1) Pick the right subject. Choose a specialist niche that you understand. It should be big enough that you can attract a large enough audience, but small enough that you can become the market leader.

2) The right domain name. Choose a short, simple domain name that describes your business and is easy for visitors to remember.

3) Update frequently. You must put up new content regularly to keep your audience and the search engine spiders coming back.

4) Your site must be easy to find. Your website must be designed so that it is easy for the search engines to find and index. Google currently only finds 25% of all web pages.

5) Your website must be easy for your CUSTOMERS to use. It is staggering how many websites are difficult to navigate. Make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

6) Your website must be easy for YOU to use. One of the biggest causes of online publishing failure is having a website that is difficult to update and manage. Make sure you have an excellent content management solution.

7) Use your webstats. Your webstats tell you which pages your visitors read most frequently. Use this amazing intelligence to determine what content to create.

8) Capture information from your customers whenever you can. When someone lands on your website, you should do everything you can to get their email address so you can keep in touch. Offer a newsletter or gift to get them signed up.

9) Make your website interactive. Include functionality on your site that allows you to interact with your visitors. This includes an email newsletter, discussion forum, user comments fields, member directories and user submitted articles. The more engaged your visitors are the more loyal they will become.

10) Make money from multiple revenue streams. Good content websites can drive revenues from online and offline sources. Online money should come from advertising, subscription and ecommerce. Offline money from teleseminars, seminars, conferences, books and consulting services.

Start Your Own Content Website

SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to design, build and launch your own content website. Find out more about SubHub's services or call us with any questions.

Tel US: 1-800-344-4224
Tel UK: 0845 222 0202
Tel Intl: +44 2920 444 787

Advertising

Advertising is the simplest way to generate revenues from content.

You no longer have to sell the advertising space on your site, you can simply sign up to an ad network, integrate the ads into your site and wait for the money to roll in. The most popular ad network is Google Adsense, but there are many more that are growing in popularity.

Alternatively, you can sell your own advertising or site sponsorship so you don't have to share the revenue with the ad networks.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is halfway between advertising and ecommerce.

You place links or ads on your website. If one of your site visitors clicks on the link, goes through to a third party merchant site AND makes a purchase, you get paid a commission on the sale. Commissions vary depending on the value and quantity of products sold.

Ecommerce

You can sell physical and digital products from your site.

Most content sites have the potential to make good revenue from selling ebooks, reports, white papers, research, podcasts and other downloadable products. Many also sell physical goods that they either stock and ship themselves, or they just take the orders for a third party merchant to fulfil.

Subscription

Charging access to premium content is one of the most profitable ways you can build a sustainable online business.

To create a successful subscription website, you need to be able to separate public and member content, manage member's personal data and process recurring payments. These capabilities should be fully automated so you don't spend your life dealing with customer service issues.

Participation

Participation relates to the many different events that you can promote through your website.

These include webinars, teleseminars, seminars, conferences, consultancy, etc. It could also include licensing products, franchising your services, or other creative ways of leveraging your audience.

Start Your Own Content Website

SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to design, build and launch your own content website. Find out more about SubHub's services or call us with any questions.

Tel US: 1(877) 827 4926
Tel UK: 0845 869 3324
Tel Intl: +44 20 7099 8376

The web has been around for long enough that rules and best practise have emerged from years of trial error by thousands of website owners.

You can either go with the flow and be grateful that you can learn from the experience of others, or you can swim against the tide and try to convince the market that you are right and they are wrong.

I would suggest that swimming downstream is far easier and will give you a much greater chance of success.

To understand which layouts work you only need to look at the industry gorillas. These are the online content publishers who have been around for years, and who have tested just about every layout combination. Good examples are some of the most read websites on the internet including:

- BBC (www.bbc.com)
- The Financial Times (www.ft.com)
- The Economist (www.economist.com)
- The Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com)

You will quickly start to recognise elements of the page layouts which are common across all these sites. Just as with print newspapers and magazines, these are the layouts that have proven to sit most comfortably with the reader and with the way online users want to consume content.

The second half of this article can be found at www.subhub.com