Question about starting a News-type website

Did you search for information? You can get some information by following the news sites available.

I don't think there is any limit to the amount of content you post if it is unique content. The Google News sites put out a lot of content. There's always a lot of news, especially for general news sites rather than niche news.

Google doesn't care how much content you put up- as long as you are posting on a daily basis during the content loading phase. (Once you have a fair amount of content up posting every day isn't as important to Google, but it probably will be to your users.) Instead, what is important is that you need to have an actual staff of writers and editors. Even if it's just going to be yourself, you need to create other profiles and post under their names and fake it by having a "Contributors" page that lists your editors and writers.

No one takes a news site seriously that only has one writer anyway- that I can tell you from experience.

This and many other requirements are what it takes to get your site accepted by Google News. I tried for 3-4 months to get a high-quality (with some exceptions) site accepted with no luck. Even though we showed multiple writers and editors, only posted original high-quality content (about 1-2 posts per day) and followed the Google News acceptance/TOS to the letter, we were not able to get accepted.

The problem is that Google doesn't tell you why it's not accepted, they only refer you back to their TOS. It's very frustrating.

I'm not telling you this to rain on your parade, I'm only telling you my experience and it may not be the same for everyone. I welcome you to review the site I am referring to: newsroom headlines dot com. You can use this site as an example of how to set things up, of course keeping in mind that we were never able to get accepted- but the site is built according to the terms.

As you can see, I abandoned the site at the end of January and am not sure what to do with it. Posting content every day for months with no result isn't anything I have time for.

Now, it might not be important for you to get into Google News. However, if you want REAL traffic, it's a MUST. News sites that are not listed by Google News get very little traffic compared to their News-Accepted counterparts. This is because, as you will soon see, it is very difficult to "SEO" a news site.

Anyway, I spent months dealing with this issue so feel free to send me a PM if you have any other questions at all.

Suzanne;
I agree about the header- it's pretty bad although it looks better in IE and Firefox than in Chrome. We made numerous changes to tweak it but that was the last test header when we gave up on the site. I do like the structure of everything else above the fold, however.

I'd be curious to know where your statement of a 5 staff minimum comes from. Not that I doubt your word but we reviewed the TOS intensely and all it required was a multi-level editing staff but never stated any specific numbers. If we had known 5 was a magic figure we would have definitely made it appear as if we had 5.

While I appreciate your comments and they might have been good things to implement if we were to continue with the site, ultimately I don't think those are the reasons the site was rejected. There was something else but I'll be damned if I know what that is. I reviewed those terms line by line and the site met every item.

In any event, this was my first time experimenting with a news site, and I have to say that I'll stick to other types of internet properties that I can monetize a whole hell of a lot better than a news site anyway. Niche marketing is far more profitable and that news site was the opposite of a niche.

Lesson learned, but not that I wouldn't encourage anyone else to try. If you get your site accepted into Google News you could make a great deal of money, but it requires a lot of time and genuine effort- it's NOT an autopilot type of deal.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever flipped a news site?

Great advice everyone. Russell Barnstein, tried private messaging ya but it says you have it turned off and are not allowing anyone to message you. Box might be checked on accident? I duno

never thought of making it a priority to get into google news. Very interesting. However, I'm confused about the part where you said without it, you get really little traffic. As long as you promote it, share it with social media sites, and have viral tools like the share button, facebook like button, twitter share button, etc. Traffic could really can really explode at a unbelievable fast rate with people sharing things with their friends, family, and coworkers left & right.

Another way for explosive traffic is the current, realtime, what's-going-on-right-now kind of traffic. It's like riding the hype train at the right moment. If your on the computer and see a rising viral topic or video, writing an informative article at the right time can really pay off. One perfect example being Rebecca Black's funny music video (currently at 99 million views). Damn, that was one thing on the internet everyboddy was talking about for awhile. I remember for the first week or so, it looked so easy to rank on the first few pages of any search engine. In conclusion I'm not too worried about traffic since there are so many creative, innovative, and smart ways of getting massive traffic without it being a multi-staff editoral pro news site. Great idea tho, if I had enough people & money, I would definitely do as suggested.

side note : have read stories where a group of people or friends decide to do a colllaboration and form a staff of editors / writers where everybody writes in their own section on the same site for FREE, because they do what they like to do : writing & informing the public. and at the end of the month or so, split the affiliate / advertisement earnings equally.


Awesome idea, but then again I was thinking more along the lines of a one-man-team. Just a young, typical starving college student who loves to write, and get paid for doing what you love at the same time ( affiliate sales, adsense, etc). Heh. With one hard working, dedicated person who has a passion. I see countless and numerous people doing this and some actually making a living off it and quit their typical 40 hour a week, 9-5 job! The success stories of webmasters making a living as writers / bloggers / webmasters is something a lot of people dream of, and of course can be achieved with hard work & great effort.

Sorry, that's fixed now. I tried to PM you but it said I must have 50 posts in order to PM anyone. Lol, that seems a little extreme to me but w/e. You can send a message using the contact form on my site and I'll be glad to answer any questions you might have. I don't dare copy in the address here.

thanks all

50 posts to pm people. This has gotta be new, when did they put this into effect? heh. Must be to stop spammers or somethin along those lines. will do russell thanks