Website as Newspaper?

by John P Schulz
(Berwin, GA, US)

Read All About It!
Redneck Newspaper Website?

Site: Requiem for a Redneck

Steve, I have been following your site and receiving your newsletter since its inception. You have opened up some concepts for me to follow and I really appreciate it. I have an involved question, but I will first give you some background.

First, I wrote a really good book called REQUIEM FOR A REDNECK which is somewhat different in that it portrays the southern redneck as a person instead of just a bunch of jokes. I self published the book after paying attention to Ron Pramschufer of selfpublishing.com. I followed his directions and did a lot of research. I have been blessed with a beautiful, professional looking product which is selling locally like hotcakes. I am currently selling it in gift shops because yankees like to send copies north.

I am a total novice with internet marketing and procedures and I am therefore hanging on every word you say. I plan to purchase SiteBuildIt through you as soon as my confidence level increases a bit.

On receipt of the book, we put up a quickie website just to have one. Before I met you, we had arranged to put the book site on the back cover. I have been listening to you, though, and I understand that I will need to put up another site to drive traffic to my book.

I have been racking my brain trying to think of some sort of outside of the box type of approach to use on the SiteBuildIt format. I am an outside the box type person but I realize too far outside will probably not work with the search engines.

My office is on Berwin Road which is all that is left of Berwin, Ga. which was once the last whistle stop for the train from Chattanooga to Rome. The other day, my girlfriend/publisher/editor (wheredepony press) asked me for the news from Berwin. I wrote the first edition of The Berwin News. She was delighted and I sent copies to some friends who were also delighted and forwarded the letter all over the place.

AHA MOMENT Could the Berwin News be the solution to my problem? Will SiteBuildIt teach me how to publish a "newspaper"? Will the newspaper send visitors to my site? Or am I on the wrong track and may need to do more thinking?

I know you are very busy. I have read every word on every post in your shared self pub. world and I really appreciate all of the help you have given me, conceptual and otherwise.

John Schulz

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John, thanks for making contact, as well as for the very kind words.

I like the challenge you've presented, as well as what I've read of your writing. I've checked out the 1st issue of The Berwin News, as well as the "What is a redneck?" explanation on your website. Funny stuff, well-written (and I really enjoyed your bio). How exciting to have written something that's selling like hotcakes! It sounds like you're really on to something.

Now let's get to your question. We'll start by examining three approaches to web success.

1st there's everyone's web dream: to go "viral." Do something so brilliant that by the mere fact of mailing around a link to it, millions of people visit your site to check it out.

Pluses:

1) One artistic act results in huge amounts of attention and, potentially, profit.
2) Others do the grunt work of promotion for you.

Negatives:

1) It's a longshot, no matter how brilliant your art is.
2) You inevitably get ripped off. Since your work is text, others appropriate it as fast as you can say, "Copy and paste."
3) Traffic inevitably tails off (partly because of #2), usually to near zero.

Ouch. So what are the alternatives to praying to go viral? Well, one is to just slowly build a following as a "destination site," one that people return to and forward links about. This requires a steady stream of amazing content.

Let's consider The Onion, since their humor-website-as-newspaper seems similar to what you propose.

By one estimate they receive 2 million visitors a month. They benefit from all the years they were a popular hard copy humor newspaper. A nice place to be, but a heck of a lot of time (and writers) were required to get there.

It's kind of a "success begets success" situation. It'd be great to be them, but...Catch-22: you have to be famous to be popular. What if The Onion hadn't started off famous? I'm hard pressed to think of the searches that would find them.

So let's look at option #3: building a search-friendly website.

Plus: You don't have to be famous to get found. Someone doesn't even have to be looking specifically for you. They just have to be looking for information that's available on your website!

Added plus: you can become rather "famous" in your niche in this way, and start harvesting the benefits of the "success begets success" model.

Let's assimilate that information and move on

You want to write a redneck newspaper website. Well, The Onion shows there's an audience for newspaper humor. And I just found out that 1.5 million people Googled redneck last month, so there's certainly demand for that, too!

But now we run up against the search engine conundrum. Google and Yahoo "read" rather primitively, looking for words on the page that signify certain content. In other words...

Title something "The Berwin News" and write of plastic Santas, double-wides, likker and deer meat, and the engines won't know it's redneck humor. We would, but the engines won't, and so we'll never find it.

You can tiptoe around this fact and give a webpage the title "Redneck Humor," but now you're still competing with the 54,600 other pages (by today's count) that contain that phrase in their content.

That's the problem with posting "writing" (as opposed to "content") to the web. Google and Yahoo don't have literary "taste" (yet), so a search for Best Redneck Humor is hard to win (with a tiny website, that is).

Your web newspaper options

If we could put traffic aside, your vision would probably best be spoken to with a blog. In essence, you're envisioning a diary of fictional Berwin events, and what is a blog if not a diary? But blogs are rather untrafficked unless they become destination sites.

Vis a vis the engines, with a blog not only would you still have the "writing" vs "content" problem, but blogs are inherently inferior to traditional websites in that the engines assume older material is dated and of less interest.

Everything about the structure of stand-alone blogs causes them to rank below traditional websites - all other things being equal - and the availability of RSS feeds to traditional websites really renders stand-alone blogs irrelevant. That widget on this site's home page does ALL the work of a blog by letting followers of this site know when and where new content is posted.

So where does that leave you? Well, I'd still be excited about the newspaper, but I would be thinking about it as a component of a larger, search engine friendly site. Remember those 1.5 million Redneck searches? Queries like

redneck woman
redneck jokes
funny redneck
you might be a redneck
redneck pictures

They're each googled over 10,000 times in a typical month. Those queries are your ticket to searches you can win with a properly built website.

That's your traffic. Once you net your traffic, you get to work with it as you will. Perhaps The Berwin Times is your newsletter, sent out weekly or monthly. (You may have noticed the huge proliferation of websites using the newsletter model, a GREAT way to encourage repeat visits and greater sales.) Newsletters can be set up just by pointing and clicking within SBI.

Or the newspaper could be a blog WITHIN your website (something that could be accomplished with SiteBuildIt a number of ways).

I'm thrilled to hear you'll be giving SiteBuildIt a go. I should tell you that it's best to start SBI without preconceptions. Since you've read so much of what I've had to say, you've probably heard me describe it as a "hand-holding" service (among other things).

Until you experience it, it's hard to know how apt that description is. When you start with SiteBuildIt, you'll begin almost immediately with keyword research. It's this research that'll tell you when you have a site concept even Goldilocks would approve of - not too big, not too small.

Going in with too specific a plan is a great way to outsmart SBI (or perhaps I should say, to "outdumb" it) and fail. Rather, you should revel in the hand-holding and be willing to unlearn much of what you thought you knew. To have SiteBuildIt work best for you, you need to accept that you don't know yet what your website is going to be!

(A degree of letting go that - I know from experience - can be hard.)

And do consider taking advantage of the current, once a year, 2-for-1 special. Even if you can't envision building two websites, SBI might change your mind. Alternatively, the 2nd site can be a fun thing to hold onto for awhile with the intention of giving it to someone.

(SiteBuildIt will let you go up to 9 months without starting the clock ticking on the 2nd site, so you'll have thru next September to decide what to do without it costing you anything.)

The special runs through January 5th, 2009, though you may elect to act even sooner for tax purposes!

Did I answer the website as newspaper question?

I hope so, but no doubt I left at least a few loose ends. Please feel free to keep the dialogue going by commenting.

Thanks for putting forward such a poser, and please let us know what you decide to do!