In Summary
- Every portal website is a website, but not every website is a portal website. A portal website has a larger capacity and is more extensive in its functionalities.
- It pays to have your own, because whenever users want to find out something, they start with A search engine. If it is not on the Internet, it is as if it does not exist at all.
- There are some types of Internet portals: information with current news important to the local. communities, or industry/topic with articles, news, and tips about a certain industry, e.g. construction.
- To create a portal web page, you will need a concept, competitor analysis, plan, and release schedule. On top of that, a good CMS (Content Management System).
- If you plan placeholders for ads sponsored articles, small paid advertisements and a catalog of companies, you can actually make a lot of money with your portal website.
- The total cost of a portal website consists of on the chosen CMS (some are free, some are not), hosting, server (dedicated/shared) and, if necessary, a programmers job.
- Read also: What is CMS?
Index
- The difference between a website and a portal website
- Information portal. What is it?
- Why is it worth having your own Internet portal?
- How to create a portal website?
- How much does it cost? an information portal? cost?
As of 2019, more than 312 million people in the United States of America have access to the Internet. 90% of adults use the Internet, either regularly or from time to time. No wonder more and more people are trying to find ways to make money online. One of them is making money with your own information portal website or local service from ads.
It’s a tasty morsel, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how important it is for companies to have a presence on the Internet .
The difference between a website and a portal website
To begin with, it’s important to determine the difference between a basic website and a portal website.
Those words are often used interchangeably. However, the difference is quite significant.
Every portal website is a website (who would have thought?), but not every website is a portal website. The distinction lies in the capacity of its functions.
Each one can have its own website: a blog, a simple theme service, a company website. Nowadays, creating those is not very difficult anymore, thanks to website builders and CMS.
However, you can still come across websites that seem to have never been created. been updated since then. the 90s And that’s how it works.
Look at the apps you use most often. They have constant updates, after which it’s often hard to find what’s where, isn’t it?
Paradoxically, it’s the constant change, smart adaptation to users’ needs that makes us all use Instagram and let Snapchat fade away. into oblivion.
So what is an information portal website?
Information portal website. What is it?
An information portal website is actually a portal website, where users can find new information about current events. p>
Among them there are local information portals. What is an Internet portal website?
To be precise, an Internet portal website is also a website, only much more professional and complex.
A portal website is an experiential and interactive journey. It has many interesting features.
It provides complex access to all the information the user wants to know about their local community.
Allows you to check news and updates news, add announcements, comment on an article, or even create an account.
It makes users expect to find interesting information every time they visit.
A website from the information portal of The Internet is also a business card for your company. Not only for customers, but also for potential business partners.
There are many types of Internet portal websites:
- information – local, regional, informing about current events, i.e. car accidents, road repairs and investments in a given place or region,
- industrial > – informing about new trends and possibilities regarding a certain industry, e.g. law, construction, etc.
- dating: the chance to meet a soul mate in all possible gender configurations
- ads: contains local ads : sell, buy, trade (something like Craigslist)
- social: you can create a community that revolves around a certain topic: in the past there were discussion forums, today today it’s mostly Facebook.
If you want to be associated with the highest quality and reliability, you have to write it on your face, on your portal website. Still not convinced?
Why is it worth having your own news portal?
For a long time we have been witnessing an upward trend buying products online.
After all, why waste an entire afternoon running around a mall and picking your way through the masses, when you can sit in your sofa and access a much larger stock without the risk of being infected with the coronavirus? You’ll probably have a hard time finding anything interesting anyway.
This practice is spreading among customers in every way possible. To keep up with the competition, take action and create an online presence.
A good analogy is apps like Grubhub or Uber Eats, which appear like mushrooms.</p
Supposedly, they are not economically beneficial for restaurants. So what if users would rather have dozens of restaurants in one place, rather than search their websites one by one and make sure their food will be delivered?
If you don’t adapt, your business will go under.
So if you’re a local newspaper or magazine publisher and for some reason you don’t have a portal website, that’s your cue to change. it.
Today, the search process for everyone starts with a search engine like Google, so make sure your business appears on it. Not having a website is like not existing.
How to create a portal website?
This is what your news portal would look like when use our 4media CMS:
How to create such a layout?
We would not recommend the ‘hooray’ approach . You need a plan.
There are a few ways to do it. They differ from each other in terms of many factors, from price to quality. However, they each start with the same step.
1. Concept
To get started, you need to have an idea for your Internet service. What idea?
A local web portal? Information one? Or an industrial one?
Plan your theme. If it’s related to your company, then the topic should probably revolve around that line of work. It pays to follow the latest trends, both in your country and abroad, and become the first source of information for users in your industry. Readers will certainly appreciate it and come back more often. Don’t forget about tips and how-tos – it’s a valuable form of articles, known for its popularity and gathering a large audience.
If you go for an information portal website, remember keep the news local. Recognize the 80/20 rule of thumb, which means that 80% of the content should stay local, while 20% should focus on the national scale (however, the stories described should have a impact at the local level). community). Therefore, it is good to have at least one journalist on your staff. (S)he will collect and publish local news.
An exception might be a regional portal website that revolves around a precise topic, e.g. rock climbing. Reporting breaking news would not be a top priority in such a case. Instead, set aside a space for guides and useful information for tourists.
#PROTIP: Think SEO. Don’t know what SEO is? Don’t worry, we’ll come back to this in a bit and describe this feature in detail.
Right from the start, in the Concept step, you should plan for keywords, tags, and think about the post category titles.
Avoid duplicate content: Google will rank it lower and you will sabotage yourself.
However, the concept of how to build a web portal is just the beginning.
2. Competitor analysis
Your city doesn’t have a local web portal? Congratulations, you just found the idea for your web portal.
But probably in 99% of cases it won’t be that easy.
Once you decide the type of website for your portal, you can move on to market analysis.
Studying the needs of users can help you discover an undeveloped niche.
It’s easier to beat the competition when it doesn’t exist and is left behind from the start.
During this phase:
- find out what the competition is. The industrial trends are,
- verify, what is lacking in the local community,
- verify, what are the most discussed topics from online venues (Facebook, discussion forums, comments on other portal websites),
- think about what could distinguish you from your competitors,
- find out what your competition is missing and do it yourself.
If your city or district is not It still has an information portal, it is a great opportunity to start it up and meet the expectations and needs of your community.
3. Content Planning
At this point, you should be aware that running a local Internet of information service requires at least a long-term basic plan for publication, or if you are finding it difficult to do so, try to plan at least a week in advance.
A portal website is an investment and if you want to get your money back, you have to be smart when
Like it or not, you are forced to submit to Google, because the vast majority of users will first visit your page through the well-reputed search engine.
p>
Fortunately, their algorithms are no mystery to professional copywriters. What matters most is:
- the original content,
- the time of publication,
- the frequency of publication,
- following the latest trends,
- appropriate format of the texts ( titles, leads, middle titles, keywords, and phrases).
Of course, the main goal is to make each of your posts useful to real users, not robots.
It is also one thing when you are reporting breaking news and another thing when it comes to more universal or seasonal content, such as ‘best prom haircuts 2022’.
It’s worth spending the time and finding out how to create articles that help you get noticed on Google News and Google Discover (don’t worry, that guide is already on its way to you ).
Considering the visibility of Go ogle remembers, never copy anything. This search engine simply can’t handle duplicate content and once it detects it, a page will be discriminated and rank lower. Informing your readers that a particular text is copied from another source and linking to it will not matter to Google.
If you have a lot of duplicate content, your reach will decrease, but the same than search engine visibility and website traffic to your portal. As a result, the income from the sale of your product, or simply from advertisements, would also decrease. More than that, your credibility would take a huge hit, one you might not recover from.
All of the above are good reasons to familiarize yourself with the term mentioned above: SEO. SEO is search engine optimization.
It is not an accident that a certain link appears at the top of the first page of Google (and the only one that will be reviewed in almost 100% of cases) after searching for a phrase, while other websites are doomed to have no visitors.
With a few adjustments, the positioning of these websites could be greatly improved and make it into the top 10, but more on that another time.
For example, after typing ‘seo’ in just 1.26 seconds, I got about 6,220,000,000 (six thousand million two hundred and twenty million).
What could you do to get to the top dozen?
First, prepare useful and substantive content.
Do some proper research and add something new, something fresh, which has not been described in such articles before. Update existing information with new developments. Share an article on social media.
Also, it’s worth creating a publishing schedule. Let’s figure this out: the more often you post good-quality content, the better. Google bots can add your articles to search results.
That is why, in the case of an industry portal website, it is worth investing in professional copywriters, who will create the materials The right ones.
Running the local or information portals will definitely require the help of journalists.
If you decide to become an editor and a journalist at the same time, you could be overwhelmed with responsibilities.
A news site, which claims to be the first news source, and then continues to publish general or national information will quickly bore users, because they will consider it to be of little informative value.
That’s why providing real information about the latest events on local portal websites is essential to their existence.
Of course, there is another way to spend money and still get to the top of the Google listings – the money itself.
You can pay to advertise your page, that is, on Google Ads. However, if it’s not filled with good content, users will visit it once and never come back. And that’s not what you want. What you want is a user base that provides you with a steady stream of ads.
So, once your regional portal website launches, make sure you post only relevant materials .
Another step ahead: choosing a CMS for a portal.
4. Which CMS to choose for a portal?
What CMS we have already prepared an extensive article about. However, to make things easier for you, I will also briefly explain it here.
CMS stands for Content Management System.
In simple words, it is software which makes it easy to run your own website.
It works a bit like the familiar Microsoft Word. In most cases, knowledge of coding languages is not required.
You simply type the text you’d like to put on your website, and CMS adjusts it visually itself, based on the themes and skins you have chosen.
A good CMS allows you to add modifications to the structure of your portal website.
CMS are basically divided into three categories:
a) Open Source CMS
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! etc These are CMS based on open source code . Biggest advantage? Free use. It also has a lot of plugins to install.
The downside is the constant need to update (Updates, as mentioned before, are generally good. However, in this case, they may make your page stop working correctly).
In addition, the best solutions (skins, themes, etc.) are usually paid (for example, the design of an information portal).
b) SaaS CMS
Software as a Service: Payment model, often by subscription (billed monthly).
It is a good solution for people who value convenience and want the help of 24/7 external support for their CMS information services.
SaaS are easy to use and made only for local news sites and media outlets. Generally created with the idea of local portals in mind, it must have mods and functionalities of the media.
c) Original CMS
Solutions for specific needs.
If budget doesn’t limit your options, original CMSs are created exclusively to run a single portal website. This option is used by the largest portals nationwide.
5. Monetization
Reading this article, it’s easy to come to one conclusion: creating and running a portal isn’t cheap.
So, once you decide to have one of your own, make sure it’s an investment, instead of throwing money down the drain.
CMS, copywriters, journalists, and also hosting (share a page with users through a server).
The list of expenses goes on and on. And yet properly managed regional information services allow you to cover all these expenses.
They can even make you money! There are many ways to make money with a news portal.
Banners
First, the ads. Your news site should have placeholders for ads.
However, you can’t just throw ads at users, because aggressive ads, annoying pop-ups make your guests afraid to click anything and instead just walk away, never to return.
Or just install a browser extension to block ads, which it means you won’t get any revenue from them.
Is there a way to allow users to only scroll through your page after they have disabled ad blockers. Make sure to encourage them to stick around once they do.
Sponsored Articles
Another way to make money with your website news is sponsored articles. It is definitely the least intrusive form of advertising, even if it is well paid.
This type of article allows readers to gain some knowledge on the topic with the subtly promoted product smuggled. as an in-text mention (sometimes you can run into horribly written sponsored articles, but it really should be subtle).
The user doesn’t care, because they really learned something strong> and, as a bonus, they were graciously recommended a product from the searched category.
Paid Ads
It’s possible to have a ‘little Ad module’ installed in your local online media outlet.
Other businesses can share your business cards there as a form of advertising, and you can earn money from them.
It can be for free too – you’ll still build traffic, and maybe those companies will return the favor in some way.
It goes without saying that paid ads and posts should stand out, and its longer broadcast, than the free ones.
How much does an information portal website cost?
As you have already learned, there are websites of the portal and portal websites. There are a few types, and the price for each of them differs significantly.
It mainly depends on how complex you want your website to be. be, on which CMS it is supposed to be based and how many functions you want to have implicit.
An Internet portal is a project, which requires a lot of commitment from a team from several people, who will work tirelessly for a long time, before delivering you a ready product.
One of the most important steps before launching a CMS based on information services is your evidence. It’s time consuming, but it allows you to avoid frustrating scenarios, where nothing works as it should.
It’s worth getting it right once and be done with it.
Regardless of the test team size, they won’t be able to find as many bugs as users, they’ll just be allowed to use the site.
And even then, if the bugs are minor, your team will be able to fix them in no time. If they are important, you will lose traffic.
The investment in a web portal that does not work and drives users away will not be recovered.
It is important to remember: A portal website is an investment, allowing you to earn money from ads.
That’s why it’s worth taking a look at all the available programmatic ad types in the market and just count, how much does it cost to have them on your portal website and what kind of revenue can they offer based on the chosen CMS.
Yes, CMS is a very important in this equation.
Can you set up a local information portal based on a genuine CMS for a couple thousand dollars? I guess.
It is worth asking yourself a question, what exactly is the point of having such a website. It will not bring you money, or even satisfaction. Time after time, something will go wrong, and I doubt anyone would ever want to revisit such a page. And your public image would take a deep dive.
The cost of creating a regional information service based on a CMS is closer to a dozen, if not several dozen thousand dollars .
Of course, the price differs depending on the level of complexity. Not everyone requires a complicated site, some are fine with a simpler project, based on a free CMS like WordPress and a theme available for a couple of bucks.
Aside Cost of When creating a website, the cost of hosting enters into the equation. Having your page on the server is not free.
I would like to mention the advantage of dedicated servers over shared ones – the first type will probably be able to operate faster and allow you to store a large number of files (after all, your portal will contain a large amount of information).
The cost of hosting can be very different and depends on its quality and power, but basically it should be between about a few to a few hundred dollars each month.
An open source portal website will be the cheapest for sure, because the systems themselves are free.
Don’t be fooled: setting up a web page based on this system will be expensive, because most of the time it requires the help of an IT technician to organize the website of the portal the way you want.
The entire process can be time consuming and let’s get this out of the way: there’s a reason paid CMS are paid – they do offer just more.
The cost of hosting is also added in this case.
However, there is a complex solution: in the case of SaaS CMS, both the Hosting such as server could be included in the price.
The service is paid for on a subscription basis, and its monthly cost generally ranges between $500 and $1,000 or more, depending on the package you choose. Constant technical support is also included, so in an emergency you won’t be left alone with the problem.
The cost may increase, if you already have a portal website and now you want to migrate it to a new CMS.
In that case it is necessary to copy the entire database and configure the correct redirection from the old URLs to the new ones, so that the portal does not lose its current position for the that worked, and users do not find old links that do not work to the previous content.
In the end the final cost will depend on many factors and on each individual case will be agreed with the company you decide to work with.
You wonder, what are other ways to make money with a local information portal? What is an affiliate network? We’re working on an article on that, so be sure to come back and check it out soon!
More info: CMS 4media. Learn more, earn money, save time! Subscribe for $499 per month!
.