Promotion Push Ongoing for Outdoors Mag

The Herald & Times Group is running a major promotion to boost sales of its glossy monthly magazine – tgo.

The magazine, which brands itself as 'the UK’s leading monthly magazine for the independent hill walker and backpacker', and has 'The Great Outdoors' incorporated in its masthead, has already been recently distributed free with The Herald newspaper.

And The Herald is carrying a form enabling readers to claim a free copy of the November issue of the magazine. The offer ends this Saturday. The magazine is also offering a free Coleman Lite sleeping bag, worth £39, to anyone taking out a subscription.

The newspaper group has also been cross-promoting the magazine with an article each week on the back page of the main paper of the Sunday Herald – alongside a regular article by Cameron McNeish, a former editor of the magazine and now its editor-at-large.

Tgo, which is edited by Emily Rodway, and retails at £3.60, was redesigned and relaunched two years ago, and at last year’s Scottish Magazine Awards, won three awards: Publisher of the Year (Darren Bruce), Columnist of the Year (Jim Perrin) and Sales Performance of the Year (Ronnie Dodd and Louise Jane McDonald). 

It is shortlisted in four categories for this year’s awards.

On its website the magazine, says: “TGO’s successes were further cemented with its ABC certification in February 2010, confirming that the magazine has been bucking economic trends and demonstrating consumers’ confidence in the magazine and their passion and support for the great outdoors. Official figures confirmed by ABC certified TGO with an 8.2 per cent year-on-year increase of its headline figure, with news trade sales up by 11 per cent and subscriptions up by 8.9 per cent.”

This year the magazine launched a new website, tgomagazine.co.uk, which features outdoors news, gear, walks and topical debate and features inspirational outdoor videos, podcasts and blogs. The website says: “TGO online also now enables users to register on the website to interact with other users and comment on articles as well as become part of an online outdoor community on the tgo forum and social network.”