“Build it and they will come” is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it’s usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionally—not always—discovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a website, no matter how good the content of the site is.
And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? “Good” does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is perhaps self-referential: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draws traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).
The topic is important because having good content is the single most important determinant in where a site stands in search rankings and whether the site draws traffic. A site that draws traffic is a potential money maker, or can help you fulfill your business goals even if these don’t include direct revenue creation. Obviously, other factors besides content do come into play in determining search rankings, but there is no substitute for quality content.
Having well-formed and properly tagged content on a site is nice, but it’s not nearly as important as the site content itself. Keeping content fresh and making sure there are good links into your site help—but nothing beats good content.
Note
Inbound links, explained in Chapter 4, are at the heart of Google’s PageRank system. But the rationale for making these links important is that they are an “objective” way of discovering, and ranking, good content.
So let’s take a closer look at how web content can be categorized.
If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site’s traffic is broad. Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site; people use Google to search for a myriad of different things. But narrow, or focused, traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmological conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it only draws a few hundred users a day. Google’s traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. All the targeting in the world won’t help unless you get some eyeballs.
As I’ve suggested, to make money with your website content, it’s a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good content—either broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other things—for example, software applications or jokes.
From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues with setting up a content website so that you can be flexible as you go along. Flexibility is good—to make money with advertising, you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I’ll explain how to set up sites so that you can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site.
There’s a great deal of variation in good—successful—content websites. The gist of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It’s hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:
The site is humorous and makes visitors laugh.
The site provides a useful free service.
The site is an online magazine or newspaper.
The site provides opinions in the form of a blog or blogs.
The site provides practical information.
The site sells a popular product or service.
The site services a community and provides communication tools for that community.
The only thing these kinds of sites have in common—and there are undoubtedly other ways successful sites can be categorized—is that they draw traffic (either focused or broad). Therefore, they are “good” sites, using my self-referential definition, and are excellent venues for web advertising. In short, they use web content to make money—and making money with your website content is the topic of the first part of this book. Even if you don’t care about making money from content on your website—perhaps because you are an online retailer with the primary goal of increasing prospects rather than selling ad space—the issues are the same: you need good content to attract the search rankings (and therefore the traffic) that you desire.
In this section, I’ll drill down further on the categorization, or taxonomy, of successful sites without spending too much time on the issue. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stewart once commented about obscenity, it’s hard to define good content, but you know it when you see it.
Note
The section How Much Content Is Enough? provides information about the mechanics of content creation—in other words, how many pages of content do you need, how frequently should it be updated, and so on.
Obviously, entertainment is huge on the Web. Many of us spend too much time surfing, and sites primarily aimed at entertainment can be great traffic draws. The best entertainment destinations typically involve community participation (see The Power of Community). Other common properties of good entertainment sites is that they involve humor, and even though entertainment is the primary thrust of the site, often there is an important educational or communicative component as well.
YouTube, owned by Google and shown in Figure 1-1, is a good example of a broad site that combines entertainment with other forms of communication. Many people visit YouTube simply for its entertainment value. In addition, it’s not uncommon to find software training material posted as YouTube videos and other kinds of material that are not necessarily entertaining (although they may be edifying).
Some successful entertainment web content sites fill relatively smaller niches. For example, CollegeHumor, shown in Figure 1-2, is at the time of this writing the top search result in Google for the term “humor.” CollegeHumor hosts content of a type and tone that you’d expect considering its target demographic, and it’s very successful in its role as a niche entertainment site.
There’s a final category of entertainment site that tends to show specific content based on a current trend or news item. I hesitate to give specific examples in this category because these sites, which are mostly parodies or humorous in some other way, tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from view.
Today everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, topical humor sites that are static, meaning that the content doesn’t change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interest—which means that to make money from this content, you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot because it will only be popular for a short while.
TinyURL provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLs—for example, like those you often see on Amazon.com when you select an inventory item—into short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). Astoundingly, this service is free. Last time I looked, TinyURL had more than 185 million hits a month. Talk about traffic!
In part, a service like TinyURL works to generate ad revenue because it is so targeted. If you go to the site, you’ll find Google AdSense content ads for things like DNS (Domain Name Server) services and software that fixes technology problems with browsers. In other words, technology that addresses the problems of reasonably savvy web users is likely to be contextually relevant to the concerns of visitors to TinyURL. Enough users click these ads to more than justify the startup cost and ongoing costs of maintaining the URL conversion service.
It’s splitting hairs to try to decide whether sites that provide access to free downloadable software are providing a service or information. Whatever the case, a site that provides information, links, resources, and downloadable software covering a particular technology can draw a great deal of traffic.
For example, if you want to learn about RSS and Atom syndication software—tools for reading and writing feeds—and to download this software (and find easy one-stop links for the location of the download sites), a good site to visit is the RSS Compendium. Because of their usefulness, one-stop technology sites such as the RSS Compendium (whether or not they provide access to downloads) can draw considerable traffic—and content-based ad revenue.
If you are going to publish a site whose main draw is access to software, and then make money off the site with content advertising, bear in mind that software that runs on the Web typically generates multiple page views for a single user running the software. (In other words, the user spends time on the website.) This makes it better for the purpose of generating content revenue than a site that merely publishes information about software with download links.
Note
The difference I’ve described is between software that runs on the Web and software that you download from the Web in order to run locally.
With a download link, once the user downloads the software, there is probably going to be no more interest in the web content.
The business of Salon.com, shown in Figure 1-3, is to provide informed editorial content. This business is profitable because of the advertising that appears on the Salon site. The business model of Salon, and other online magazines such as Slate, is pretty much like that of a brick-and-mortar newspaper or magazine: subsidize the distribution of articles and editorials, and make revenue with sponsored ads. This works fairly well on the Web, even though it is essentially old fashioned.
While it is harder to get subscription revenue on the Web than off-web for content, profit margins for online advertising are higher, and ads can be more reliably targeted to the context of the content. This last point is important, because it is the unique selling proposition for web advertising as opposed to advertising in other mediums.
Opinions about whether charging a subscription fee for access to content makes sense differ at even the most successful online venues. This is a debate that is almost as old as the Web, and yet to be fully resolved.
For example, as of this writing, the Wall Street Journal does but the New York Times does not charge for most access. The New York Times online site has a far greater revenue base from online advertising and certain pay-for-access premium services than the Wall Street Journal with its entirely subscription-based model. If you include the New York Times-owned About.com in the comparison, the New York Times is probably making more money than the Journal.
There’s evidence that both subscription and advertising newspaper and magazine models can work on the Web. But at this point, the advertising model seems to be winning the race.
You probably read one or more blogs, at least from time to time. A blog, also called a weblog or web log, is a diary of entries, usually presented on the Web in reverse chronological order. You may even write your own blog. The subject matter of blogs varies wildly, from general rants and raves, to blogs about relationships, to blogs more or less devoted to specific subjects, such as my photography blog.
If you think that a blog about a specific subject is an ideal (although narrow) venue for targeted advertising content, you are quite right. Unlike opinion sites that are basically online magazines, blogs are a specifically web phenomenon (sometimes collectively referred to as the blogosphere). A variety of software mechanisms—such as the ability to automatically collect trackback links in a blog entry, meaning links to sites or blogs that discuss the original entry—make blogging an extremely effective and versatile mechanism for publishing content on the Web. Syndication built into most blog content management software—such as Movable Type or WordPress—allows easy distribution of the content.
All is not perfect in paradise, though, and there are some problems with blogging as a vehicle for making money from your content. First, there are so many blogs. It’s easy to create a blog using hosted services such as Google’s Blogger or Six Apart Software’s community sites TypePad and LiveJournal. (Six Apart is the publisher of Movable Type blogging software.) But it’s hard to stand out from the mass of blogs and generate notice and traffic. See Chapter 2 for some ideas about how to drive traffic to a blog, and Chapter 10 for information about how to purchase traffic for a blog using Google’s AdWords contextual advertising program.
Next, the fact that blogs are essentially unvetted and unedited makes some advertisers leery of placing ads on these sites. If you do expect to make money from advertising on your blog, it’s a good idea to be careful with spelling, punctuation, and the overall presentation issues involved with writing.
Finally, most bloggers use hosted blogging services such as Blogger, so they don’t have to worry about configuring or maintaining their own blogging software. Installing software like Movable Type is tricky enough that Six Apart, the company that wrote the software, will get it going for you on your own web server—for a fee.
But a problem with having a hosted blog may be that it’s not up to you to place advertising on it—if there is contextual advertising, the revenue may go to the blog host. You should check with specific blog hosts and blog hosting software to determine the rules. So, if you plan to make money from blogging content, you need to either set up your own blogging server software, or work with a specialized web hosting organization that handles the technical end of things but still lets you profit from advertising.
Note
The problem of losing control of the revenue potential of hosted sites can be present in contexts other than blogging. For example, many smaller e-commerce websites outsource order processing and shopping cart functionality. This often makes practical sense, but it may mean that these pages are no longer available for advertising—or that the advertising and profits are controlled by the host rather than the site creator.
The O’Reilly site provides a great deal of practical information, such as code from the O’Reilly books. O’Reilly is also a source of (usually) well-informed opinions, mostly about topics related to technology—for example, the O’Reilly author blogs, articles, and other quality content.
Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations, and much more. These content niches are probably the most dependable road to advertising riches on the Web.
Niches don’t necessarily have to be big niches. The smaller the niche, the more targeted you can be. For example, quality content aimed at answering questions about specific medical conditions is likely to be in high demand, even if the population with the condition in question isn’t huge.
Good content positioned in a very narrow niche can be very profitable indeed—but you need to make sure that there are advertisers willing to pay for target words related to the niche. A good technique for quickly assessing what advertisers are willing to pay for specific keywords is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, explained in Chapter 10. (You don’t need to actually place an ad to use this tool for research purposes.)
Don’t forget the old saw that it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. Sites that feature a niche that is only of interest to a small group of people (but very interesting to those people) are likely to achieve high search engine rankings for the relevant terms, draw traffic through the search engines, and become well known among aficionados of the niche.
See Chapters 2 and 3 for more information about drawing traffic and search engine rankings.
If you are the publisher of this kind of niche site, you are likely to make a nice revenue return in relation to the effort involved.
Many of the most successful web businesses make their money as e-commerce sites by selling goods or services. Advertising on these sites is a by-product (you might say, a product by-product). To name just a few examples:
Amazon.com is the department store of the Web, selling either on its own account or for affiliates everything you can imagine.
eBay is the world’s greatest flea market and auction community, with a great business model because it doesn’t need to take an inventory position in the items sold on its site.
ETrade, Schwab, and other online trading and investing sites are among the greatest revenue generators on the Web.
Gambling sites successfully part players from their funds.
The only things these sites really have in common are they make money by selling something that people want and they draw traffic (in some cases, such as eBay and Amazon, lots and lots of traffic).
Making money from advertising is not the primary business of this kind of site. Still, it’s natural to look for additional revenue sources, and many e-commerce sites do sell advertising, although they all try (or should try) not to let the advertising interfere with their primary goal—selling products or services online—or with their brand. For example, you can buy ad placement for a book or other product on Amazon. These ads show up as similar items when you are checking out (or considering a purchase). This works pretty similarly on eBay. You can purchase contextual advertising on eBay—but only for your products or store on eBay itself.
E-commerce sites besides Amazon and eBay may sell ads based on impressions (also called CPM, or cost per thousand, advertising), such as banners used for branding purposes. These sites are very unlikely to sell ads on a pay-per-click basis (also called CPC, which stands for cost per click) because they want to keep traffic on their sites. Even CPM ads intended for branding purposes will be scrutinized carefully to ensure that the branding message is in line with the goal of the e-commerce site.
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