Over the last year I’ve worked with a number of online publishing businesses at different stages of development. They’ve ranged from one-man bands to multinational business information providers, but all of them ave been able to boil down their problems to one of the four following essential functions.

• Technical
• Editorial
• Marketing
• Sales

If you’ve ever dreamed of online riches from your own magazine site or have an idea for a new advertising-based revenue stream, I hope these will help plan your new venture.

Technical

The first hurdle you’ll need to get over is getting a site up. Be it a few HTML pages or a more organised content management system (CMS) fortunately this is a lot easier than at the start of this decade. There are plenty of free and very competent software solutions and even a few online services that mean you don’t even have to worry about the hassle of finding a website hosting company and installing software on their servers.

For the real novice on a shoestring, services like Blogger are a godsend, and the fact that Google owns Blogger definitely has an effect in making sure your efforts are found quickly. Blogs are very easy to use, but can be rather one-dimensional. They are designed around organising short articles by date, but fall down as soon as you need a more structured approach to your information.

Further up the food chain, more flexible CMS systems like Expression Engine will help you organise your site in a far more structured manner and to add in new sections as new opportunities arise.

Beyond that, there are a variety of commercial CMS systems that will do all sorts of information from readfing in data off other sites and re-organising it, re-purposing video and other content for the web and much more.

Anyone with large ambitions and a budget to match might want to checkout e-consultancy’s supplier guides on the subject.

Fortunately this is the easiest part of the process to outsource once you have decided what sort of information you want to hold on your site.

Editorial

So now you have a website set up and your fingers poised over the keyboard in anticipation, waiting to unleash your insights into the word of underwater-basket-weaving onto the world, or do you?

Creating good quality written content, video, podcasts, or however you decide to get your message across isn’t easy. Aside from just gathering together your facts or opinions, it takes some passion in the subject, not just a passion to make money from it, to build a long term publication. It takes research to keep on top of current trends in your market place, and contacts in the right places to get fresh information that will set your site apart.

On the creatively challenged days that face even the best writers try some of the blogs-about-blogging such as ProBlogger.

Sure, you can make a little from scraping and regurgitating other people’s opinions, but that’s not a publishing business, that’s a recycling tip.

Your other option is to get someone else to create your content for you, either by paying freelance writers or or basing your site around User Generated Content (UGC). You don’t have to be the next Facebook, there are plenty of blogs, forums and review sites that thrive on the writings of a committed group of enthusiasts.

Marketing

You’ve got over your writer’s block now and have a fistful of original and insightful articles on your chosen topic on your shiny new website. It’s time to start getting the advertising dollars to roll in. But there’s one step before that and it’s a big one. For your site to make money it needs visitors, readers, traffic, whatever you want to call them, and plenty of them.

Getting visitors to your site is an art all of its own and can be done in any number of ways including PR, search optimisation, advertising and mixes of all three. One thing all these methods have in common is getting out there and telling other people about your new endeavour.

If you have done a good job on your editorial and have something original to say, this step will be a lot easier. Other sites will be far more willing to send their own readers to news and original content than a ‘thin’ site aimed at no more than firing the visitor off to another site.

While you are doing it, work on getting your site visitors to sign up to email newsletters and RSS feeds. The more people you can get coming back to your site for free the better.

Marketing a publishing website is a lot of leg-work, and whilst you can get help form outside it may be tough to make this pay if you are on a pocket-money budget unless you have some skills of your own in managing these suppliers.

Sales

A business isn’t really a business until it has money flowing into it, rather than just out of it, so now is the time to go and find some other businesses who are interested in your site visitors.

There are two routes to get you started that won’t even need you to pick up the phone or create a media sales pack for your site:

1) Google Adsense serves up adverts onto your site which match the content it finds on each page and shares the revenue from each click with you.

If your site has a particularly valuable audience, the revenues can be far better than you might expect from selling your advertising via an advertising sales network. A general consumer interest site might earn £5-10 per thousand visitors (CPM). More competitive sectors like finance can earn £60-100 or more.

2) Affiliate Networks both give you a range of big brands who you can promote on your site without you needing to go out and pitch to them, but the real joy of affiliate networks is that you can be far more creative in how you weave these earning opportunities into the editorial on your site. Reviews & recommendations, price comparison, adding in sales and offers and so on. If you can write in a manner that is designed to send people to another site and BUY then this can be a great model.

But don’t stop there. Once your site has proven its value to advertisers, you’ll have people wanting to write content or sponsored editorials for you to get in front of your visitors, and even pay you for the privilege. Direct advertising deals with advertisers, both on your site and your email newsletters can raise your revenues, just be careful that your site doesn’t become an endless stream of adverts or you’ll turn your readers off quicker than a light bulb.

Is your publishing business plan written on a three legged table?

Reading through the list above you may feel a bit overwhelmed, but the reality is that there are very few people who can successfully carry out all four functions above themselves.

Be honest about the skills that you have and where it would be quicker or cheaper to partner up with other people or businesses who can help you fill the gaps.

How have you coped with dealing with all these functions in your publishing business? Have you found interesting ways to deal with each one, or even a way to avoid one altogether?

Let me know.