Blogs: money, great content, or both?
Over the past few months I have been working on a little side project at Classhelpers. I originally created the site after being inspired to flip (re: build and sell for a profit) the site after reading an article over at College Startup, but now I am considering holding onto it.
A lot has happened since I first thought of the idea to start Classhelpers: I was able to hire a few interns to write roughly 10 articles per week, incorporated Google ads into the site, and have done a bit of simple redesigning to the site.
As of now, the site is populated with really great content focused on helping college students, it’s constantly being updated by two excellent writers, and though traffic is pretty low… I expect it to increase when school starts back up in the fall.
Hmmm…. this side project got me thinking about entrepreneurs who create tons of blogs/sites. I can definitely see myself with a good amount of personal blogs that I have direct control over. And, of course, I see myself implementing ads to monetize the blogs, but I don’t see myself pumping out blogs purely to slap on Google ads and spit out poor content. Great content will always be my aim.
I see so many young entrepreneurs out there starting many, many blogs/sites in an effort to create money through Google ads. I think that this is really great and at the same time it can be really bad.
I’m not one to spread myself thin with a ton of “so-so” sites. I come from the school of thought that it is always best to do a few things very, very well as opposed to doing many things decently.
However, I don’t think that it’s impossible for the young entrepreneur to have tons of really great sites. But the question is: are you creating all of these sites just to throw ads on them to make cash, or are you also creating them to really help people with awesome content? Or… is it both?
If you can create numerous powerful blogs/sites that offer excellent content that can really help people, and also throw in ads to make some cash, then I think that’s perfect! I tip my hat to those entrepreneurs who can attain that balance – unfortunately, may can not.
On the other hand… if you are simply banging out a shitload of sites that are basically splogs (spammer blogs) and sites that are 50%+ covered with ad pages, then I am definitely going to question your motives as an entrepreneur. Heck, how can your aim be to help people when the first thing they see on your site is a million pixels of ads?
Don’t get me wrong: having ads on your site is not only smart, but it’s only logical for the entrepreneur seeking to make money – that’s cool. But when you’re just creating sites purely to cash in on them at the expense of feeding your readers bullshit content, then that is pretty low. I’d rather see you create an excellent site with powerful content and ads, then sell it for a profit. As opposed to creating a splog with horrible content.
The entrepreneur’s main objective should be to help others, right? Are we really helping people by throwing a million sites at them with a million ads instead of helpful content?
I don’t know, what do you think?
Awesome post David, I have to agree with you completely…I wrote this article recently and took quite a bit of heat from people who only make AdSense sites for the purpose of people clicking on ads http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/jun/30.html