Section 1.3. How Much Content Is Enough?

1.3. How Much Content Is Enough?

Suppose you create one web page every hundred days that generates $100 in ad revenue. Alternatively, you create a page a day for 100 days. Each page generates $1.00 in ad revenue. Either way, you end up with $100.00 at the end of 100 days.

The point is that there are different ways to go about deciding how much content to createit significantly depends upon the quality of the content. A single content page might make sense if it contained a valuable application like TinyURL (See "Useful Free Services and Software," earlier in this chapter). If your pages are low-value content, you will need a great many of them to make significant revenue from advertising.

Web Site Metrics

The metrics of web site traffic is a huge topic just by itself, with a number of books just about web metrics and quite a bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. It's a very important topic, because to optimize your site you need to have baseline information as well as feedback so you can understand whether changes improve site traffic, or not and also which elements in your site draw traffic.

The topic is also important because the fees you can expect to get from advertisers largely depend upon the metric of your site.

By and large, web metrics are simply beyond the scope of this book, although you'll learn about the metric related to Google's AdSense in Chapter 9 and the metrics related to AdWords in Chapter 12.

Of course, your web server's logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can help provide you with useful metrics.

But, no doubt, the best metric of all is money in your pocket from fees paid by advertisersthrough the AdSense program or some other mechanismfor publication on your site.

For further information about metrics, I suggest you start with Jim Sterne's Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success (Wiley) and then have a look at the "Tracking and Logging" thread on WebMasterWorld, http://www.webmasterworld.com.

Between the two extremesa single page of valuable content and many pages of low-value contentlies a happy medium that will work for most content-based sites by creating enough critical mass to draw both traffic and advertisers. If you are just starting out, this happy medium is a goal to which you can reasonably aspire.

Here's what you need at a minimum to have a site drawing respectable numbers at the end of one year:

• 100 pages of quality content "in the can" to start with

• On average, one new page of quality content a day every day for a year (each page about 300 words)

"26 Steps to 15K a Day" in O'Reilly's Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest provides a step-by-step formula for creating a successful content site and drawing traffic (for more on drawing traffic, see Chapters 2 and 3 of this book).