Forum Moderators: mack
I hope I am in the right forum. I want to start a site that will provide information, discussion rooms and online polls. The focus will be political. I will be writing most of the initial content myself. I stumbled onto this site doing another search and I hoped to get some advice about planning, hardware & software getting ad revenue, etc.
I am willing to take the time and get things done in the best ways that fit my means (which are not great). Since the site would not be my primary source of income, I dont have to rush it. However, I would like to get the site up and running by the summer of 2004.
I would appreciate any advice that you could provide. Thanks in advance.
SO
I'll answer all of that for you in one single link ;-)
[webmasterworld.com...]
TJ
That is exactly the kind of link and info I need. I all ready have several dozen pages of content. and I will keep working on that. Any ideas about how to get the most mileage out of each article (financially and otherwise)? Thanks again.
SO
Any ideas about how to get the most mileage out of each article (financially and otherwise)?
If you're building a site that you want to be a financial success then I would suggest that you find the products (or services) and market first, before building it.
Know who you're targetting and write accordingly. Use keyword checking tools like Brett suggests.
You could end up building a wonderful site, but at the end of the day have nothing to sell. You'll have traffic for sure, but you need to harness that traffic and send it somewhere that will generate cash.
If you've already done that, then I would just re-iterate "know your market and write accordingly".
TJ
This has several advantages. First, the reader isn't forced to read through material that they already know, or don't really care about. They can "opt-in" to the depth content that they want. That's very web-like.
Second, each page then tends to have a very precise focus, and that helps to get lots of varied search engine rankings that are high enough to generate traffic.
It's a different mind-set than the kind of linear article that we are nearly forced to create in print. But modularizing an article makes very good sense on the web.
If all you are selling is the content you are in for a difficult trail.
But, nothing ventured, nothing gained, etc.
Jedi and Txbakers: Thanks again. By "harness that traffic and send it somewhere that will generate cash." Im guessing you mean the affiliate programs and that kind of thing. I will spend a lot of time in that forum in advance then, in order to find out where and how to send the traffic there. I would not want to pay for an online magazine either, so I will have to find some appropriate products to point people to.
I think I know part of my market well, but the reading I have done here so far suggests that I will need to continually update the site to emphasize the things that are actually getting hits. Even though Brett's post has a lot of info in it, I have no idea how to implement that on a site. I have a ton of reading to do! Is there a forum here that goes into the nuts and bolts of setting up pages the way that Brett suggests?
Tedster: Thanks to you also. Would you have any suggestions about where I might see some examples of the modular style you describe? Are there any posts or forums here that deal with this?
Also, I am not a programmer, but its obvious that I have to learn. Does anyone have any suggestions about this php -vs- asp issue? I dont know if I have time to learn both of these well enough to decide on my own. I'm asking because I think I will need a database to be able to control the opt-ins and track the logs and handle certain other features that I have seen mentioned. These two languages seem to keep coming up in discussions I have read elsewhere. While there may not be a "best" way to deal with databases, are there any ideas about the most sane way for someone starting from scratch? Thanks for your help.
SO
By "harness that traffic and send it somewhere that will generate cash." Im guessing you mean the affiliate programs and that kind of thing.
What I meant was understand your market. For you to generate any cash from a website, someone, somewhere, has to sell one of your users a product or a service.
There are a number of ways to implement that - you could have an online shop and sell direct, you could send people off elsewhere to buy stuff by using AdSense, or a direct affiliate program.
By knowing your market you will know the end product or services that people are likely to buy after visiting your site. And that dictates your content. Well, part of it anyway - I'm not saying that every piece of content on your site should be geared towards selling stuff necessarily.
For example, in your field of politics, if one end product is likely to be books on politics, then you might want to consider content pages consisting of book reviews, or articles about leading authors in the field etc. Then AdSense would serve up appropriate ads on those pages. Or you have an Amazon affiliate link. Or a "Buy this book online now" link at the end of a review that points to your second (shop) domain.
But you need to target the end product, the thing that actually generates money, and then work out what your money generating pages will be and how that revenue will be generated.
That was what I meant in reply to your original question of:-
Any ideas about how to get the most mileage out of each article (financially and otherwise)?
Know what your market is.
TJ
[edited by: trillianjedi at 11:41 am (utc) on Aug. 15, 2003]
PHP has the flexibility of being cross platform, and Apache's mod_rewrite module deals with the issue of dynamic URLs. For that you'll need Apache hosting. For ASP you'll need MS hosting, for which there are solutions available to deal with dynamic URLs but either they're complicated, hard to find information about, or very expensive for scripts to accomplish it. Apache and mod_rewrite information are freely and abundantly available; for that reason PHP could be your choice. We do have some past discussions on it if you do a site search.
SO
... "PHP has the flexibility of being cross platform, and Apache's mod_rewrite module deals with the issue of dynamic URLs. For that you'll need Apache hosting. For ASP you'll need MS hosting, ... Apache and mod_rewrite information are freely and abundantly available; for that reason PHP could be your choice."...
Actually there is also a way to use ASP on a non-MS, Apache hosted site. I've used Chilisoft! ASP (now a Sun Microsystems product) on Apache servers to achieve the same results as mentioned above with PHP. The same mod_rewrite module can handle ChiliSoft ASP and dynamic URLs.
Would you have any suggestions about where I might see some examples of the modular style you describe? Are there any posts or forums here that deal with this?
Here are some good discussions on our Content and Copyrighting Forum.
Write for Scanners, not Readers [webmasterworld.com]
Word Expansion [webmasterworld.com]
I also know there's a thread over there that's exactly on target for this topic, but I can't find it right now.
I will be hosting the site from my home so I have a tough decision to make about the OS, webserver and database. The PHP-vs-ASP issue must also be dealt with. There seem to be lots of good books and people on both sides of the fence in that one. I need to put in a lot of time to become proficient at one or the other so I am hoping to make the right choice the first time.
Finally, developing a "web" writing style is also on the to-do list (thanks for the links, tedster). At the rate I'm going, I may need to wait until Fall of '04 to launch. We'll see. I am always open to hear good ideas, so if anyone else wants to share, I would greatly appreciate it. Take care all.
SO
