Creating an effective online magazine with WordPress: the planning
What’s got a theme to do with your Web-derived income?
In a word, everything.
One of my income sources is Text Link Ads. Another is Google AdSense. My visitor volume is neck-in-neck five thousand a day, and borders on eight thousand when one of my articles gets picked up by LinuxToday and others.
How can I boost these income sources? I could just tune ad placement. But I reached a plateau using that technique. I had to think of other techniques!
Thus, I turned my attention to boosting the visitor count. In summary, visitors to a Web site come from:
- Search engines: They provide this site with a steady but small flow of visitors.
- Word of mouth: My latest count shows that referrals are practically zero.
- Subscriptions: RSS feeds are a Godsend.
Hence, these are the most effective ways you can boost your readership:
- Presenting the right leads (hyperlinks) to content. Link bait makes the content on your site more discoverable to first-time visitors.
- Stimulating feed subscriptions. You can make first-time visitors into repeat visitors.
- Enabling readers to spread the content using social networks. Both e-mail and Digg are valuable visitor sources.
As you can see, repeat visitors are key in my master plan to destroy the Univer… er, grow my passive income. To crack this problem more effectively, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an average reader .
“I’ve read this article. Now what do I do”?
Any person reading an article on the Web eventually asks himself this question. There are two answers:
- Close the Web browser
- Follow a link to another interesting subject
We want readers to execute number two. Once they’re following your link bait like salmon, you’ve got yourself an extra handful of page views. And, most probably, new repeat visitors.