polski
español
Aleksander Janicki
In short
- Every news portal is a website, but not every website is a news portal. A website has a bigger capacity and is more expanded in its functionalities.
- It’s worth having one on your own, because whenever users want to find something out, they start with a search engine. If you’re not on the internet – it’s like you don’t exist at all.
- There are a few types of news portal websites – information with current news important for the local communities, or industry/topical with articles, news and tips concerning a given industry, e.g. construction.
- In order to create a news webpage, you will need a concept, an analysis of the competition, a plan and a schedule of publishing, as well as a good CMS (Content Management System).
- If you plan placeholders for ads, sponsored articles, paid small announcements and a companies catalog, you can actually make quite a lot of money off your news website.
- The overall cost of a news website consists of the chosen CMS (some are free, some are not), hosting, server (dedicated/shared) and, if need be, a programmers work.
- Read also: Open source VS proprietary CMS. A brief chat with Ryan Dohrn & Piotr Marek before Niche Media Conference 2023
Table of contents
- The difference between a website and a news portal website
- News portal. What is it?
- Why is it worth having a news portal of your own?
- How to create a news portal website?
- How much does a news portal cost?
As of 2019, over 312 million people in the United States of America have internet access. 90% of adults use the internet, either regularly or from time to time. No wonder more and more people are trying to find ways to make money online. One of them is to make money on your own news portal website or local service of ads.
It’s a tasty morsel, especially because the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how important it is for businesses to have an internet presence.
The difference between a website and a news portal website
For starters, it’s important to determine the difference between a basic website and a news website.
Those words are often used interchangeably. However, the difference is quite significant.
Every news portal is a website (who would have thought?), but not every website is a news portal. The distinction lies in the capacity of their functions.
Everyone can have a website of their own – a blog, a simple thematic service, a company website. Nowadays, creating those isn’t very hard anymore, thanks to webpage creators and CMS.
However, you can still come across websites that look like they haven’t been updated since the 90’s. And they work so.
Look at the apps you use most often. They have constant updates, after which it’s often hard to find what’s where, right?
Paradoxically, it’s the constant change and smart adaptation to the users’ needs that makes us all use Instagram, and let Snapchat fade into oblivion.
So, what is a news portal website?
News portal website. What is it?
A news portal website is, in fact, a website, on which users can find new information about current events (news).
Among them there are local news portals. What is a news portal website?
To be precise, a news portal website is also a website, just much more professional and complex.
A news website is an experience, and an interactive journey. It has a lot of interesting features.
It provides a complex access to all the infomation the user wishes to know about her or his local community.
It allows you to look through the most recent news and updates, add announcements, comment on an article, or even create an account.
It makes users expect to find interesting information whenever they visit.
A news portal website is also a business card of your company. Not only for the clients but also for potential business partners.
There are lots of types of websites:
- news – informational, local, regional, informing about current events and situations, i.e. car accidents, road repairs and investments in a given place or region,
- topical – informing about new trends and possibilities regarding a certain topic, e.g. medicine, health, job, law, construction etc.
- dating – the possibility to meet a soulmate in every gender configuration possible
- announcements – contains local announcements: selling, buying, trading (sort of like Craigslist)
- social – you can build a community revolving around a certain subject. Back in the day there were discussion forums; nowadays, it’s mostly Facebook.
If you want to be associated with the highest quality and reliability, it should be written all over your face – on your news website. Still not convinced?
Why is it worth having a news portal of your own?
For a long time we’ve been witnessing a rising trend of purchasing goods online.
After all, why waste an entire afternoon running around a shopping mall and plowing through the masses, when you can sit back on your couch and access a much bigger stock without the risk of getting infected with the coronavirus? You would probably struggle to find anything cool anyway.
This practice is spreading among customers in every possible aspect. In order not to be left behind the competition, act, and create an online presence.
A good analogy is apps like Grubhub or UberEats, popping up like mushrooms.
Supposedly, they aren’t financially beneficial to the restaurants. So what, if users prefer to have tens of restaurants all in one place, rather than searching for their websites one by one and ensuring they will have their food delivered?
If you don’t adapt, your business goes under.
So if you are a local newspaper or a magazine publisher and for some reason don’t have your own website, it’s your cue to change that.
Nowadays, the search process for everyone starts with a search engine like Google, so make sure your business appears in it. Not having a website is like not existing.
How to create a news website?
This is how your news portal website might look when you use our CMS 4media:
How to create such a website? We wouldn’t recommend the ‘hooray’ approach. You need a plan.
There are a few ways to do this. They differ from each other in terms of many factors, from price to quality. However, every one of them begins with the same step.
1. Concept
For starters, you need to have an idea for your online presence. What idea?
A local news website? Informational one? Or a topical one?
Plan its theme. If it’s related to your company, then the theme should probably revolve around that line of work. It’s worth following the newest trends, both in your country and outside of it, and becoming the first source of information for users in your industry. Readers will certainly appreciate it and pop in more often. Don’t forget about tips and instructions – it’s a valued form of articles, known for its popularity and gathering a large audience.
If you’re leaning towards an informational/news portal website – remember to keep the news local. Acknowledge the golden rule 80/20, meaning that 80% of the content should be kept local, while 20% should focus on the national scale (however, the described news should still have an impact on the local community). Hence it’s good to keep at least one journalist among your staff who will collect and publish local news.
An exception could be a local website revolving around a precise topic, e.g. rock climbing. Reporting breaking news wouldn’t be of the highest priority in such cases. Instead, separate some space for guides and useful intel for the tourists.
#PROTIP: think about SEO. Don’t know what SEO is? Don’t worry, we’ll come back to it in a bit and describe this feature thoroughly.
Right at the very beginning, in the Concept step, you should plan the keywords, tags and think about the titles of the post categories.
Avoid duplicate content – Google will position it lower, and you will sabotage yourself.
The concept of how to build a website however, is just the start.
2. Competition analysis
Does your town not have a local portal website? Congratulations, you have just found your website idea.
But probably in 99% of cases it won’t be so easy. Once you decide on the type of your website, you can move on to the market analysis.
Studying the users’ needs can help you figure out an undeveloped niche.
It’s easiest to beat the competition when it’s non-existent and left behind from the very start.
During this phase:
- find out what the industrial trends are,
- verify what the local community lacks,
- check out the most discussed topics by the locals online (Facebook, discussion forums, comments on other local websites and media outlets),
- consider what could possibly distinguish you from your competitors,
- find out what your competition is missing out on and do it yourself.
If your town or district doesn’t have a news portal yet, it’s a great opportunity to start one and meet the expectations and needs of your community.
3. Content planning
At this point, you should be informed that running a local website requires at least a basic long-term plan for publishing, or if you’re finding it hard to do so, try to plan at least a week ahead.
A local portal website is an investment, and if you want to get your money back, you have to be smart about it.
Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to submit to Google, because a great majority of users will visit your page for the first time through the well-renowned search engine.
Thankfully, its algorithms are no mystery to professional copywriters. What matters the most is:
- original content,
- the time of publication,
- the frequency of publication,
- following the newest trends,
- proper formatting of the texts (titles, leads, midtitles, keywords and phrases).
Of course, the main goal is to make every single one of your publications useful to true users, not robots.
It’s also one thing when you’re reporting breaking news, and another thing when it comes to more universal or seasonal content, like ‘best haircuts for the 2022 prom’.
It’s worth investing time and finding out how to create articles to help them become visible in Google News and Google Discover.
Having Google visibility in mind, remember to never copy anything. This search engine just can’t stand duplicate content and once it detects them, a page will be discriminated against and positioned lower. Informing your readership that a particular text is copied from another source and linking it will not matter to Google.
If you have a lot of duplicate content, your reach will decrease, as same as search engine visibility and traffic on your website. As a result, the income from selling your product, or simply from ads, would drop as well. More than that, your credibility would take a huge hit – one you might not recover from.
All of the above are good reasons to get familiar with the term mentioned before – SEO. SEO is Search Engine Optimization.
It’s not an accident that a certain link pops up at the very top of the first Google page (and the only one that will be looked through in almost 100% of cases) after searching for a phrase, while other websites are condemned to no visitors.
With a few adjustments, the positioning of these websites could be greatly improved and make it to the top 10, but we’ll talk more about it on another occasion.
For example, after typing ‘seo’ in a matter of just 1.26 seconds, I got around 6.220.000.000 (six billion two hundred and twenty million) results.
What could you possibly do to get to the top dozen?
First and foremost, prepare useful and substantive content.
Do proper research and add something new, something fresh, that has not been described in such articles before. Update the existing information with new developments. Share an article on social media.
Moreover, it’s worth creating a publication schedule. Let’s settle this – the more often you publish good quality content, the better. Google's robots can add your articles to the search results.
That is why in the case of an industrial/topical website it’s worth investing in professional copywriters, who will create suitable materials.
Running local news websites will definitely require the help of journalists.
If you decide to become both a publisher and a journalist at the same time, you could be overwhelmed with the responsibilities.
A news site that claims it’s the first source of news and then goes on to keep publishing mostly general or nationwide information will bore users quickly because they will consider it to be of little informational value.
That is why providing actual information about the latest events on local news websites is essential for their existence.
There is, of course, another way to spend money and still get to the top of Google lists – money itself.
You can just pay to advertise your page, i.e. in Google Ads. However, if it’s not filled with good content, users will visit it once and never come back. And that’s not what you want. What you want is a user base, that will provide you with a steady income from ads.
That’s why once your local news website launches, make sure to post only relevant materials.
Another step before us: choosing a CMS for a news portal website.
4. Which CMS for a portal to choose?
What CMS is, we have already prepared a wide article about. However, to make things easier for you, I’ll explain it shortly here as well.
CMS stands for Content Management System. In simple words, it’s software that allows you to easily run your own website.
It works a little bit like the well-known Microsoft Word. In most cases, coding language knowledge is not required.
You just type in the text you’d like to put on your website, and CMS visually adjusts it itself, based on the themes and skins you’ve chosen.
A good CMS allows you to add mods to your portal website’s structure.
CMS is basically divided into three categories:
a) Open source CMS
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, etc. These are CMSs based on open source code. Biggest advantage? Free to use. It also has a lot of plugins to install.
The disadvantage is the constant need to update (updates, as mentioned before, are generally good). In this case, however, they can make your page stop working properly.
Also, the best solutions (skins, themes, etc.) are usually paid (e.g. the layout of a news portal).
b) SaaS CMS
Software as a Service – paid, often via a subscription model (monthly payment).
It’s a good solution for people who value comfort and want the help of 24/7 external support for their CMS information services.
SaaS’ are easy to use and are just made for news sites and local media outlets. Usually created with the thought of local news websites in mind, it should have mods and functionalities characteristic of the media.
c) Original CMS
Specific solutions for specific needs.
If the budget doesn’t limit your options, original CMS are created exclusively for running a single website. This option is used by the biggest nationwide portals.
5. Monetization
Reading this article, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that creating and running a website is not cheap.
So once you decide to have one of your own, make sure it’s an investment, rather than throwing money down the drain.
CMS, copywriters, journalists, and on top of that, hosting (sharing a page to the users via a server).
The list of spendings goes on and on. And yet, a properly run local news website allows you to cover all these expenses.
They can even make you money! There are a lot of ways to make money off a news portal.
Advertising banners
First and foremost, ads. On your news site, you should have placeholders for ads.
However, you can’t just throw ads at the users, because aggressive ads and annoying pop-up windows make your guests scared of clicking anything, and instead they just leave and never return.
Or just install a browser extension to block ads, meaning no income from them for you.
There is a way to only allow users to scroll through your page once they turn ad blockers off. Make sure you encourage them to stay once they do.
Sponsored articles
Another way of making money off your news portal is through sponsored articles. It’s definitely the least invasive form of advertisement, however well-paid.
These types of articles allow readers to gain some knowledge on the subject with the promoted product subtly smuggled as a mention in the text (sometimes you can stumble upon horribly written sponsored articles, but they truly should be subtle).
The user doesn’t mind because he actually learned something, and as a bonus, a product from the searched category was gently recommended to them.
Paid announcements
It’s possible to have a ‘small announcements module’ installed on your online local media outlet.
Other companies can share their business cards there as a form of advertisement, and you can earn money off it.
It can be free as well; it will still create traffic, and maybe those companies will return the favor somehow.
It goes without saying that paid announcements and posts should be highlighted, and their emission should be longer than the free ones.
How much does a news portal website cost?
As you have already learned, there are local news websites and just websites. There are a few types, and the price of every one of them differs significantly.
It mostly depends on how complex you want your website to be, on what CMS it is supposed to be based on, and how many functions you want to have implied.
A website is a project that requires a lot of commitment from a multiperson team that will work tirelessly for a long time before giving you a ready-to-use product.
One of the most important steps before launching a CMS-based information service is its testing. It’s time-consuming, but it allows you to avoid frustrating scenarios, where nothing works as it should.
It’s worth doing it well once and be done with it. However, no matter the size of the testing team, they won’t be able to encounter as many bugs as users simply allowed to use the site.
And yet, if the bugs are minor, your team will be able to fix them in no time. If they are major, you’ll be losing traffic.
The investment in a not-working website that pushes users away will not return.
It’s important to remember that a news portal website is an investment that allows you to make money off ads.
That’s why it’s worth analyzing all available types of programmatic ads on the market and simply count, how much it costs to have them on your website and what kind of income they can offer based on the chosen CMS.
Yes, CMS is a very important factor in this equation.
Can a local news website based on an original CMS be set up for a couple thousand dollars? I guess.
It’s worth asking yourself a question: what exactly is the point of having such a website? It won’t bring you money or even satisfaction. Time and time again, something will malfunction, and I doubt anyone would want to visit such a site again. And your public image would take a deep dive.
The cost of creating a regional information service based on a CMS is closer to a dozen, if not several dozen thousands of dollars.
Of course, the price differs depending on the complexity level. Not everyone requires a complicated site; some are fine with a simpler project based on a free CMS like WordPress and a theme available for a couple dollars.
Other than the cost of creating a website, the cost of hosting comes into the equation. Having your page up on the server isn’t free.
I’d like to mention the advantage of dedicated servers instead of shared ones: the first type will most likely be able to operate quicker and allow you to store a large number of files (after all, your portal will contain a huge amount of information).
The cost of hosting can be very different and depends on its quality and power, but basically it should be between a few and a few hundred dollars each month.
An open source CMS website will be the cheapest without a doubt, because the systems themselves are free.
Don’t let yourself be fooled, though. Setting up a webpage based on this system will be costly, because most often it requires the help of an IT guy in order to arrange the portal website in a way you’d like.
The whole process might be time-consuming, and let’s get this out of the way: there is a reason why paid CMS are paid – they simply offer more.
The hosting cost is added in this case as well.
There is, however, a complex solution: in the case of the SaaS-type CMS both, hosting and the server might be included in the price.
The service is paid in the form of a subscription, and its monthly cost usually ranges from 500$ to 1000$ or more, depending on the package you choose. The constant technical care is also included, so in case of an emergency, you will not be left with the issue alone.
The cost can increase if you already own a website and now you want to migrate it to a new CMS.
In that case, it’s needed to copy the whole database and set up correct redirection of the old URL addresses to the new ones so that the website doesn’t lose its current position you worked for, and the users don’t come across old, not-working links to the older content.
In the end, the final cost will depend on a lot of factors, and in every individual case, it will be agreed upon with the company you decide to work with.
Do you wonder: what are other ways to make money off a local news website? What is an affiliate network? We’re working on an article about just that, so make sure to come back and check it out soon!
Read more: CMS 4media. Inform better, make money, save time! Subscribe for 499$ per month!
