Making Money with an Authority Website

The following is a guest post written by Patrick Meninga of Make Money With No Work. He recently built and sold a website for $200,000 dollars.

I want to talk about building an authority website today, and how you might create one for yourself in order to generate income.

There are many different kinds of websites you might create. For example, you might make a niche website that is relatively small and only targets a single keyword. Or you might create an e-commerce store that focuses on selling products.

But an authority website is a bit different. Instead of exploiting the web for inefficiencies in order to produce income, the authority website model seeks to create income by offering real value to people.

Other types of websites may offer value to the site visitor as well, but an authority website thrives on delivering value. If it does not, then it is essentially just a bunch of spam that will eventually be penalized by the search engines.

Quality content

The main key in building a successful authority website is in delivering quality content.

If you read the A-list blogging crowd then you are probably sick of hearing about “quality content” by now.

But the fact is, your business is not sustainable if it just a bunch of “me-too” content.

For example, if you go to Google and do a search for your keyword, you can probably find hundreds or even thousands of articles about your topic.

Then go to eZine Articles and do another search for your topic. Notice that there are thousands of articles about it. Glance through and read some of them.

Recognize that the content that you create for your website has to be far, far better than everything you just read.

The web is a sea of spam, and several hundred thousand new blogs are created every month. Every month!

So ask yourself: “How am I going to stand out from all of that spam? How am I going to build a brand online, and get people to share my stuff with each other?”

You have to create something amazing. You can do this by creating articles that are:

* Extremely in-depth.
* Very detailed.
* Helpful, unique, insightful.
* Original ideas not found elsewhere on the web.
* Unique presentation that is lacking on the web. For example, video or eBooks in a niche where none currently exist, etc.

Building an authority website means that you have to deliver unique, remarkable, and high quality content.

High volume

Ever hear of “volume blogging?”

The idea is that the title of each article you publish has a lot of power to be able to rank for long tail keyword phrases.

Therefore, one approach to building an authority website is to publish lots of articles that each target a unique long tail phrase.

This is a very powerful and somewhat dangerous approach.

What is the danger?

The danger is that most people allow their quality to drop as they try to push out higher volumes of content. This is only natural, and is very difficult to overcome.

One of the best ways to deal with this is to have a daily quota for yourself.

My recommendation is 3 articles.

This may take a while to build up to. Publish 3 articles on your website in a single day, and evaluate your quality level. Is it still up to your high standards?

If not, you may have to settle for one or two articles per day for a while, until your speed increases.

As you continue to write, your speed and quality will go up over time. This is especially true given that you will be publishing about the same topic over a long period of time.

Keep pushing yourself until you can publish 3 quality articles each and every day.

If you can maintain that quota, that is over 1,000 articles per year.

This will get you to a very healthy online income in a very reasonable amount of time.

The bonus is that if your quality is really high and you have good insight and expertise on your topic, then your income will be very sustainable and durable as well.

Making money with your authority website

There are many different ways to make money from an authority website, but I would urge you to focus on traffic generation for at least the first year.

After that, you can easily test different methods of monetization to see which ones pay off the best.

AdSense is a powerful option because there are so many advertisers bidding for the ad space, and it is extremely easy to implement. It is also fairly easy to optimize.

Once you have run AdSense for a month or so, you can get an idea of what your current traffic is worth. Then you can test other forms of monetization against this, and see which performs the best.

When I created my authority website, it took me about 300 hours to write approximately one million words of content on 1,500 articles.

The website went on to earn up to $2,250 dollars per month in AdSense, and I eventually sold the website for $200,000 dollars.

Thus, my dollar-per-hour earnings when creating that website was somewhere around $900 dollars per hour. Not bad work if you can get it.

And I believe that anyone can achieve those kind of numbers, but very few people actually will, because the probationary period is so long these days (Google will not send you free search engine traffic for several months, because so many new spam websites appear every day).

Building an authority website is a labor of love, but I still believe it is one of the best choices for online income, because the resulting income is relatively stable. Smaller niche sites have less trust and can easily be crushed in algorithm updates.

If you want to learn more about building authority websites, check out Patrick’s website about making passive money online.

Vern’s Note: As you know, if you’re a reader at this site, or my AimforAwesome.com site, I don’t accept guest bloggers that I don’t personally know, respect, and idolize. Patrick is that, and more – he is a friend that has freely given me heaps of help and inspiration over the years. He’s one of the “Good Guys” and there aren’t all that many in his niche! Thanks to Patrick for this guest post – you’re welcome to post again anytime!

The “Free” Business Model

You might have heard about people giving away products or services for free online and wondered how you make money from that business model.

It might go a couple of ways:

1. You could give away loads of information on your site – in the articles you write, for free. This is information you could charge money for – but, you don’t – you give it away for free.

2. You could offer some specific product or service for free that you could charge people for access to. (PDF, book, forum, video, training program, report)

Why would you want to give away something for free? Shouldn’t you always charge money for it? Not necessarily.

There are websites making a whole lot of money by giving away free information. Here’s why that is.

1. Free information is instantly available to whomever lands at your site. They don’t have to wait for it – or pay for it, it’s there and ready to consume.

2. You might be instantly cutting out your competitors that are all charging for the product/service. You may quickly become THE source everyone uses because everyone wants free instead of paying for it.

3. Free = Viral if the information is desired. People will pass free links to their online friends much more often and quicker than they would for something that will cost their friends money. Surfers love to help their friends and passing them links to a place they can get info for free – is a big help.

That’s the WHY of the Free Business Model. Now, what’s the “How”? As in, “How do I make money from it?”

Basically traffic comes first. Money comes later. If a website is able to amass traffic – a couple thousand people per day or more, then the website can make money from advertisements on the website. Their own or other companies advertisements work well when large amounts of visitors are arriving at their site.

The amount of money you can make from ads on your site depends on:

1. Numbers of people coming to your site.

2. The focus of your site. If your niche is tightly defined and there are advertisers that pay a lot per click you can do quite well off low level traffic.

Most businesses giving it all away for free are usually also selling something.

So, you can advertise on your site some products that you’ll charge money for. Or you can put Google Adsense, Textlink Ads, or charge other businesses to put their ads on your site because you have some decent traffic coming in every day – giving you a high pageview count.

One of the best things you can do when you have a free site is start an email list. You can start a list with Aweber.com – which is definitely one of the top two companies doing email lists online today.

Short and simply… You join Aweber. You create a form on their site – that you can add to your site – as a pop-up or as a small blurb that goes on your website somewhere people will see. Look at the checkbox on IncAnswsers – that’s my Aweber form section. I also have a popup that comes up sometimes – once per customer. If your IP address changes you’ll see it again.

You collect names and email addresses to go with the names. You create a newsletter or some other emails that you send out to those that join your list. If you focus on providing more free information and occasionally ask for friends on your list to buy something – some do. Over time your email list will become very important to your business.

Recently one guy I follow pretty closely, Jeremy Schoemaker, decided that instead of write a book and sell it he was going to create a 12 week course and just give all the information away for free instead. The way he’s monetizing this is that he gives away his affiliate link so I can link to his course… if you buy any of his products or services I’ll make a small commission off whatever it is. It’s a win-win-win. You win because you find his 12 week free course. I win because I get a commission. Jeremy wins because you’ve found his site and become an email list member if you decide to opt-in to the free 12 week course.

That’s what to do with a Free Business Model site to make money with it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Of course I can’t cover everything in one article – so, ask questions to clarify if this is something you’re considering.

- Vern

Photo credit: Flickr.com member, The Consumerist

Which Blogs Make Money Online?

If your blogging focus is making money then you must have a blog that can make money.

There are blogs that make money within a year and blogs that don’t. The difference between them is whether the audience your blog attracts is focused on some niche area that is easily monetized or not. The difference in money-making capacity between blogs from the two different lists below can be the difference between success and failure for the online business entrepreneur.

Blogs with this Focus Are NOT Easily Monetized within a Year:

• Diaries, personal accounts of blogger’s life – unless famous
• Personal Development
• Motivational blogs.
• Individual sports: bicycling, running, tennis, triathlon
• Traveling (wide focus)
• Writing
• Saving money
• Music
• Wide focus blogs. See my AimforAwesome.com site – it’s a collection of positive articles with all sorts of subjects. Tough to monetize.
• Food
• Kids, pregnancy, some health issue like cancer, hepatitus, diabetes
• Politics

Blogs with this Focus ARE More Easily Monetized within a Year:

• Making money – teaching others to do it
• Blogging – teaching others to blog successfully
• Technology – a narrow focus like iPhones, or product group, like “netbook computers”. Photography, video, mobile phones of all sorts.
• Online games. You may not play them, but there are millions that do.
• Addiction, overcoming bad habits, self help
• Blog themes (WordPress, MySpace), mobile themes – anything to do with customization – personalization of some popular online activity. If Facebook ever opens up to custom backgrounds… wow.
• Applications. iPhone applications are selling like crazy right now – and if you can tell people how to get into that space you’ll make a lot of $ right now. Any Mac app, Windows app, Nokia s60 app blog will do well.
• Team sports – National and college teams. Sports that are on tv and attract a lot of viewers.

I chose to focus these lists on realistic topics that someone could become successful with in a short time with a lot of effort. It doesn’t take really high traffic numbers to make a decent amount of money with the topics I chose as easily monetizable. Bloggers on the second list can choose from many products to offer to customers and have a much better chance of selling to their visitors than do bloggers on the first list.

Now, there are some blogs in the first list that might make a lot of money depending on how many people arrive at the site. Huge traffic can still bring you a lot of cash from Google  Adsense if you get thousands of people each day to your site. Big traffic usually takes a few years of effort and if you’re in it for the long-haul – like you should be, you can pick a topic like politics – and really be cranking in 2-3 years.

One of the top blogs on the planet is StevePavlina.com. His is a personal development blog that he started about 4 years ago that is filled with over 600 articles – many of them very interesting and thought provoking. You can do that too – but you’re looking at the very long-term for success with such a blog. If that’s where your interest is – go for it!

The thing is… you can probably make money with any blog that gets huge amounts of traffic. That’s a given. Big traffic takes time – couple years as a minimum.

In the short term you cannot make decent money online with blogs that aren’t focused on an area that’s easily monetizable.

So, ask yourself – are you in it for the long-haul online or do you want to be making money as fast as possible online?

There’s something to be said for both options…