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I like to think of online business like a 2-story building. (Please excuse my drawing. I’m not an artist by any stretch of the imagination.)
Step 1: Content
The foundation is content. Pun intended. Content is the key to a good long-term online business. Why? Because marketing costs time and money. You want to have content that gets passed on naturally through the internet. You still need to do marketing but you’re hoping much of your marketing will be done freely through word-of-mouth. And to leverage word-of-mouth, you need to have quality content worth talking about.
So, spend a lot of time planning and producing your content. Create a content blueprint to organize your content ideas. For me, this blueprint is a list of different types of content. For example:
- Tutorial
- Interview
- News
- Humorous article
- Commentary on industry happenings
- Video
- Audio
- Series of articles on one topic
- List
- Guest Article
Step 2: Marketing
Next comes marketing. With the growing amount of information on the internet, marketing has become more important. There are many sites with great content that don’t have much traffic because no one knows about them. Marketing is simply the activity of letting people know about your site.
I would create a marketing blueprint. However, spend most of my marketing time in a few marketing channels. It’s not advisable to stretch your marketing efforts too thin. Marketing channels take time to cultivate before they’re fully effective. Of course, if you have a lot of time for marketing or the money to outsource, go ahead and use more marketing channels. Here are some marketing methods that have proven effective for webmasters.
- Blog commenting
- Social media sites
- Press releases
- Forum posting
- Guest blogging
- Article submission
- Video submission
Step 3: Monetization
Finally, we have monetization. Now that you’ve thought about content and marketing, you can focus on converting your traffic into dollars. The key here is understanding your traffic. Why are they coming to your site? What are their problems? What can you sell them that would solve their problems?
Also, think of advertisers with products your audience would find useful. Contact those advertisers and see if they would be partner with you. Here are some methods for monetizing your site.
- Contextual advertising
- Advertising through a broker
- Direct advertising
- Reviews
- Affiliate offers
- Sell your own product or service
- Donations
Feedback
How do you juggle these 3 steps?
I think that you have your business model all backwards. You need to first think about how you are going to monetize your “business”. Otherwise you may be stuck with a great product or service but no money. Cashflow is king in business. You can’t eat good intentions.
Secondly, Content should be thought of as supplemental and be replaced by a service or product. In some cases knowledge is a product or service. However, as more and more people become aware of this method and the market becomes flooded your knowledge will lose value due to the over saturation of the internet. Make yourself stand out and don’t become dependent on your content.
You need to decrease the ability of others to duplicate your methods. Content is one of the easiest methods to duplicate.
Don’t get me wrong many are making ok money but there are three major problems. It’s not sustainable unless you are in the top 20%. Second, it’s not unique. Third, you can make more money being an internet entrepreneur if you would simply rethink your model.
Thanks for another thought-provoking post. For me the king of these three is content. My process is always first to build the content and make sure it’s strong and of good quality. I always go with original content, except Money Maker Blogs which was a different kind of project for me. Once I have the content built up to a point where I won’t need to create more content for a while, I move on to monetization. Bear in mind that I don’t always upload all my content upfront. I create a good amount online, and then I make sure to have more content sitting in my hard drive that I will add when I don’t have time to write something fresh, e.g. during the major parts of the other two phases. This way I can concentrate my efforts on the other components, responding to comments, and adding the already created content periodically. The reason I do monetization next is because if I first build an audience and then monetize, I will be challenging my audience to adopt to a new look and new things on my sidebars and stuff before they have developed enough loyalty to the site. It takes time to build a loyal audience, and if I want to monetize a site, I want to do it as fast as possible. I then market my website using all the methods you mentioned. One of my experiments with one of my sites was to not market it at all, and I have been watching my stats. What I have noticed is that this is the one site that seems to get the most organic traffic from search engines, which is pretty weird I guess. But the content is in a unique niche, so this may explain it.
What you write about content being easy to duplicate is very true, and is one of my big concerns with building content sites. I think that depending on what your interests are, content may be the backbone or not. The thing is that when people go online they are looking for a service, a product, a community, or information. I watch my friends habits online and I see that content is still crucial, because people will be looking for the quickest way to find information, in which case content is king. But I do get your point.
The thing that is a challenge with content is finding a unique niche and building an audience before anyone has a chance to duplicate your content.
I have to agree with Aaron. It is not that I don’t see the points you’re trying to make but as Aaron says it’s an uphill venture.
When I start a new business online I always start out by finding a high demand/low comp. niche to target. Then I run through monetization options for the niche and finally I setup a website with the relevant content to a) support the monetization options and b) the demand.
It has worked perfectly.
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Superb post and absolutely spot on advice for anyone starting a blog.
I suppose Design is part of Monetization but i think that is a big part of converting traffic into money.
The other people who have commented are being narrow minded and not seeing this post for what it is. Obviously these 3 things aren’t the ONLY things that someone needs to consider, but as a framework its a great start.
Interestingly John Chow has posted something very similar to this on his blog 2 days after you. I reckon you should go ask for a credit from him!
Great post though.
[...] on netbusinessblog a nice simple 3 step model on launching an online [...]
I totally agree with your last sentence. That’s why market research and marketing is so important.
I understand where you are coming from. I think the order is not as important as doing a good job in each of the steps. Each of the three steps is vitally important to having a long-term profitable website.
I think my model works better for new to intermediate webmasters. In my experience, if you start with monetization, you’ll be tempted to go into a niche you’re not passionate about. To me, that’s not a good idea. In my opinion, unless you’re a really good marketer, it will be harder to make money in a niche you’re not passionate about.
The problem is most of us are not really good marketers.
Also, when you actually build your website, you have to use my model, because you can’t market without content and you can’t monetize without traffic which comes from marketing.
I think if you have good content and marketing, you can monetize any niche. It might not be a full-time income, but it should be a decent part-time income. If you have good content and marketing, you’ll get traffic. And if you have traffic, there are just too many ways to monetize traffic today.
Content can be duplicated easily. That’s why marketing is more important than content. I think most websites are not marketed well at all. Marketing allows you to establish a dominant market position. But to keep that position, you need quality content.
Thanks for your dissenting opinion. It’s made me think more deeply about my opinion. I’m thinking of emailing some internet marketers for their thoughts on this matter.
Like I said in the above comment, I’m realizing that the order is not as important as actually doing all 3 steps well.
I like how you “store up” content to focus on the other 2 steps.
I think the unique niche is a big reason for getting organic traffic without marketing. Thanks for sharing that experiment. That’s more evidence of the power of choosing a unique niche.
Thanks for the positive feedback.
I’ve been thinking about where design fits in. I think it’s part of both monetization and content.