Informational Web sites include a variety of sites, reaching any number of different markets. Maybe your school offers online classes, or an area for campus clubs to post upcoming meeting or event dates. These types of sites fall within the informational category, as do concert calendars posted by radio stations, online gossip magazines, movie review sites or general media sites.
For larger, more commercial informational sites, the main revenue stream is advertising. Th e key to generating higher advertising revenue is to show as many ads as possible, which means that traffic rates have to be high. In order to generate high traffic rates, informational sites need to ensure that the information they provide is:
• Interesting to the market they are trying to reach—not just in terms of content, but also in the way the content is presented. Copy writers must work hard to ensure that they produce copy in a voice that is specifi c to their readers.
• Updated on a regular basis. If long periods of time elapse between content updates, readers will be less likely to return. RSS feeds, discussed in Chapter 6, help alert the user when new content has been added to a site, so that they are more likely to return.
• Highlighted in a marketing campaign. In order to gain maximum exposure, developers of information-based sites need to do their own marketing to let their target audience know that their content exists.
• Interesting to the market they are trying to reach—not just in terms of content, but also in the way the content is presented. Copy writers must work hard to ensure that they produce copy in a voice that is specifi c to their readers.
• Updated on a regular basis. If long periods of time elapse between content updates, readers will be less likely to return. RSS feeds, discussed in Chapter 6, help alert the user when new content has been added to a site, so that they are more likely to return.
• Highlighted in a marketing campaign. In order to gain maximum exposure, developers of information-based sites need to do their own marketing to let their target audience know that their content exists.
Other revenue models for informational and educational sites include off ering paid subscriptions for more in-depth information and articles. This is not a popular model, however, as it has proven diffi cult for subscription-based sites to fi nd an audience with so many free resources available on the Web.