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The internet is built on buzz words. It seems that as soon as someone comes up with some new terminology, the internet is quick to adopt it. The word "portal" is a good example.
Typically, the word portal has come to mean something that big internet sites with lots of money use to provide an entrance or doorway to the Internet when this is not exactly true. A portal site has nothing to do with how much money you have or how well known your site is. A portal is simply a web site that offers a doorway into a world of information ABOUT a specific thing. It doesn't have to be about the internet. It can just as easily, (in fact more easily), be a doorway into a specific topic that you are interested in.
A portal is a system of integrated programs designed to make it easier for a user to find information. Typically these programs will include things like free e-mail, chats, forums, classified ads and most importantly a search engine. The purpose of all these integrated programs is to provide convenience, and a sense of community to the user, and to help make the user feel more comfortable about using the portal for the purpose of beginning their journey from "there" as opposed to trying to go out all over the internet and find all the pieces of the puzzles for themselves. So in this sense the portal is offering a valuable time-saving service.
Why do you want your own portal? Increased traffic and a degree of control over that traffic in the respect of where "they" go and how they get there.
By offering your visitors a portal about a specific topic, you can control the results they get when they do a search for a keyword. The links that get returned are the links that YOU want to return. This gives you the opportunity of keeping the visitor on your site as opposed to them leaving and going to another site. By virtue of the community building tools such as Free: e-mail, chat and forums, it also gives the visitor a way to communicate with the portal owner and ask questions and make comments about the specific topic. The advantage to you, of course, is that by addressing those questions and comments, it gives you the opportunity to become a trusted expert on your topic.
By offering these services and building up your traffic, now many other options open up for you such as advertising revenue. Once you have established a community, there are plenty of people who are going to want to advertise on your portal, their product or service that relates to yours. This not only produces revenue for you but again offers a valuable service to your visitors that keeps them returning to, and feeling good about using your site.
While there are many more reasons that a system of integrated programs, allowing you to offer a "portal" as opposed to a web site, are there for you to take advantage of, these are the ones that are extremely important and the easiest to accomplish. |
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