When I first started with web publishing I believed that all I had to do was produce websites and get some incoming links to them. I thought over time I would eventually rank in the top of the search engines. Its clear that this belief may be little more than wishful thinking.

Most web publisher’s business models look like this: create content, send links, get free search engine traffic, filter traffic off through Adsense to make money. If this describes your business, you probably won’t be around 5 years from now. (In fact, it could be more like 2-3 years.)

In the short-term this is a great way to make money. In fact, it probably beats the hell out of just about any business out there. The start up costs are zero and the monthly expenses are in the low two-figures.

Whats the problem? The problem is if you lose the search engine traffic your business model is worthless

On the web, traffic is money. When you put Adsense on your site, advertisers aren’t paying for clicks, they are paying for prospects. Despite what some people say about blending ads, deception, and accidental clicks, thousands of advertisers are dieing to get visitors to their sites. Some of them turn a profit from the ads, other don’t in hopes of a larger payoff in the future, either through customer value or a company buyout.

This means is when you no longer have traffic, your site no longer has value (ok, there may be value to other search engine optimizers depending on site age and links.)

Aaron Wall pointed to a Wall Street Journal who moonlighted on one of those freelance article writing sites. No suprise, content buyers are looking for sweat-shop bargains, and writers are pumping out plagerized, biased garbage. Beyond search engine ranking spider “food” this content is junk.

I’m guilty of producing crap content. These sites make some spare dollars for me, but I’m no longer under the illusion they will make me rich. The real value in the sites was me learning how web publishing really worked. If these sites are making me pennies in a few years, I’ll be suprised.

The long-term demographic trends point to only an increase in garbage content, and I’m willing to bet it will be on an exponential scale. More people are getting into the game, be it English-speaking entrepreneurs to the third world poor who want a few extra dollars a day. If the search engines don’t catch on fast their results will be comparable to a spam in-box (MSN already suffers this problem, just search “credit cards.”)

Ok, now that I’ve given you the doomsday scenario should you just give up and run from this business? If you ride this wave right, you will do very well. If you want to prosper online, in the long-run, here is what you should be doing:

Fill your sites with quality content. Most optimizers take the perspective of fighting the engines; I believe long-term the people who give engines what they want (ie: highly relevent pages for the keywords/phrases they are targetting) will come out on top.

Build sites that people come back to. This can’t be done for every subject, but its far from impossible. That guy making $300,000 a month from Adsense only gets a small fraction of his traffic from Google despite ranking on the top for search terms like “free dating.”

Build relationships with other people in the site’s industry. I’ve started sites on topics I’m an expert in, and others I knew nothing about the topic before I touched it. If experts in the niche/industry of the site are talking about your site, it is a very good sign.

Build the site on top of a premium domain name. Developers cringe when they see the price tags of high quality domain names. Few will make that investment. Right now plenty of premium domains are still priced in a way experienced developers can realize the value from them — and to me, that means they aren’t over-priced (although many certainly are.) A premium domain means visitors remember your site, you have a steady stream of new prospects through type-ins, your site looks more professional (ideal for that multi-million dollar buyout), and if the domain market keeps moving up your site has a salvagable value.

Are you serious about this business? If you don’t have a long-term project in your website portfolio, now is the time to do so.