Internet Publishing: The process of producing and delivering content around a niche, small or large, in order to carve out a loyal readership who reward you with clicks, affiliate sales, product sales, or any number of other [TAG]monetization[/TAG] methods.
A time is coming when people will look back at the early years of the web as “the wild west” for more reasons than simply an abundance of opportunity.
The way sites are published and marketed is changing radically.
How it Works Today…
- Everyone is an independent publisher in the extreme sense
- Most people now learn and do their own SEO
- Most site owners are responsible for keeping up on myriad, complicated marketing tactics
- Most site owners are responsible for manually adding good content regularly
- Site owners have to keep up with site building technology to stay current
- Most sites are still in static html
- Most sites do not run from a central database on a template driven system
- Site owners have to be “jacks of all trades” to succeed online – not just content providers
On the new web an ideal is taking shape that is going to radically change the way people build online businesses, market them, and profit from them.
Here is the Future…
- Sites will become, more and more, hosted publishing systems
- The hosts will keep up on SEO and marketing technology and keep the system we publish on working at optimal levels for search engine placement
- Some smart SEO firms will become hosting companies as well in order to optimize the technical backend of the publishing systems that get the best results in the engines
- The rest of the SEO industry will fade into obscurity since there won’t be enough demand for SEO work for independent sites
- People will be publishing on technology that is too complicated and too proprietary to give to individual site owners to work with
- But the technology will work so well that people will more and more give up the Wild West do-it-yourself days for better search engine placement and a much more professional presence
- Books and courses that teach “How to get a top 10 ranking in Google” will be obsolete for anyone publishing on a supported network where that training is included and much of the work in this area is done by the publishing system itself and not website owners
- Writers, experts, bloggers, coaches, and product/service marketers will be able to simply focus on content, and post and rank for their content
- Design will be handled by designers on a hosted system, not by site owners who cannot design their way out of a paper bag, thus design and navigation of sites will improve drastically across the web
- Web designers and programmers will begin doing the bulk of their work THROUGH the hosts of these publishing systems rather than individual web site owners
- Hosting companies will pick up on the trend toward “optimized publishing systems” and start including competing products in their service
- Site owners will become content providers, period, with the time to master the art of creating content that drives traffic rather than being responsible for everything else it takes to make a good publishing machine run optimally
People with something important to say and/or sell will simply be able to log on, say it, sell it, and not worry about SEO, design, html, layout, hours of keeping up on techie things each week just to stay current, programming, hiring programmers, and everything else that goes with The Wild West internet today.
The Market
There are far more people in the world with good ideas for sites and products than there are people who understand how to best build and optimize those sites.
People do not want to know HOW fuel injection works on the car they are purchasing. They want to know that it improves performance. They don’t care about the science behind braking systems. They just want the vehicle to stop properly.
Online, most people glaze over when the geeks start talking about RSS, syndication technology, autodiscovery, feeds, plugins, search engine algorithms, Google updates, meta tags, html, shtml, php, java, flash and the hundreds of other components of a successful publishing system.
They simply want to know that the platform they are publishing on works better than anything else for their purposes. The biggest gift anyone could give the average website owner would be the gift of taking all the technical barriers down and putting them on equal footing with established competitors.
People want a system where they “just add content.” They want to post and rank. They don’t want to install anything, program anything, optimize anything, or pay high fees to have those things done for them outside their hosting company.
People want a marketing system that is also optimized. Lead generation, followup, community building and everything else that goes with an optimized on-site marketing system should be plug and play.
What else is going the way of the Dodo?
Geeks will stop trying to sell people on technology and start creating systems where the technology works, but stays out of the way of the publisher.
Geeks will start consulting with each other more rather than trying to teach the world how “cool” their technology is and how it works.
People don’t care how their instant messenger program WORKS. They just WANT it because of what it DOES.
No one cares how Skype does what it does. They just want to make internet phone calls and connect with family and friends.
We on the cutting-edge of technology have to stop trying to force people to learn what we know. People want to build an online business not become expert script installers. People want to know they will be in the search engines for their content, not how they got there or what it will take to get there again.
If people can stop spending thousands, even tens of thousands per year on courses, services, programming, and scripts, they will have enough money to try paid advertising and other marketing that tends to get pushed aside when people follow the old system of “know it all” publishing.
If you have something to say, something to sell, or anything to offer the world on the web, there should be no barriers preventing you from letting the world know.
Will your ideas or products and services make you rich or successful? That’s up to the market. But the market has to be tested and it cannot be properly tested if you are constantly working on every facet of publishing just to get a site up and your content published.
If we take away the barriers to getting on the web and becoming successful in a niche, by creating a powerful publishing “vehicle” for them to drive, far more people will get into web publishing.
This will make for a more diverse and exciting internet experience for everyone when the geeks and highly motivated, over-worked, stressed out do it yourselfers have to compete with great ideas rather than their competition’s search engine optimization skills.
If you want to check out the leader in hosted publishing solutions, you should take a look at what Content Desk is doing to make the ideas expressed here a reality.