Blogs and other information sites

Online publishing still describes what most webmasters do. More than anything else, web visitors are looking for information.

There are many ways to serve up that information. One of the most popular is the web log, or blog. I encounter a lot of business people who still view blogs as opinionated, badly written screeds about what you and your girlfriend did last night. While there are plenty of blogs out there like that, the blog has grown up. It’s the modern answer to the newspaper, with the letters to the editor instantly appearing under the article.

The blog is just one publishing venue. Recipe sites, how tos, world news, business advice, tech reviews…you name it, it’s on the web.

For an information site, traffic is everything, especially if most or all of the information is free. To make money with a site like this, you’ll probably need advertising. Which means lots and lots of traffic. You can also sell information on a subscription basis, but that still requires traffic.

Fortunately, building an info site or blog is easy. Just install WordPress and go. Information sites don’t have to be flashy or fancy to attract and hold visitors. In fact, it’s better if they’re not too fancy. You don’t want to detract from the content.

The key issues with an information site:

• Freshness. Blogs, especially, need to be updated regularly. And that means twice a week, not twice a year. If you’re selling subscriptions, the only way to keep folks subscribing is to feed them fresh content.
• Knowledge. There’s this notion floating around that you can just slap up some content, rewrite some out-of-date public domain book (or steal someone else’s content), and have a viable site. Sorry, but online publishing is like offline publishing–there’s way more stuff that nobody reads than there are bestsellers. You need quality content to attract visitors and keep them coming back. That means you (or a partner) need to know what you’re talking about.
• Writing skill. Nah, you don’t have to be Shakespeare, or even John Grisham. But unless you’re really lucky, hiring some guy halfway around the world for 50 cents an article is just going to fetch you the kind of crap you see all over the web: “Content” that sounds like a fifth-grade term paper and that is about as informative as your average political stump speech.
• Honesty. Way too many blogs and other “info sites” are devoted to reviews that are thinly disguised sales pitches for products (the blogger gets a cut, of course, or may have been paid to write the review). Reliable information is getting harder and harder to find amidst all the noise. That’s why good old journalistic integrity will set you apart. There’s nothing wrong with advertising—as long as it’s identifiable, and not disguised as objective copy.