Senin, 13 Juni 2011

Building Content — The Key to a Profitable AdSense Website

AdSense works better than just about every other type of online advertising
for one simple reason: the ads are relevant to the content on your page.
Users click on the ads because they find them interesting.
But those users come to your site because they find your content interesting.
If your site doesn’t have good content, you’re going to struggle to attract
users and links. You won’t be able to persuade anyone to visit your site, and
without those visitors, you’ll have no revenues.
Having the right content then is crucial to having good income from AdSense.
It’s also pretty important to the relationship you have with Google’s indexing
mechanism — and it’s vital for the success of your site.
That’s why if you spend any time at all researching Internet-based
opportunities, you’ll come across the phrase “content is king” again and
again.
It’s a sensible position to adopt. No one visits a website to see ads, just as
no one buys a magazine to look at the ads, however glossy they might be.
Those pages of relative dullness are the price subscribers and buyers have to
pay for the articles they want to read. The more they want to read the
articles, the more they’re willing to put up with the inconvenience of looking
at ads for cars, perfumes and pet food.
When the articles isn’t good enough and the ads are irritating enough, they
put the magazine back on the shelf.
That’s the challenge faced by any producer of content, and it’s the same
challenge that you’re going to face as an Internet publisher.
The better you make your content, the larger your audience will become, the
more willing they’ll be to put up with the ads — and the more you’ll be able
to earn.

But just as the content of magazines and television shows cost money to
create so your content will cost money to create too. You won’t be able to
charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a minute’s placement or a full

page ad to cover those costs but you will need to know how much your
content is costing you and what you can do to cut the costs.

The Value of Content
One company more than any other has understood the true value of content
and what it takes to make money out of it online. Demand Media was
launched in May 2006 by Richard Rosenblatt, a serial entrepreneur who had
once been the Chairman of MySpace. Armed with $355 million of start-up
funds, he set about creating a giant online publishing company.
Today, as the owner of eHow.com, Livestrong.com and a host of other online
properties, Demand Media’s ad revenues are believed to top $200 million.
That income is generated from the 5,700 articles and videos produced daily
by the company’s 10,000-plus freelance contributors.
What has made Demand Media such a giant success — and what has made it
such a controversial success — isn’t just Demand Media’s scale though. It’s
an approach that inverts the usual way in which publishers have made
money online.
Publishers usually try to produce the best content they can, assuming that
the higher the quality of their content, the higher their advertising revenues
will rise and the greater their profits will become.
Demand Media works differently. It caps the price it pays for content, limiting
the amount of time that writers will spend on it and restricting its quality.
The company has developed a series of algorithms that use search data to
look for underserved subjects, develop titles that are likely to generate
traffic, and predict — based on clickthrough rates, traffic flows and keyword
values — the lifetime revenues of each article it might produce.
When the algorithm finds a subject that can generate more than the flat $15
fee the company pays a freelancer to produce it, the article is added to a list
for writers to accept and complete.
The result, not surprisingly, is content that’s not particularly good, and
Demand Media has come in for a lot of criticism for flooding the Internet with
mass-produced, low-quality articles and videos.
But it is making streams of cash.
Without a $355 million investment or an understanding of the kind of
algorithms that Demand Media uses to spot content opportunities and assess
their value, the company’s business model isn’t one that small publishers are
going to be able to emulate completely. But the principle is something that
you can hold on to: content costs money to produce and the amount of
money it will generate has as much to do with the size of its potential
audience as the quality of the work itself.
You have to know how much you’re investing in each article you’re producing
and how big an audience you can bring to it if you’re going to create content
that turns a profit.
That investment in production can come in two forms.
It can come in the time you take to produce the content yourself; and it can
come in the fee you pay others to produce content for you.

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