10 Secrets of Building an Authority Website

These are all secrets that I learned on my journey to building up a successful website and eventually selling it off for $200,000 dollars. I am not sure if all of these qualify as real “secrets,” but many of the concepts here are not obvious, and some of them even go completely against traditional internet marketing wisdom.

Secret #1: Volume/quality

The whole “quality content” argument will likely rage on for as long as the Internet exists.

Everyone knows that you need “quality” content on your website.

I would argue that this is absolutely true, at least as far as “authority websites” are concerned. You are not going to build a long term, full time income out of junk content, unless you keep putting more and more of it up (this is a job, no?).

But the “secret” that goes along with the quality content argument is this:

You need a lot of it.

The problem is that the search engines have to use certain trust factors in order to rank your website. One of the biggest signals of trust has to do with the size of your website.

Yes, you actually CAN rank a very small website, but it is MUCH more difficult to do so.

The niche site model is dying, and has been over the last few years. Bigger websites get pushed to the top of the serps because search engines can trust them more not to be spam.

So yes, you need quality content. That is no secret. But I would advise the newcomer that they need quality + volume. That is a bit tougher act to provide, but you can do it if you are determined to stay at this business for a long time.

Secret #2: Cheap links

Everyone knows that you need “quality links.” You know, links from other websites in your niche that are actually “real” websites. I would advise that you need at least one or two of those and possibly more in the long run.

So the secret here is that you need cheap links too. Or rather, you would be foolish not to use cheaper links if you know what you are doing.

Basically my advice is to slowly drip in cheap links only after two other factors are leaning in your favor:

* Site is aging a bit (over a year old, say).
* Site has at least one or two “real links” pointed at it.

After those two things are met, dripping in a few cheap links with specific anchor text can really help boost your rankings.

I used to fear that suddenly Google would completely eradicate the juice that cheap links pass. I was worrying about this over 4 years ago and it has still not really come to pass.

Cheap links still work if you know how to use them.

Secret #3: Ignore the head, go for the tail

When I first started in internet marketing I thought that the big payoff would be for ranking for really juicy keywords. So I set out to rank for a few keywords with my website, words that I thought would bring in a healthy income all their own.

Now the thing to understand here is that I worked really, really hard at this. I built links for months and months. Tons and tons of effort. And ultimately, after all of this hard work, my best keyword was only earning me $50 dollars per month.

This was on a website that was earning over $2,000 per month in advertising. The best keyword only drove in about 48 bucks.

Where was the money coming from? The long tail.

This particular website had about 1,500 articles, and over 1 million words published on it. It did not rank for extremely lucrative keywords, it just ranked for a lot of them.

Don’t get me wrong….it IS possible to rank for a single keyword and make a lot of money doing it. But, that is not how I experienced success myself, and that is not really the “authority website” model.

At least one drawback jumps to mind immediately for chasing the really juicy keywords: you can suddenly lose your ranking and then all of your income is gone.

This is because you will be relying mostly on backlinks in order to rank your content.

With the authority website model, you are not so much counting on backlinks to rank, but your high volume of quality content instead. Sure, you still need some links in order to rank, but they are not going to be critical drivers of your income. Your vast span of content is what will be the main driver of your income, as you clean up on long tail keywords.

Long articles are not necessary, but a high volume of articles will multiply your earnings. That said, I would not create a website in which every articles is 400 words. I would try to make a variety of article length, with most being between 1,000 and 2,000 words long.  Learn how to build a website properly by using a variety of content types and lengths.

Secret #4: Legitimacy through community

Building a community around your website and your ideas would provide “intangible benefits” that cannot be fully explained. Part of the benefits of building a community and/or a readership include:

* Repeat traffic that the search engines may use to help legitimize your website with.
* Building fans that can then help spread your content and build real links to it.
* Having a platform for your community to add content (like a forum) that can then grow your site’s footprint and thus help to build authority in the eyes of the search engines.

Those are just a few of the ideas that lead to real benefit to your site if you can build a community.

My advice for actually building a fan base intentionally would be for you to:

* Have original and useful ideas within your niche.
* Engage each and every reader who leaves a real comment on your site.
* Start a discussion forum when you are getting a few comments each day on a regular basis.

If you do this then the community that forms within your discussion forum will bring many benefits to your website, some tangible and some that are much harder to quantify.

Secret #5: Persistence/patience

OK so this one is fairly obvious, not really a secret, but so many people fail in their online career simply due to a lack of persistence, so I had to include it here.

If you keep doing internet marketing for the long haul then at some point your income is going to be down (or non-existent). There will be ups and downs. This is much the same as any other business.

The key is that you keep your head down and keep pushing forward even when things are not looking so good. Usually it is during those down times when an upswing is just up ahead and if you want to take advantage of that then you need to keep publishing every day and promoting your website.

It takes a good deal of time to build real authority on the web. Actually, compared to other businesses in the “real” world, the timeline is rather short. You can achieve a full time income and real authority in only a year or two if you work hard at it. This is actually a phenomenal opportunity considering how lean the business is and how low your overhead will be (under $100/year for domain and hosting).

So while it might feel like it is taking forever to build up authority, keep in mind that most businesses lose money in the first year or two, and internet marketing should not necessarily be any different from that. You have to put in the effort, time, and consistency if you want to build a stable business.

Be persistent in building up your website and be patient with the results. It takes longer than you think, but the rewards are also greater than you are assuming as well.

Secret #6: Reinvest profits

One of my internet marketing teachers once told me a story about a student he had that started a website and was earning about $100 dollars per month. The student was happy with this amount and was quite pleased with the additional income. But, when the teacher instructed him to start reinvesting a percentage of his profits in order to grow the website, the student would not hear of it.

“He had a kung-fu grip on that 100 bucks,” the teacher told me. “And it was such a shame because if he just would have started outsourcing maybe half of his income, he could have easily grew his revenue to over $1,000/month within a year or two.”

You see, the first $100/month is the toughest. It takes a lot of effort to build your website up to the point where it is earning that much income. But once you cross that threshold, adding an additional $100/month in income is fairly easy to do.

Why?

Because once you have enough link juice to earn $100/month, you probably have enough link juice to scale that up by creating more content.

There are two ways to expand your income more quickly once you start experiencing some initial success:

1) Add more content on site.
2) Add more links off-site.

If you are dedicating 40 hours or more to building your website, then there probably is not a huge need to outsource your efforts. However, if you are not able to dedicate that much time, it will probably make sense for you to reinvest a portion of your revenue in order to grow your income further.

Some people do this by paying for new content to publish on-site. I never went that route personally, and instead reinvested a portion of my profits into link building and promotion instead. I feel this is an important strategy because the quality of your content is going to be questionable at best if you are paying anything less than 15 dollars per article for on-site content. Most people cannot afford that expense and are better off writing their own on-site content. My opinion is that your outsourcing budget should be spent creating “cheap links.” I would recommend doing this only after you are generating regular revenue.

Decide on a percentage of your revenue or a set amount to reinvest and stick to it until you reach your monthly income goal. What I did was this: When I was earning $600/month with my website, I started outsourcing $200/month in promotion. I continued to do this all the way up to when the site was earning over $2,000 per month. I never varied the amount or bothered to increase it (which I certainly could have). The important thing was that I was consistently reinvesting part of my profits to help grow the site further.

Secret #7: Test everything and ignore traditional wisdom

As I was experiencing more and more success with my flagship website, I was getting all sorts of advice, such as:

….”You should write an eBook for your website and sell it to make another revenue stream. That way you are more diversified.”
….”You should use social media to diversify away from search engine traffic.”
….”You should create a product or service in your niche and diversify away from relying on AdSense for income.”
….”You should explore other forms of monetization: develop an eCourse, create a membership website, sell eBooks, pitch affiliate products, etc.

I took much, if not all, of this advice.

I attempted to sell an eBook. I sought out direct advertisers and made direct deals to try to beat AdSense income. I experimented with social media using various platforms. I tried to monetize with affiliate products.

Now keep in mind that all sorts of people were telling me that I could increase my revenue and diversify.

But ultimately what I learned was that, for my niche, AdSense was extremely efficient. I tested many different forms of monetizattion, but none of them could compare to AdSense for my particular niche. Now this was quite unusual because in most niches, AdSense is not going to be the most optimal solution. Nonetheless, this only goes to show that you should test everything and simply go with what works best.

Every niche is a little different. What works for other internet marketers may not work perfectly for you.

I don’t have all the answers. And the people who taught me internet marketing? They didn’t have all the answers either. I had to find many of them on my own.

The way to do that is through experimentation and testing.

So, take advice from others and try new things. But always measure what you are doing and simply go with the setup that earns you the most profit.

Secret #8: Solve problems for search engine visitors

My flagship website sold for such a large some of money because my content was actually useful. The articles that I produced for the site had value to the search engine visitor because the information that I presented in the articles helped to solve a real problem that people were having.

If you look at marketing from the perspective of “problem solving,” you will see that most people who decide to part with their money and spend it on something are doing so in order to solve a problem that they have.

Your content–even though it is essentially “free”–should solve a problem for people.

Why?

Because if it doesn’t, then nobody will care about it. And if nobody cares about your content, no one will link to it or share it with others, and your message will never spread.

This will be a problem in the long run because if you have rely on manufactured links in order to promote all of your content all by yourself, then you are probably never going to make it.

Most people who use a search engine are trying to solve a problem that they have of some sort. Give them the answer to their problem. Not only that, but give them the best possible answer for their specific problem.

Some people have used the approach where they sort of talk about the problem on their website without really solving it directly, in the hopes that the user will click on an ad. Don’t do this. Although it can increase conversion rates and make you more money in the short term, it is a poor long term strategy for your business. More important is to gain authority and long term organic link juice by actually being the best authority on the Internet for a certain topic.

Give the best answer that you can and really try to help people solve their problems.

Secret #9: Give people something amazing to link to

Why would anybody share your website with someone else?

Your content has to be good enough, useful enough, or insightful enough to “sell itself.” If it is not, then what you have actually created is just a big website full of spam, not a true resource for people.

The solution is to create amazingly helpful content that actually solves a problem for people. That way, your content will market itself with much less effort required on your part.

Think about your content years from now. Will it still be accruing links naturally, without any effort on your part? Some of it should be. Your best articles should be good enough to pull in organic links indefinitely. If this is not the case yet then you need to start planning and developing some truly amazing, remarkable “flagship” content.

Not every article on your website has to be a “home run.” But many of the articles should be, eventually. Start creating “premium content,” one article at a time.

I would advise that you shoot for at least 20 such articles or so on your website, and then promote them all heavily with links. Also, be sure to list them in the sidebar of your website so that everyone who visits your website has instant access to them and can find them easily.

Other tips for creating link-worthy content:

* Create good headlines that have serious “grab-ability.” See the front of Cosmo magazine for examples. Google your topic and look at the headlines on the ads for headline ideas. You want stuff that is highly clickable and has serious grab.
* Over deliver on your promise. Make a big promise in your headline, and then over deliver on it. Look at the existing resources for your topic on the web, and then beat them all with a superior piece of content. Go for long and detailed.
* Mix it up and offer a wide variety of content formats. Supplement text with videos, pictures, and free eBooks. Give everything away for free; charge nothing for your premium content and do not use pay walls of any kind.
* Look at what your competitors charge money for in terms of content. Then, create superior content, and give it away for free. This will encourage incoming links and word of mouth sharing.

Secret #10: Daily publishing

Perhaps the biggest secret of all is this:

Publish multiple articles daily.

That’s it. The day is your multiplier. You get 365 of them each year. If you publish 3 articles each and every day, then after a full year you will have a huge website with over 1,000 articles on it.

Most people who are making money online do not even have that much content. Those who do are generally making a really nice, mostly passive income.

Now this “secret” of publishing multiple articles each and every day is hardly a secret, but it is critical that we point out:

1) Just how powerful the technique is, and
2) Just how few people do it.

My own flagship website used to have about 300 articles on it, and was making around $500 dollars per month. I wanted to expand my business and earn more from it so that I could quit my day job and thus buy my freedom.

So what did I do? I took a month off of work, and proceeded to publish close to 20 articles every single day for a while month.

It was this big push in my publishing that took my website above $1,000/month and eventually above $2,000/month.

You are probably not going to get very far just publishing one article each day, unless you are really, really patient. Most people do not want to wait several years for their business to start generating a return on their time investment.

Therefore, if you are in this thing to make money then you need to set a daily publishing goal and stick to it.

I recommend that you publish 3 quality articles every single day. I would make sure that they are in the 600 to 1,000 word range at the minimum.

Some people consider this to be a lot of writing. If you stick to the schedule for a full year then at some point cranking out your 3 articles will seem pretty easy. You will get faster and more efficient at composing articles if you have the discipline to stick to a publishing schedule.

None of the secrets listed in this article are even half as powerful as this one. If you publish multiple articles every single day, you will reach your monthly income goal eventually.

It takes work, and dedication. No days off. Publish daily, and you can achieve your dreams.

If you find this website at all helpful my only request is that you share it with others. Send them to:

http://www.makemoneywithnowork.com/

If you found this helpful, click the Facebook Like button below or Tweet it.