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Wish I knew what I know know when I was younger
While the title above is the lyrics to a famous song it is definitely true. When we started the website, the day after Jacob Zuma fired former finance minister Nonhlanhla Nene and put back bencher David "Des" Van Rooyen in charge of the National Treasury the straw broke this camel's back and we felt we needed to inform the South African public and the rest of the world more about South Africa's economy, its financial markets and the impact politicians, policy and we as the public have on it all. We had no idea how to set up a website properly to rank higher on google, in fact we still don't really know how to rank better. We had no idea how to track how many users visit the website, where they come from, their general interests. After having our website up and running for about 4 months we eventually figured out Google Analytics and how to use this and monitor website activity.
We didnt know anything. We just wanted to share economic and financial and stock market information with the public at large. And we hope to present it in new and interesting ways. We believe a proper graphic can say more than 1000 words. Problem is spending to much time on graphics and not enough on actual text content doesn't help google rankings either.
The market we are targeting is already covered by big sites such as Fin24, Biznews, Moneyweb, Business Insider South Africa to name but a few. So we are up against tough competition. But we do cover a lot of topics they they generally dont, and they do provide more updated "news" as they are largely news driven sites. We tend to aim at providing interesting facts and figures about the South African stock market as and when it becomes available. But it is exceptionally hard considering this is a second job for all of our team members. We all have full time jobs in the financial, analytics related industries. So we dont have a massive team pumping content the whole day, or a group of editors that checks all the articles. Or a team of people working in promoting content on social media sites. We a small time working away every day in order to develop new content for the site.
We didnt know anything. We just wanted to share economic and financial and stock market information with the public at large. And we hope to present it in new and interesting ways. We believe a proper graphic can say more than 1000 words. Problem is spending to much time on graphics and not enough on actual text content doesn't help google rankings either.
The market we are targeting is already covered by big sites such as Fin24, Biznews, Moneyweb, Business Insider South Africa to name but a few. So we are up against tough competition. But we do cover a lot of topics they they generally dont, and they do provide more updated "news" as they are largely news driven sites. We tend to aim at providing interesting facts and figures about the South African stock market as and when it becomes available. But it is exceptionally hard considering this is a second job for all of our team members. We all have full time jobs in the financial, analytics related industries. So we dont have a massive team pumping content the whole day, or a group of editors that checks all the articles. Or a team of people working in promoting content on social media sites. We a small time working away every day in order to develop new content for the site.
So if you planning on developing a content site that you are hoping to earn money (or to make a living from it) you will need A LOT of traffic. For South Africans as a rough guide you will earn about R10 for every 1000 adds seen. That is right on average you will earn R10 for every 1000 ads seen on your website. You can do the maths from there. If you want to earn say R20 000 a month you will need a total of 2 000 000 ads seen. Assuming you place 3 ads per page, you will need about 667 000 visitors on your website a month or 22 200 a month. That is a lot of people and a serious amount of content to get those numbers to your website.
When we started we created a blog post a day, just calling the page title blog and then the date. Sadly this doesn't help your google ranking as google uses the text in your page title to assist in searches and rankings. Our blog's were relatively short too. Around 400 to 700 words. From what is out there google considers quality content pages to have words of well over 1000, and prefer longer articles at around 2000 words plus. And note copying and pasting other website's content wont get you anywhere. Google will know and it wont index the page if it realises its the same as another website's. So the content you create needs to be unique and not a verbatim copy and paste from other websites.
Google likes websites that are good google citizens, basically providing links to other website. And it likes websites that have a lot of links pointing to that side. This is called backlinks. The number of links to your website coming from other websites. If a poor/spamming/low quality website provides links to your site, this wont help much. Google likes high quality websites linking back to your website. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to get backlinks to your website from other high quality sites.
Make sure your website answers readers questions. If google realises people get onto your site and leave it relatively quickly (called the bounce rate) and go back and googles another query or goes to another link or website, it scores you down as it believes your website is not answer the question the reader(s) had.
When you add images to your content website make sure its compressed or relative small images as you don't want 20meg pictures slowing down page loading times, as this will affect your google ranking too. And there needs to be captions for pictures or images. Google likes this so that it could provide readers with more images when they do image searches.
Quality over quantity. In the rush to try and build up your website remember quality content over quantity content will always win. You can add 100 pages a day but if its of a poor quality it will never rank highly in google searches and you want get the visitor numbers required. We started off doing a page a day, and not of very high quality. And we did this for months on end as we didnt know any better. But over time we learnt that we need to add more content on our site, but the content needs to be of a better quality. Quality in terms of relevance, uniqueness, clarity etc.
Eventually we figured out there is something called Search Console. Which is a google application for developers that shows you which queries people used to get onto your site, where you rank and what percentage of your website links seen are clicked on. This was a revelation. And we believe we still not using it optimally. Perhaps if we had a proper marketing team we could take full advantage of this.
Website behaviour is pretty volatile. Looking at week to week or month over month activity on your website, dont bother. Rather look at year on year performance. If you have a lot of students on your website, your website activity will decline when there are school holidays or when universities are closed. So dont get a fright when you see numbers decline substantially every now and again, events like the above will affect it, hence we recommend looking at year on year website performance. But one will start to understand website visitor fluctuations once one has a better understanding of website visitors age, location etc which can all be found on Google Analytics.
If you are planning or currently developing a content website good luck. It takes hours and hours worth of hard work and dedication and reading and planning to get it up and running but it is worth it when you see the people on your website reading your articles. Watching Google Analytics is like a drug, we find ourselves with the analytics page open all the time looking to see what exactly readers are reading and where they are from.
It is hard work, and our users have grown substantially over time, but we are nowhere near making a living off it, and it is due to the countless hours of hard work and the pretty limited earnings up to this point that we felt that we need to let those looking to start a content website know that it is not easy to get it to a point where one can earn a living off it. Unless you have loads of capital to advertise your site and to build it into a massive content website. If you dont have the capital to pay for it to be promoted or to pay a lot of people to develop content for you, know that it is extremely hard work and in the end it might not come close to delivering the type of earnings you are expecting or dreaming about. But it is still fun doing it though and we still enjoying the journey and cant wait to see where it takes us.
When we started we created a blog post a day, just calling the page title blog and then the date. Sadly this doesn't help your google ranking as google uses the text in your page title to assist in searches and rankings. Our blog's were relatively short too. Around 400 to 700 words. From what is out there google considers quality content pages to have words of well over 1000, and prefer longer articles at around 2000 words plus. And note copying and pasting other website's content wont get you anywhere. Google will know and it wont index the page if it realises its the same as another website's. So the content you create needs to be unique and not a verbatim copy and paste from other websites.
Google likes websites that are good google citizens, basically providing links to other website. And it likes websites that have a lot of links pointing to that side. This is called backlinks. The number of links to your website coming from other websites. If a poor/spamming/low quality website provides links to your site, this wont help much. Google likes high quality websites linking back to your website. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to get backlinks to your website from other high quality sites.
Make sure your website answers readers questions. If google realises people get onto your site and leave it relatively quickly (called the bounce rate) and go back and googles another query or goes to another link or website, it scores you down as it believes your website is not answer the question the reader(s) had.
When you add images to your content website make sure its compressed or relative small images as you don't want 20meg pictures slowing down page loading times, as this will affect your google ranking too. And there needs to be captions for pictures or images. Google likes this so that it could provide readers with more images when they do image searches.
Quality over quantity. In the rush to try and build up your website remember quality content over quantity content will always win. You can add 100 pages a day but if its of a poor quality it will never rank highly in google searches and you want get the visitor numbers required. We started off doing a page a day, and not of very high quality. And we did this for months on end as we didnt know any better. But over time we learnt that we need to add more content on our site, but the content needs to be of a better quality. Quality in terms of relevance, uniqueness, clarity etc.
Eventually we figured out there is something called Search Console. Which is a google application for developers that shows you which queries people used to get onto your site, where you rank and what percentage of your website links seen are clicked on. This was a revelation. And we believe we still not using it optimally. Perhaps if we had a proper marketing team we could take full advantage of this.
Website behaviour is pretty volatile. Looking at week to week or month over month activity on your website, dont bother. Rather look at year on year performance. If you have a lot of students on your website, your website activity will decline when there are school holidays or when universities are closed. So dont get a fright when you see numbers decline substantially every now and again, events like the above will affect it, hence we recommend looking at year on year website performance. But one will start to understand website visitor fluctuations once one has a better understanding of website visitors age, location etc which can all be found on Google Analytics.
If you are planning or currently developing a content website good luck. It takes hours and hours worth of hard work and dedication and reading and planning to get it up and running but it is worth it when you see the people on your website reading your articles. Watching Google Analytics is like a drug, we find ourselves with the analytics page open all the time looking to see what exactly readers are reading and where they are from.
It is hard work, and our users have grown substantially over time, but we are nowhere near making a living off it, and it is due to the countless hours of hard work and the pretty limited earnings up to this point that we felt that we need to let those looking to start a content website know that it is not easy to get it to a point where one can earn a living off it. Unless you have loads of capital to advertise your site and to build it into a massive content website. If you dont have the capital to pay for it to be promoted or to pay a lot of people to develop content for you, know that it is extremely hard work and in the end it might not come close to delivering the type of earnings you are expecting or dreaming about. But it is still fun doing it though and we still enjoying the journey and cant wait to see where it takes us.