"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is
occasionallynot alwaysdiscovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site,
no matter how good the content of the site is.
And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this
chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably
promoted).
If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use
Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused
traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it
draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And
all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs.
To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good contenteither broad or
targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other thingsfor example, software applications or jokes.
From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you
publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you
can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site.
Build It They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites
