How to Get Featured in Good Housekeeping Magazine

Today we are going to talk all about how to get featured in Good Housekeeping magazine, a very well known and well respected magazine.

Would you believe that Good Housekeeping is 98 years old!?! It will celebrate its 100th birthday in 2022 and it is still going strong. 

Interesting Facts:

• it’s readerships and subscriptions are still climbing every month
• subscription revenue has grown by 80% in 2020
• it has 6 million unique visitors online (huge!)
• the print circulation is over 400,000 copies which is 150,000 copies more than its closest rival
• their product features generate millions of pounds worth of retail revenue (for product based businesses it can be a dream to get featured)

That is pretty impressive for a magazine I think you will agree!

Who reads Good Housekeeping?

The readership of Good Housekeeping is actually a pretty vast profile. It is women, aged 35-70, typically across two generations (e.g mother and daughter) which is quite a wide range for a target audience.

What is included in Good Housekeeping?

Good Housekeeping is a lifestyle title, so they typically cover a little bit of everything. Main sections include (all equally important):

• Fashion
• Beauty
• Cookery
• Homes (real life, decorating and products)
• Health
• Travel

A massive overarching theme for them is sustainability, in terms of the products they feature, travel, home care etc. They are really invested in this throughout their subjects. 

As well as the magazine itself, they also have brand extensions/extra supplements for things such as Christmas, gardening, healthy living, cookery, travel, cleaning and decluttering. 

They also run features on inspirational women (household names as well as female entrepreneurs). They are really into inspiring and empowering women to be themselves and to be financially independent (they even have a financially fabulous feature here)

Other potential female entrepreneur features are

• “Be Inspired” & “Personal Journey” – these features are focused on life changing experiences that can inspire others.
• Literary sections – inspiring reads, new books, books that changed my life etc.

Good Housekeeping is in the same family as Red and Prima, so they actually have journalists who cover central themes such as beauty, health, fashion etc, who sit across all of the titles and they will look at adapting ideas for the different titles within that publisher. 

Tips from the Editor herself:

1. In terms of pitching, pitch your ideas to the relevant editor. The actual editor herself has said she actually gets 400 emails every day, of which only 25% are relevant to her and she needs to pass them to the associated section director to review. So make sure you do the research and send information to the right person in the first place! 
2. For those of you who find the idea of following up with people being quite rude and intrusive, the editor said that their email filter for what they call ‘clutter’ is very sensitive, so a lot of emails end up in her clutter folder! So she is fine with people following up on emails because she doesn’t always see them the first time around. So don’t worry about following up on things (within reason – 3 follow-up emails is probably enough). 
3. Health & wellbeing is a huge area for them at the moment and is growing. Topics associated with a healthy mind, healthy body, ageing well, 40 being the new 30 etc. Although their target audience is 35+, the bulk of their audience is in the 40-50-60’s. 
4. Travel is still huge (despite no one being allowed to go anywhere at time of writing!). They are looking at best places to travel to inspire people and give them that boost off the back of COVID. 

What are their deadlines?

Typically they start 2-3 months out for the final decisions but 6 months out for the ideas. 

They actually start planning their Christmas edition in late Spring/early Summer which is much earlier than most other publications. The reason why is that the Christmas edition is their flagship edition. Their belief is that you can never be too early with your Christmas product pitches!

Obviously digital has much shorter lead times, so before pitching have a think about whether you are pitching for the magazine or for the online sections. 

 

As always get used to their website and their magazine and be aware of what opportunities there are there for you and your business.

The Good Housekeeping team are very open to pitches so what are you waiting for??

Good luck!

 

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. 

You can catch the video replay now.