There’s so much focus in the blog and infoproduct world on creating “quick and easy” moneymaking websites. While it is possible to make quick websites that make money (although it’s much harder than people claim), I’d love to see more instruction like this from Andrew Johnson about steps to take to create a top notch content website.
As he states up front, it takes work, perhaps a lot of work, but the rewards can be much greater. And I think people who set out to create a great quality website will have a much greater chance for success than those who are trying to aim to make a quick buck.
I speak from experience on this one in that I have created a couple of large and successful content websites, and it did take a ton of work. However, if you’re passionate about the subject, that work is fun. It wasn’t a necessarily a lot of tricky knowledge that I had, it was that I worked hard to create good content for years, grew a forum, did tons of online and offline marketing, and made it a real business and focus.
On the other hand, I’ve also created “quick” websites, and the success rate was much lower.
It’s only part 1 of a 6 part series, so it’ll be fun to see what Andrew brings out next for advice. His advice so far is right on the money.
Different audience, but I heard just the opposite at last week’s Online Publishers Association Forum on the Future, where large media companies debated and speculated and conjured.
Content has been forever severed from its distribution platform, so it is extremely hard to make money as a content site. At a minimum, you need to adopt multiple delivery platforms. When it comes to funding, content sites need not apply: you have to offer a tech-enabled site with an application that allows users to promote for you. Otherwise, you just won’t get the marketing bucks you need to build the audience of tens of millions of users that the VCs want to see.
If interested, you can see my writeup of the entire conference on Friday, March 16, at imediaconnection.com
Hi Pat,
I find this topic quite fascinating, especially because it seems like, in my dialogue with affiliates, that most people are still winging it (not saying that they do not write good content) – but they equal time spent on content with quality. Which is not an accurate “measurement, if we agree that quality means high conversionâ€. I have among others been working with:
Conversion Participation Metrics
Revenue Participation Metrics
And have seen huge impacts on where people spend time and how which content they optimize. My 2 cents 🙂
Cheers
Dennis,
My Analytics blog
http://visualrevenue.com/blog