.

But Wait - I Want To Stay Ahead of the Game!

Want a head start on knowing what these magazines are working on right now? Tin Shingle keeps a list of content deadlines that these magazines are working on. Known as Editorial Calendars, these give businesses, artists, makers and brands the heads up as to the direction the magazine is headed in that month, which is a clue to you for how your business could fit into its pages. Editorial Calendars are a  great idea source as you look for ways to pitch a writer or editor about your business.

Editorial Calendars (see Tin Shingle's full list in our collection here) and corresponding Media Contacts are available to Level 4 All Access Pass Members of Tin Shingle. Learn more about the perks and different levels of membership.

PR Special Opp: SCENES Media Valentine's Day Gift Guide

Tin Shingle's insiders obtain juicy leads and opportunities from the media and influential outlets. Here is the latest opportunity.

GOOD FOR PRODUCT OR SERVICE BASED COMPANIES:

• Jewelry
• Gift Bags/Cards
• Novelties 
• Art
• Travel Items
• Outdoor Gear
• Drinkware
• Anything entertainment themed

MENTION TIN SHINGLE FOR PRIORITY TREATMENT!

Deadline is soon and submissions are already rolling in!  This is an editorial (no fee) PR Lead.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 2ND, 2018
CONTACT DETAILS:
Email and further details are available to Level 4 Tin Shingle Members
Upgrade now if you haven't already!

Tin Shingle is not affiliated with any lead unless otherwise specified.

If you are  PR Professional, Writer, Editor, or Producer who wants to share your leads with Tin Shingle's membership base, please email prleads@tinshingle.com. 

Tin Shingle’s Monthly Meeting This Monday: Kick A**

Tin Shingle’s Monthly Member Meeting is this Monday, Jan 29 at 12pm at Beacon’s Telephone Building - First Floor, First Door.

Are you kicking a** and taking names in your business? Or your art? Or your nonprofit that is saving, preserving or creating something amazing? This meeting is our chance to connect with like minded business owners to get the strength, gumption and vision to keep moving forward and growing your business. A Community Level of Membership is required to attend ($45/month - commitment free so totally flexible to turn off and on).

Come hang with us to get the fuel to go big with this big dreams you have and are making happen. If you’re already going big, that’s awesome, and come to connect and get fresh ideas to keep marketing and evolving.

Join here: www.tinshingle.com/membership

We have amazing and inspiring members from all over the country, but our HQ is in Beacon, so we get to have an in person connection meeting here! See you soon!

PR Special Opp: National TV Show, The Doctors, Seeking Submissions for Audience Giveaway

Tin Shingle's insiders obtain juicy leads and opportunities from the media and influential outlets. Here is the latest opportunity.

We have to keep most of the juicy details private - and available to Tin Shingle Members Only at Level 4, but here’s what we can share with you (upgrade or login for full contact details and pitching tips):

GOOD FOR PRODUCT OR SERVICE BASED COMPANIES:

• Soap
• Jewelry
• Books
• Gift Bags
• Pet Treats
• Healthy Snacks
• Accessories
• Be Creative...what would you like to receive?!

MENTION TIN SHINGLE FOR PRIORITY TREATMENT!

Deadline is soon and submissions are already rolling in! 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: NOW or by 6 PM EST TODAY

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

• Submission requires a minimum of 105 products or gift cards and must have a minimum retail value of $150 each.
• TS PRO TIP: If your product values less than $150 pair with a complementary product to increase the value to $150. Or include more than one scent or flavor of product (Ie. Soap, snacks, etc.)

CONTACT DETAILS:
Email and further details are available to Level 4 Tin Shingle Members
Upgrade now if you haven't already!

Money Monday: e-Filing 1099s With QuickBooks Is Finally Easy!

"Money Monday" at Tin Shingle is all about earning, spending or donating money from your business. Share your Money Monday experience or tip by submitting your idea here for consideration to be featured on Tin Shingle's blog.

Money Monday gets a gold glitter ball this week.

Every year, when prepping the books for taxes, I am so tempted to e-file the 1099s to our contract workers via QuickBooks instead of having our accountant prep them. Not that I don't love supporting another business owner! But he's going to get 3 sets of taxes to file from me, so this is chump change. The benefit, really, is the ease of use, and quickness of filing those 1099s.

QuickBooks has had an e-file 1099 option, but it's never been seamless enough for me to try. I'm error-prone, so if there is more than a 10% room for error, I abort and put it in the hands of the professionals. This year - and maybe it's just me - maybe QuickBook's platform has been the same all of these years, it's just me who grew more confident - I did it. I e-filed the 1099 through QuickBooks!

Took all of 5 minutes, after the prepping of each vendor - which consists of the following and is the same as if the 1099s were being submitted to the accountant:

• Checking for their social or EIN number.
• Updating their address and email.
• Checking money totals against the actual bank transactions.

I take that back. There is one step that was new, and that was selecting the number of Accounts and Vendors that would be included in this pull for 1099s. "Accounts" means that there are different reasons that you spend money, and when you do, you select an Account to attribute how that money was spent. That part didn't take long, it was just new for me, which made me nervous, and made me remind myself not to over-create Accounts and get too nitty-gritty, but I shouldered through and selected the correct Accounts. I checked the money totals against the bank transactions, and got matches.

Once all of that was complete, QuickBooks has you review your information before entering your credit card to pay. And the price of filing is quite affordable. Not only was it pricier with my accounting firm (again, I don't mind supporting my local firm), but I didn't have to drive there to pick up and sign my approval for them to e-file (not that I mind seeing my local firm either!), and stamping them and putting them in the mail. QuickBooks puts them in the mail!

The step of filing of 1099s is often a forgotten one done at the last minute. So this is a way to help businesses not need to file extensions, and start the tax year off right!

Snow Day! Snuggle Up With Editorial Calendars

I stepped a booted foot here in the office as it began to snow just a half hour before our school’s canceled After School Program (translation: Early Kid Pickup) and probably a school snow day tomorrow!

Had to at least set foot in the office before the bump in the road, but I did hear from a Tin Shingle member, after we sent out the email alerting everyone to the rescheduled TuneUp on SEO,  which made it all better, because we are all in this together! She said: “I had three contingency plans today for no early dismissal, no after school sport and early dismissal – we got early dismissal 😃”

So Happy Snow Day everyone! We knew this was going to happen - snowdays slowing everything down for business in January. We talked about it during the TuneUp on Hibernating Your Business in December. Use this day to browse through the content ideas in Tin Shingle’s Editorial Calendar Database. What are editorial calendars? Here's a whole entire article on it, and even an article about how to pitch a magazine based on an editorial calendar, but in short, they are the yearly projections of what a magazine is working each month for the coming year. It is a general declaration, like "In June, Men's Health will be working on the Best Grills issue!" Things like that. They are a great resource to get your wheels turning. We research dozens of magazines for these editorial calendars, and put each one into Tin Shingle's private database that only our All Access Members can search through at any time.

We have PLENTY of Editorial Calendars for you to browse and get dynamite ideas for! Log in to get in our private collection. You’ll need to All Access Pass of Membership to get them, which you can learn about by clicking the Membership tab on the website.

Cheers to your hot chocolate today! 

Martin Luther King (MLK) Day - How To Recognize As A Brand

In recognition of Martin Luther King Day, we are encouraging our retail friends to put out a message encouraging equality and humanity, and to not put out a Monday holiday sale.

This move was inspired by two things: some national retail chains like RIE who closed on the traditional Black Friday Weekend after Thanksgiving in order to encourage employees and people to focus on the reason for the holiday, and to get outside and enjoy nature. The second inspiration is from the musician and activist Pete Seeger, who was extremely active in raising awareness to civil rights and enviromental issues in my current home town of Beacon, NY. According to The Beacon Free Press publication this week, Pete felt that the day was being forgotten as a day to raise awareness and instead was a day of sales, and worked with the Southern Dutchess Coalition to start a parade march followed by ceremonies celebrating youth, adults and a service. Of course it’s always nice to use a three day weekend to go on a mini vacay, but you get the idea.

So instead of running a sale on Martin Luther King Day, step into a Baptist Church, one of Martin Luther King’s homes and inspirations, and do something out of your regular habits, extending kindness where you might otherwise have overlooked.

Peace and love today.

UPDATED: 2018 Content Planner Contains Page For Ideas Not Ready For Calendar Yet

Tin Shingle's 2018 Content Planning Calendar has been updated to include a sheet for capturing your ideas that you aren't ready to assign to a month or week yet. This page in the calendar is called "In The Hopper" and it is the last page. If you have purchased the calendar, you can revisit it here when logged into your Tin Shingle account, and click the link to download the file. The most updated file will download to your computer. If you are an All Access Member of Tin Shingle, this file will automatically be available to you to download. Get to it!

GirlBoss Launches New Podcast: Self Service - A Witchy Listen of Self Care

GirlBoss editor Jerico Mandybur has announced the new podcast for the girl empowerment source: Self Service, the self described "cosmic comfort zone, an 'inner-beauty school' where self-care is celebrated, where getting real with emotions is a treat, and an interest in thoughtful, funny conversations, weird wellness and astrology is unabashed. It’s where being a little self-indulgent isn’t just a shame-free act of self-love, it’s a necessary launchpad into a life that’s wholly ours, in a world where we feel good about taking up space. Here, we serve our hearts. We rant. We grow. And we tune the eff up."

In her email announcement, Jerico defended the astrology angle. Not that she needs to, but it does set the podcast apart from other self-care mediums. She explained that her family belief system included "a strong belief in superstitions, messages sent through dreams, and evil eyes." Further, she finds that it is core to how someone can provide self-care to themselves, yet it is considered "woo woo" and brushed off or punished.

"Witchy stuff has been historically demonized (I believe)," Jerico explains, "because it’s a feminine system that threatens the dominant power. Mid-wifery, being a single woman in possession of land, healing using old plant knowledge; these are all things women suffered for that are now being reclaimed."

Being that had a midwife for my third child, and am reading the second book in the Outlander series, Dragonfly in Amber, where the memory of the heroine's near miss with being burned at the stake because she knows how to heal people with plants is fresh on my mind as she hunts down the other time traveler that did meet her fate at the stake in that book (the cross-over in time is so fascinating!), I'm drawn to this message of normalizing knowledge that women tend to get shunned for. Like, why does a woman's credit score plummet when she gets divorced? Why is that normal? Does a man's? I'll need to look into it. If you know, please chime in below in the comments.

So I'm looking forward to the podcast, and looking forward to seeing which of you business owners find a story angle to pitch to them, so that maybe I'll hear you on the air with Jerico!

Meanwhile, we are adding it to Tin Shingle's Media Contact Database in our new Podcast section, so that you can more easily browse for relevant podcasts to listen to, get to know, and pitch if a great fit for your message.

The Case of the Broken Bobby Pin

As you reflect upon how to make change in the beginning of this new year, there are obstacles or bad habits you'll need to clear from last year. How will you know what those are? Let this analogy shed some light and help you make change...

In the dish it sat, bent open looking like a special comb that was used to secure a special hair bun that I don’t know how to twist. My fingers flicked it out of the way to get closer to the closed black bobby pins that would hold my bangs back in an instant for the day. Wish I knew how to use that wide open bobby pin, I thought to myself.

But wait - that’s no special bobby pin - it’s a broken bobby pin that I keep staring at and moving aside. Why is it here? Why am I allowing it to clutter my dish? Gone - to the trash it went! To clear the way from clutter and help the mind see clearly. Reclaimers - don’t try to talk me out of it! I keep enough things with the intent of someday reusing them. This bobby pin dish must be clear!

This is the breakthrough moment I’ve mentioned on TuneUps before, when you’re looking for paths to clear, or new designs to improve an online sales funnel, but you’re blocked as to what needs fixing. You know there is a problem, but you can’t put your finger on it. Chances are, you keep staring at it, but your mind has justified it, so it doesn’t stand out as a problem.

To train your mind to find the problem areas in your business, watch for these simple opportunities around your house or office.  Once you spot them, clear them, and then return to the area of your business that you are trying to improve. Look at it with fresh eyes, and pinpoint the part that bothers you. As pretty as it is, what’s its deal? If it’s bucking a feeling, it needs tossed and/or replaced.

Need a fresh set of eyes from an outsider? Try Tin Shingle’s Private Training Services. An outside perspective can change a direction in a snap.