With the popularity of local portals in recent years, many individual webmasters have flocked in, but they lack some thinking about some issues in operating local portals, resulting in no gain and a waste of time and energy. Here I would like to put forward some of my own opinions, hoping that friends who are preparing to do or have already started to do local portals can make some psychological preparations in advance.
1. Be prepared to not make money for a long time!
Being a local portal is not like a garbage dump—buy some space and corn, collect some content, and wait for inclusion in the alliance.
First of all, the traffic of local portals is not as easy as that of garbage stations, which can easily reach tens of thousands. As far as SEO is concerned, local keywords are inherently limited, and it is very likely that many of them are occupied by some old and large websites. , even if you do long tail, it won’t have much effect, because the search volume of the main words of local keywords is not very large, let alone your long tail.
Secondly, the profit model of local portals determines that you cannot make profits quickly. As mentioned in the first point above, it is not easy for you to gain traffic in a short period of time, and the main profit model of local portals is to combine with local merchants to earn advertising revenue. If you do not have traffic and popularity, even if you say it, it will not matter. Who would like to place ads on your website.
2. Be prepared to invest
The first point above said that the possibility of local portals making money in a short period of time is very small, so you need part of the funds to maintain your living expenses.
Secondly, it is difficult to increase the traffic of local portals. If you want to gather popularity, you need publicity and activities. Simple flyers and the like require funds to support, let alone other publicity methods.
Thirdly, local portals are different from garbage dumps. They can just collect content and hang affiliate ads, without paying attention to the user experience. In addition to a clean and beautiful interface, local portals also need a lot of practicality and merchant publicity and promotion. For profit-making functions, such as the merchant yellow pages function launched by BlueCMS-local portal system ( http://www.bluecms.net/ ), you may need a dedicated technical support team. This is why many people say that a simple individual is not suitable to be a local portal, because it already has a certain threshold compared to a grassroots personal website.
3.Be prepared to endure loneliness
As long as you are a local portal, if you don't have any special resources at hand, the first year will definitely be the most difficult. There is not much traffic, and it is impossible to make a profit in a short time. This may make many people who have done it Friends at the garbage station felt very "aggrieved" and thought it was a thankless job. In fact, as long as you think about the broad prospects and the huge profits that can be brought to you after the local website is completed, all this is nothing. Nowadays, it is nothing new for many local portals to earn more than one million a year. They bid farewell to the era when traffic deducted from garbage dumps by alliances or their hard-earned money was taken away by black-hearted alliances. Every successful person may be different, but he must be a person who can endure loneliness. In fact, this can also be regarded as an invisible threshold. If others fail to persist, you will be the final winner.
4. Preparation for team operations
The profit model of local portals has been mentioned above. It combines with local merchants to earn advertising revenue. This alone requires specialized business personnel. Of course, when your website has a certain amount of traffic, you can run this business yourself first. Or you can put relevant advertising space for rent banners on your own website, but local portal advertising is not limited to this. It also requires many promotional activities, group purchases, etc. jointly organized with merchants, which requires specialized personnel. It is difficult for you to take care of everything on your own, including the independent advertising and marketing team, technical team, etc. in the future. The final form of the local portal will be a local online media in the form of a company, which is different from the personal grassroots website that is fighting alone. It's different, maybe it's a little early to tell you this now, but you have reason to know earlier.