Introduction
If you are passionate about journalism and want to deliver news to the public independently, launching a daily news website is a great idea. According to Mark Roemer Oakland, while a brilliant idea may have potential, it’s hard to execute it into reality and turn it into something sustainable. Don’t worry, this article is here to help. Here’s how you can launch a daily news website:
The Plan
- Make a business plan – When you invest a lot of time and money into a news website, you need to treat it as a business so that you can sustain it. The first step is to come up with a mission. For instance, it may be about notifying the community about everything happening in local politics. List down a few ideas and topics so that the editorial side is taken care of. Once you establish the editorial side, you can focus on it and think objectively around it to earn revenue.
Your revenue strategies will help you to build a business plan. It may include selling ad space, creating a membership program for subscriptions, and more. When you have a number that estimates the potential revenue that can be earned through your website, you can decide on a budget so that you can allocate resources and hire editors or writers.
- Choose a platform – WordPress is one of the most popular website building sites and it is used by everyone, from part-time bloggers to giant news media outlets. It’s the preferred choice among small creators and independent publishers since it is affordable and has a brilliant ecosystem of templates, plugins, and other such tools to build your website and scale it as you grow. However, you should check out all available options and choose the one that is scalable and flexible. You don’t want to jump to a different platform and redesign everything from scratch.
- Select the right plugins – Plugins help you expand the capabilities of your news website. You add a new plugin to your WordPress website to gain an additional feature. This helps you save money since you don’t need to hire a developer for hundreds or thousands of dollars to build something for you from scratch. For instance, you can use YOP Polls or WP-Polls to host visitor polls on your news website about a trending topic.
- Write great content and look for advertisers – Once your website is set up according to your business plan, it’s time to put together great content that resonates with your mission. Take photographs, write articles, create infographics and videos that will make readers stick to your website and return for more. If your budget allows it you can also hire outside help to write more captivating headlines and improve the SEO on your website for generating more traffic. Once, you have done that you can look for advertisers and sponsors. For starters, Google AdSense is a great option for small publishers.
Conclusion
Mark Roemer Oakland suggests that you use these tips and execute your plan of launching a daily news website as soon as possible to make the people aware of important issues.