Okay, so you have decided to build a cryptocurrency news portal.
That’s great! It means you already know how to create valuable content, distribute it, market it, and make revenue on top of this thanks to the good business model.
Let’s check how to do build and release it in the most efficient way without spending too many Bitcoins on it.
Step one: Check the Competition
No need to rediscover the wheel again. Let’s check the biggest players in the crypto world, investigate the common patterns and after that add your unique differentiation.
The most popular cryptocurrency news portals in 2020:
Step two: Prepare a list of the most common news portal features you want to implement
Customisable Articles Grid
You need to be able to feature specific articles, categories, tags, or authors on the home page and every important sub-section of the portal.
This allows you to compose attractive layouts for your users, just like releasing a newspaper.
You also need to plan some space for ads, CTAs (call to action), and sponsored content you will be publishing.
Commenting
Probably your goal is to build an active community around your content. Commenting functionality is the easiest way to start interacting with your audience.
Consider using Disqus - this is the fastest way to get commenting functionality and also a network of people already using it on other websites.
Flexible Categories, Tags, and Filters
Each category and filter option should have a unique, easy to paste URL that you need for organic traffic, and social media postings. Each of these categories also needs to have it reaches description to rank higher. The well-designed structure will also help you with traffic and user analysis. To grow your website you need to know how your visitors are behaving and in the future customize the reading experience for each user group or each user individually.
Social Share Options
Crypto is a highly speculative market, visitors want to get the information fast, even faster than it’s indexed by Google. Crypto geeks are watching multiple social media groups, telegram groups, and many other niche communities. Sharing options will make it easier for them to distribute your content.
Advertisement System
Ads probably will bring a big portion of your news portal revenue. Even before design please list types of advertisements you want to have on the website and their placement in page layout.
Newsletter
Newsletter is one of the oldest way to keep your audience updated.
Number of users signed to the newsletter is also a good KPI to measure how interesting and engaging content your’re publishing. Newsletter also help you to diversify your traffic and in the future you might consider paid newsletter version.
Step three: Niche Cryptocurrency News Portal Features
Price Tickers for Cryptocurrency News Portal
Of course, you will have a lot of crypto geeks reading your news portal because they want to be up to date with the latest crypto technology insights. But I’m afraid that most of your audience will get to your website because they’re attracted by high crypto price increases and a dream to build a fortune very quickly. You want your users to come here for the content, and also check the prices. In the future, you also might plan to add the functionality of managing their own crypto portfolio.
Articles Connected with Crypto Price Tickers
Decrypt implement a great idea for connecting articles with price tickers. The context information is making the content more valuable to the readers.
Articles Connected with Crypto Celebrities
Another clever idea from Decrypt - adding context to the post by featuring the crypt celebrity involved in the project being post subject.
Own Token or Coin for Your Readers
Crypto geeks love to get free coins, and they’re used to it by various airdrops, tokens for using a specific exchange or defi platform. This might attract them to register on your platform, but of course, to keep your growth metric clear, your content must be the reason to get involved.
Step four: Not Functional Stuff
Performance
You’re going to build a website for tech-savvy users about disruptive technology. Your website should not be just faster than getting bitcoin transaction confirmation, you should be pointing to have the fastest website in the industry.
Open Graph Support
Social channels are a very important distribution channel for your content. Please make sure your website will support all types of open graph tags that will allow your users to easily share your articles and attract more readers.
AMP
News portals are the best use cases for AMP technology. It will allow you to reach a bigger audience.
https://amp.dev/about/stories/
On-site SEO Optimisation
All of the investigated crypto news portals are well SEO optimized. The general website architecture should be planed with SEO in mind to attract users searching for several high traffic keywords like “bitcoin news” and also long-tail keywords like “bitcoin 500k USD 2021”.
Step four: Plan Future Activities
Before picking the technology stack you should try to list your future plans.
Maybe sometime after the news portal release, you would like to add another content distribution channel like a mobile app or add a new revenue stream like a paid subscription.
These functionalities should be planned before picking the technology stack and general project architecture.
Example of future plans to consider:
- Release of a Mobile App (native, cross-platform, or PWA),
- Paid access to articles/subscription system
- Donation system
- Other portals news aggregation system like cryptopanic.com
Conclusions
After this article, you should know the main functionalities you might include in your cryptocurrency news portal.
In part II we will share insights about picking the right technology stack and setting up the development process.
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