The impact of the new CMS has been huge. There is more harmony and efficiency, and we have higher-quality components than before. This also allows us to work better together across the company.
Martijn Spaargaren
International Ecommerce & Digital Transformation Manager, Stage Entertainment
Internal stakeholders are pleased with the heightened level of security that the new site offers. AnyforSoft leveraged a collaborative approach to deliver an excellent product. Customers can expect a great service.
Regina Wolf-Berleb
CEO, Projekt Magazin
With the AnyforSoft team's help, the company is able to forecast demand on inventory better. The team members treating the company as their own and doing what’s necessary to accomplish their tasks.
According to Pew Research Center, about 86% of Americans regularly consume online news. Europeans don’t lag behind: Eurostat reveals that 72% of EU citizens visit online news portals to keep up with current events.
As a media business owner, you can’t skip the opportunity to capitalize on the popularity of news content. So you must be wondering how to start your own news website and make a profit. That’s what this article can help you with.
In the following paragraphs, AnyforSoft describes how to make a news website that will attract users and, more importantly, retain them. Rather than focusing on technical intricacies, we are zeroing in on the things that really matter for launching a successful site. You will learn:
What content management system to choose for a news portal.
How to find your niche and identify your target audience.
What sources of content you can use. What features you should develop in order to succeed.
How to build a news website and get listed in Google News.
What ways to monetize news websites you can leverage, and much more.
Let’s jump straight into it.
Step 1: Find your niche
When it comes to starting a news website, you can either cover news on multiple topics or stick to only one subject. Traffic-wise, providing content on various topics seems like a better option. Big news portals such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post offer news stories on politics, fashion, business, tech, science, and many other subjects. It helps them attract visitors with different interests and thus have a broader audience.
However, this approach has significant drawbacks for beginners:
Fierce competition. If you’re just starting a news website, you won’t be able to compete with the giants like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Until you accumulate enough backlinks and increase your Domain Rank, your website will rank low in search engines, so don’t expect much organic traffic.
High costs. Another reason not to start a news website that covers too many topics is the fact that managing such a website will be costly. Just imagine how much news content appears every hour. If you were to create articles on many subjects, you would have to hire an entire team of content writers, let alone pay for expensive web hosting plans with more storage. Besides, the development of a big portal with hundreds of web pages is quite expensive and requires more time.
If you have enough time and financial resources, you can go ahead and create a news website that would cover everything: from politics to sports. However, if your budget is limited and you don’t want to plunge into tough competition, you better stick to one topic.
For example, you could dedicate your portal to the cryptocurrency niche, write about technology, or find any other subject that you’re passionate about. The more narrow-focused this subject is, the easier it will be for you to rank your news site.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Once you’ve decided on the niche, the next step is to identify your target audience. The more information you will have on it, the more effective ad campaigns you will be able to run. In addition to that, knowing the preferences of your users will help you make more informed decisions when creating content as well as designing and optimizing your portal.
That’s why it’s always a good idea to thoroughly study the target market before building a news website.
One of the easiest and quickest ways to do this is by analyzing your competitors’ sites.
Suppose you want to create a cryptocurrency news portal. What you can do is google the cryptocurrency news keyword and then add ten websites that show up for it to your list. After that, visit SimilarWeb and scan each website you got. Even a free version of SimilarWeb will provide you with enough insights. More specifically, you will be able to see the countries from which users land on a website, as well as information on visitors’ age, gender distribution, and interests.
That will help you in creating the portrait of your target audience.
Step 3: Choose a CMS
Apart from WordPress, there are plenty of content management systems to use for making a news website. Surely, WordPress is the most popular CMS, partly because it has plenty of plugins that can help you set up your portal without coding.
However, you should know that as the most widespread CMS, WordPress is a constant target of hacker attacks. Besides, due to its reliance on third-party plugins and themes, the system is extremely vulnerable. In addition to the above, many claim that this CMS is slow and has a poor knowledge base, so when you face an issue, it may take a while to find a solution.
As experts in Drupal development, we believe that Drupal is the right and often the most appropriate solution for building news portals. If you want to make your own news website that will be secure and highly responsive, this CMS will most certainly satisfy your needs.
It has several advantages:
Like WordPress, Drupal has open-source code, allowing you to make a news website with advanced custom features.
Drupal is arguably the most secure CMS due to its advanced security features, such as access control, database encryption, and malicious data entry prevention. No wonder this system is used by government websites and the websites of big corporations.
Drupal can handle high traffic and effectively process loads of data, so it is a great solution for big news websites that cover various topics and contain many web pages.
