Become an Online Media Mogul

You’ve probably seen the .li tweets that have been flying around Twitter lately. And if you’re like me, you’re probably finding them irritating already.

The idea isn’t bad. Paper.li, the service behind the tweets, lets social media users create newspaper-style websites automatically out of tweeted links. Those links might have been posted by particular lists of twitterers (at last, a use for lists!), by hashtag, or by selected twitterers and their followers.

The result should be a website updated daily with aggregated content about a particular subject.

You can see how that could be useful. Include your own links in your newspaper and you’ll be giving your followers another opportunity to read your content and click your ads. I’m just skeptical that you’ll see a significant rise in traffic and revenues. I don’t have figures but I doubt that the newspapers receive more clickthroughs to links than the links you’ll be placing to your own content anyway.

But the design of paper.li is good and it is tempting to have a website that doesn’t rely on the content that you produce alone. Some of the most successful online publishers, sites like Mashable and Techcrunch, are put together by teams of people in the same way as newspapers. They’re real publishers not just one-man blogs.

There’s just no reason that you can’t create a site like that — and you don’t have to build it with a content aggregator like paper.li.

You’ll need to outsource some of the writing. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore still contributes sometimes to his site but most of the writing is done by his staff. Back in 2007, the site was believed to be earning over $166,000 a month, so paying those writers shouldn’t have been a problem.

It becomes an even smaller problem when you take a flexible approach to advertising revenues. Mashable still uses AdSense — you can see the ads on the site. But it doesn’t depend on Google to fill its advertising space. It also has an advertising section on the site and encourages companies to contact them for quotes and campaigns.

I’m a big fan of blogs, and AdSense is invaluable. They’re so easy to use they should get you up and running very quickly. But when you’re building an online business, you should also be looking at the long haul, at turning your one-person blog into one of the biggest sites on the Web. Then you’ll be appearing in everyone’s .li newspapers.