Posted on Tuesday 7th of November 2006 at 06:01 in The Internet

Is there room for single webmasters anymore?

No one has ever said that running a popular website would ever be an easy task, a task which has become both increasingly difficult and easy at the same time by the burst of bloggers inhabiting the internet. Applications such as Wordpress can be installed on your domain in minutes, with some providers offering a "one click install" where they have scripts to take all the pain away. So with everyone able to have a voice on today's internet, is there actually room for a single webmaster to be succesful anymore?

Seopher.com has been increasingly prosperous over the past few months with thousands of visitors each week - which is Ok but nothing staggaring.

With the increased traffic comes an increased need for attention...

Introducing a Captcha to stop low-level spambots, needing new articles/posts every day where possible, monitoring/administrating comments to ensure there is nothing innapropriate there... All of this takes time. Time which is rather limited seeing as I work full time and have a social life, and pets etc.

So the model for Seopher.com is fairly simple - I write material I consider interesting and of value or I run polls for the regular readers to participate in, I submit these results/articles to various places (Digg being the most common) as my main means of exposure and hope that a percentage of the traffic become regular readers.

So how does this translate to larger sites?
Larger sites will have more people working on them, finding/writing news/blogs and adding them in. More people means that the moderation of comments is easier and the "owner" of the site has more time for promotion or whatever they see fit. But what about the small sites such as this one? I need to combine working with site maintenance, development and writing which is a hard task to manage.

So is there room for single webmasters anymore? The philosophy of "if you write it they will come" is dying due to the saturation the Internet is enduring.

True enough if you publish enough content you will have search engine traffic but regular visitors are a hard beast to tame. Just a passing thought as to whether there are any real success stories anymore.

 

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