[question]You talk about “Mequoda websites” being content-driven, Google-friendly, email-centic and profit-minded. Can you explain in more detail what this means?[/question]
[answer]Content-driven: the idea of having lots of content on your site is key. But at the same time, in a special interest niche, you may find that one of the top five or ten websites may only have a few thousands pages because it is a niche, so anywhere between 5,000 or 10,000 pages might be required to dominate a your niche. If you’re in an incredibly competitive market, that number could be in the millions. For example, Forbes.com is the number one business website in the world and they have 4 million web pages of content. So if you want to know how high “high” is, figure out who the number one player in your market is and then, using a tool like the Yahoo Site Explorer, find out how many web pages they have on their site. This way, you’ll know what you’re up against.
Google-friendly: for publishers that are successful online, they spend virtually no money marketing themselves in terms of traffic. There are a handful of exceptions, somebody like a WebMD that actually does do television advertising to drive traffic. Most of the publishers however don’t do that kind of brand advertising. They rely instead on their content to bring in traffic. And to do that they set up a Google-friendly architecture that includes things like topic pages, index pages, meta-pages and meta-tagging to make it easy for search engines like Google and MSN and Yahoo to find their content.
Email-centric: for most publishers, whether they’re ad-driven or product-driven, we usually find that as much as 60 to 80-percent of the revenue is actually being generated out of email. So we very much think that the website mission is to build the email list and that a lot of attention needs to be paid to email as a publishing platform. There needs to be a publishing plan, with formats and frequencies. Email needs to be taken just as seriously as you would a magazine or a print newsletter in terms of programming it and making sure that the readers are satisfied, so that they’ll stick with you and either buy your products or buy your advertisers’ products.
Profit-minded: of all those 100 million plus websites that are out there, most of them are not profit-minded. Most of them are either a brochure for a company or an individual or they are a personal blog where individuals share information with friends and family. That said, there still are hundreds of thousands of websites that are profit-minded, because the barriers to entry are relatively low, while the barriers to success are still quite high.
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