(Orig. posted in HTML and Web Design but largely went unnoticed.) Most tips tutorials say you should have 100-300 content pages on your site, or at least be building to that. Seems like good advice to me, but it seems that many? most? fall far short of that. So please vote with your site's number of pages (or average of your siteS). I'd also like to hear how you get new content: freelance articles, free articles, stealing from Wikipedia (a pox on you!), writing yourself, etc. For those who write their own content: how long does an average page take, start to finish? I'm building my first site now, it isn't published yet, but it seems to take me about 1.5-2 hours average to make a new page, start to finish. But that's concentrated, focused work so it actually averages out to slower than that, as I like to relax and eat dinner occasionally.
See site in sig I have about 347 pages of content. Its a quote site, with proverbs, jokes, and some religious stuff. So I get my material from various books, tv shows, movies, websites, all kinds of places.
If you can put up one solid piece of content on your main site daily, you'll do fine. Depending on your skills, that could take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to hours.
It depends, i am currently writing about management. Hitting 2 birds with 1 stone because i am also studying it. So basically reading a couple of books and writing down the important points. Notes as most people usually do when studying.
That's a good idea. I do that myself. Generating a solid income is not about working harder, it's about working smarter.
As a long term news publication, we are coming close to 20,000 news articles + tons more content in other areas. The archive drives a huge amount of regular traffic to the site from search engines.
Wow, with 11 votes so far, 1000+ is winning! I guess there is going to be a large gap between those who metuculously write their own specialized content vs. those who buy it or generate it easily through news, etc. I bet the niches/site concepts don't have a lot of overlap either...
well that is one way. If one is passionate about something the more sustainable way is to write a page a day every day. After a while one will notice that written content of two or more pages actually would make a page on its own.... Suddenly 200 pages can become 1000 pages without being just clobberd together or being incoherent a bit of "glue" go a long way and a twist on how to look at something or present it prevents it from being just a duplicate it becomes unique in its own way. God tagging and maybe a database with exerpts help as well. Expat
If the content is too interesting then people aren't clicking on the ads. In a recent email sent to me someone said "I spent the whole evening on your site." This is the kind of site I like to visit myself so it's a dilemma really. Do you make a site so interesting that no-one looks at the ads or do you make it so boring that they'll click anything to get away? I'd hate to live in a world where every site was boring because people want to make money from the ads but then again I'd like to earn the money.
True. But I think different subject lend themselves to ads better. For example, a joke site might contain a lot of jokes, which is probably what people would be looking for, so why click an ad? But if your site is music or book reviews, well, people want to read or listen for themselves so it's a little more natural to click an ad to buy it. I guess one tactic might be to think of something your typical visitor might be interested in commercially. For the joke site example, maybe they like comedy and would want standup on DVD. So you could have a review section for DVD's or comedy albums. I'm a newbie and hence talking out of my ass, but I have read this concept on DP and it makes sense to me.
My site that I'm working on will have about 500-1000 pages of hand written content by me, and after launch will hopefully generate hundreds or thousands of user submitted articles as well. Plus a forum, product reviews, etc. It's gonna be a beast