If you’re thinking of starting an online news outlet you need to make sure you get it setup in the right way with the right foundations in place to help it grow – whether you want to be niche or bigger than BuzzFeed.
Knowing where to start can be tricky though, so below you can find five effective approaches to take that’ll help get you set on the best path to media success.
#1 – Choose your niche (to begin with)
While you might feel that the wider you cast your net when it comes to news, the wider the audience will be – and even if there is some truth to this, the reality is that you’ll be spreading yourself too thin and you’ll be drowned out by bigger and better sites.
Instead, you should choose a niche or speciality to focus on when getting started and once your audience starts to grow, you can then look to diversify.
#2 – Pick a platform
The next thing to look at is your chosen platform. A strong choice for news is WordPress as it’s relatively customisable, offers a variety of different plugins, features and applications and is typically more affordable than most. WordPress is also great for beginners as there are plenty of guides available and ready-made templates you can use if you want to get your site up and running quickly.
If you’re still not convinced, you might be reassured to know that as many as 40% of all websites are made using this platform. However, the choice is yours and of course depends on your experience and technical abilities. If you want something more stylish, Squarespace might be a better fit, equally if you want something fast and mobile-friendly, there’s Wix.
#3 – Consider your content generation
Once the above is all sorted you need to get your content sorted. The news should naturally be informative, but a variety of content is what online audiences will expect, so try to have a mix of:
- Short and long news pieces.
- Imagery and accompanying video content.
- Infographics or graphical posts.
- Keyword and search-led articles (useful for SEO and ranking purposes).
- Guest posts and contributor articles.
- User generated content.
The final two bullet points here are particularly useful for both getting new and fresh content quickly onto your site and for making network connections with other content creators you can turn to in the future.
#4 – Think about promotion
It’s one thing to just create or report on the news in your niche, it’s another to make sure the right people are seeing it. You have a few options here – in addition to search-led content – you can also:
- Push content out on your linked social channels.
- Put paid promotion and advertising behind your site and/or specific pieces.
- Ask contributors to share the content on their online channels.
- Encourage users on your site to share the content they view using buttons and calls to action.
#5 – Offer something a little different
The final point is one which can help your site stand out from the crowd. If you try to do something a little different, or offer some form of USP it could be the difference between someone choosing to visit your site or them heading elsewhere.
To give you a few examples, sporting news site Rugby Onslaught offer relevant news to users as well as ‘Bizarre’ and ‘Laughs’ sections with quirky and eye-catching content. Music site Spin, has a very ‘back-to-basics’ style and heavily relies on large and noticeable imagery to promote its stories. Also, business news site Entrepreneur has a section dedicated to informational videos that it’s tagged up to display relevant videos, specific to the preferences of the user.
These above examples also show you how these news sites have changed over time and evolved to offer a bigger and better experience. So be sure to consider things like this once you’ve set your news site up and you may soon start to realise similar levels of success online.