Are Web Stores Worth Your Time?

After failing to create a Social Media platform several times, Google is just trying to compete with the Short form visual content format that’s getting popular on Instagran, Snapchat, TikTok.

Web stories are currently being heavily promoted by Google. It’s a new content format rising in popularity, but are they worth investing your time in?

Here is an overview of the potential pros and cons of web stories and tips for determining if they align with your goals.

What are Web Stories?

Web stories are full-screen, tappable slideshows optimized for mobile. They feature visually rich content with minimal text, often using videos, GIFs, and images.

Web stories can be created with tools like Google Web Stories or embedded on sites. They are easily shareable on social media. Major platforms like Google, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat now support web stories.

What are the Benefits of Web Stories?

There are several reasons web stories are gaining traction:

• Highly engaging, interactive format tailored to mobile
• Visually captivating with dynamic motion graphics
• Easily scannable with key information condensed
• Optimized for search and social sharing
• Provide creative storytelling options beyond text and images

For brands, web stories offer new avenues to reach and resonate with audiences on social and in search. And since it’s a way of Google to keep the eyeballs on the platform. It is currently promoting it heavily.

If you go to YouTube, you will find hundreds of content creators talking about how they are leveraging web stories to make thousands of dollars.

While I am not rubbishing their claims, it’s rare everyone would find the same success. Since this format is fairly new, my suggestion to new content, creators would be to look at the pros and cons of creating web stories, and how they can leverage it with what they are doing on their blogs, before committing to invest their time.

What are the Potential Drawbacks of Web Stores?

You may have watched videos on Youtube of people telling how easy it is to make thousands of dollars by creating Web Stores as its a new format and Google is promoting heavily. You should know that that Web stories may not be ideal for every situation

• It can Can be time-consuming to create high-quality visual content
• Limited space for text details or depth
• Unproven long-term ROI compared to other formats
• Promotion and distribution remains a challenge
• Viewer preference skews younger demographic
• CTR is too low since the Ads slide will be visible after a few slides of the content, most people won’t even reach the ad slide.

if you currently already have a blog going on with decent traffic and you want to explore new possibilities to get people to view your content and it, my recommendation would be to start in entirely new blog and then experiment with web stories.

In the last decade and a half, I have seen many new trends getting popularity and then feeding away. Sometimes, taking some decent blogs, with good earning, down along with them.

There was a time when people were integrating forums into their blogs, then question & answer websites were popular for a brief time, and currently e-commerce is also popular to some extent. While these things may have worked for some people. It doesn’t universally benefit everyone who has a blog.

Here are a few tips for Success in leveraging Web Stories for Traffic and extra revenue from your blog.

If you want to pursue web stories, here are some tips-

• Set clear goals for what you want to achieve with them
• Audit your audience – do they favor visual content?
• Develop engaging narratives or useful tutorials
• Leverage video and graphic designers if needed
• Promote across website, email, and social channels
• Track performance closely to optimize efforts

Experiment with web stories in bitesize ways while assessing results. With strategic testing and iteration, they may become a valuable content channel. But ensure they align with your resources and audience before overinvesting.

The highly visual web story format has potential, but merits careful evaluation. Leverage your unique creative strengths and community fit to determine if it moves the needle for your business.

Again, like I said earlier, it is preferable if you do this on an entirely new blog and not mess your existing blog if it has decent traffic and revenue.

Making Money from Web Stories?

Contrary to what the general belief is, Web stories can be utilized in different ways to monetize the content. These are a few examples of it.

Advertising

You can place ads in your web stories and earn money when people view or click on them. While it is true that you need tons of traffic to make money from ads. You can ride the tide while it is there. You can use Google AdSense or other ad networks to monetize your stories.

Affiliate marketing

You can promote products or services through your web stories and earn a commission on any sales that you generate. a marketing is a completely different skill, and if you have experience with promoting products on your blog, you can try this new format to test out whether this works for you.

Sponsorships

You can work with brands to create sponsored web stories that promote their products or services. This perhaps be benefited by content creators who are already creating visual content on platforms like YouTube and Instagram and already have expertise at creating content with brand integration.

Subscriptions

You can offer access to exclusive content or features through a subscription service. This might not be for everyone, but this new format can be utilised for exclusive content put behind a pay wall. Or maybe create stories around a product or service you sell on your blog.

It would essentially work like any other piece of content, just a in a little more visual form and more social media type content on websites.

The amount of money you can make with web stories will depend on a number of factors, including the quality of your content, the size and engagement of your audience, and the monetization strategy you use.

However, if you are able to create successful web stories that people love to read and share, you can potentially make a significant amount of money.

How to Automate the Process of Web Stories Creation

Web stories provide an engaging new content format, but manually creating visual stories can be extremely time consuming. Thankfully, there are options to automate the web story creation process.

The number of web stories and the quality of web stories weighs proportional to how much the competition is in your niche that is also using web stories.

If there is less competition, you might have to work less. Maybe create only one to two web stories in a day and it can bring thousands of visitors.

But if your niche has got competition, then you will have to create dozens of stories every day, which is not possible for any individual creator. Maybe you can use some automation tools that can help you speed up the process..

Here are some top tools and strategies for streamlining web story production.

Leverage Web Story Generators

Tools like Storyscraper, WPAutomatic, and Getbotz can auto-generate web stories using AI. Simply provide a content source like an article link or keywords. The tool creates a visually appealing web story for you.

This provides a huge time savings over manually piecing together images, text, video and graphics. But story quality varies, so generate plenty of options to cherry pick the best.

Outsource Story Creation

If bandwidth is limited, outsource web story creation to freelancers or agencies. Provide direction on stories you want developed or give creative freedom.

This leverages outside talent but can be more costly. Vet providers carefully for quality results.

Repurpose Existing Materials

Adapt existing blog posts, videos, reports etc. into web story format. This recycles assets without starting totally from scratch.

Quickly test stories using in-house content. But generally requires some reworking to fit the format.

So, automating even parts of the web story process can accelerate production. Assess where your biggest pain points are and implement the solutions that best align with your strategy, resources and audience.