How to Succeed as an Online Publisher

Someone gave this advice over at Webmasterworld’s Adsense forum, which I think is so true and needs to be taken to heart by every small business online publisher:

The trick to being a successful publisher site is to keep your costs as low as possible without sacrificing quality to get the best ROI.

Seems like a no-brainer, right? Profits = Revenue > Costs

However, I have seen many small online publishers who spend too much not thinking whether their spending will actually result in revenues. They think that they need to advertise, advertise and advertise — and then hope that in the end they can reap the profits.

In fact, there are many Google Adsense publishers who actually played the game of full blast spending with Adwords and hoped to recoup the investment with their Adsense income. They hoped that by spending to get traffic, they will be rewarded with high Adsense income. For some it worked, but for many others, it did not and they ended up with huge advertising expenses that they were not able to recoup.

This approach is ok with deep-pocketed online publishers backed by venture capitalists as they have money to spend like there is no tomorrow. But if you have limited resources, you can’t continue spending if your spending is not bringing in the profits you need to survive. You’ll crash and burn easily!

Here are some points to consider when publishing a content website:

• When advertising, set your objectives clearly as to what you want to get from your ad spending
• Track the return on your investment carefully, and immediately do remedial actions if the ad is not bringing in the results you expected. You may need to change your creative or ad text, your landing page may need to be tightened, your keywords may need to be finetuned, etc.
• Always be on the lookout for cost effective ways to get the word out about your website. Be masters of shoestring marketing strategies.
• Understand that there are no shortcuts to success: your success will come directly from the quality of your content