Maintaining Your Web Content

You may have heard of companies that spend millions of dollars maintaining their web sites. Fortunately, for the goal of monetizing web content, such expensive maintenance is unnecessary.

In fact, the only costs you'll have are hosting fees and any money you spend on promoting your site. So maintenance is going to, for the most part, come down to you publishing as much content as you can on a regular basis. Keep in mind that your monetization efforts are going to be successful only with a lot of content. You will be earning small amounts of revenue from each page on your web site which will add up when you have a large number of pages.

Other types of maintenance include simple upgrades to your web site as it grows. For example, your site may initially launch without much in the way of graphics. This is fine. But when your site grows in popularity and traffic you may want to consider creating a professional-looking logo and tag line. You may also want to start incorporating graphics in to individual posts to break up the text. These sorts of things help improve the perception of quality of your site which is equally important to the actual quality. If you have the time and resources to add these bells and whistles sooner rather than later, go ahead and do so, but remember that actual written content is the most important element of your site.

In terms of infrastructure maintenance, there will be very little. If you use a program such as WordPress, which I highly recommend, to manage your content, then you will on occasion need to upgrade the software when new versions are released. I would recommend that you avoid any "dot-0" releases e.g. 1.0 and 2.0 as these are often buggy and quickly followed by "dot-1" releases. You might as well wait for a stable version that you only need to upgrade once.

Before upgrading, be sure you have a back up of your entire web site. Even when you're not upgrading, a backup can be very useful should your site's data become lost or corrupt. Having a backup can also help should you find yourself in disputes with your hosting company which sometimes hold your data hostage until you agree to their demands. Note that with most web sites there are two components to the backup: 1) files and 2) database data. Make sure you're backing up both!