Make a Website That Is Authoritative and Focused on the Right Audience
Creating a profitable authority website requires work and patience. Many are called but few are chosen. If you’re ready to take on a long term challenge that only takes a few hours a week to grow but can pay off handsomely, digital real estate may be for you.
If you’re a content marketing pro or a small business owner, you know how important it is to have an authoritative website. But what do you have to do to make sure that your website stands out? Well, one of the most important things is identifying who you need to reach to be effective.
Starting a new authority website can be an extremely profitable experience. Getting traffic and building your reputation will take some time, however. Here are a few steps that can speed things up.
Build Your Niche Expertise Step-By-Step
If you are developing an authority site, you’ll definitely want to focus on branding your site for a select audience. Authority sites are online resource locations for people who are interested in a specific market. But unlike niche sites, authority sites cover a collection of topics within a broad niche.
An authority site has more opportunities to engage massive amounts of visitors because it covers topics in greater detail and usually involves multiple media options. Sites like https://www.protoolreviews.com/ build up a strong reputation for their content while offering articles, videos, and infographics.
Create Brand Respect
Another great example is https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/. They cover camping and hiking gear, but really appeal to a vast segment of the outdoor activity enthusiast population. These sites build their reputations on the back of their content. If you’re using a tool like Ahrefs, you can get a good look at the backlink structure of these high-authority sites.
Ultimately, your success will be tied to how effectively you’ve developed your brand. Your content will be important, but it’s still important to tie the whole thing together in a way that people can relate to. “Branding” is basically your core story. What are you known for?
Plan Your Niche Path Success
Your specific objectives will determine the best way to increase website authority. Always begin with a plan and support it with ongoing market research. Here are some tips that could help you achieve better website authority:
-Develop a short and long-range content marketing plan for your site.
-Improve the content of your website by producing interesting and useful content.
-Attempt to write to readers other than experts.
-Use eye-catching photos, infographics, and videos to attract visitors.
-Have a clear and concise structure for your content.
-Include keywords throughout your pages to help Google index and rank your site higher.
-Make sure that your website is well designed and easy to navigate.
-Always produce high-quality content that is informative, accurate, and user-friendly.
-Promote your website through social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.
-Keep your website updated with the latest security features.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to website authority, as it depends on the site’s overall ranking and the specific strategies that you want to implement. If you are building this on your own, be prepared to put in the time to learn as well as the time to produce. There are plenty of tools available to help you speed things up. Most crucial; your plan is the foundation of everything.
Essential Information on Your Authority Site
My first authority site was an article mill, back in the heyday of sites like EzineArticles and AskJeeves. My strategy was simple. We built content daily on a variety of topics that Google considered relevant. We built backlinks and promoted them on other article sites. Google’s advertising system paid handsomely for the effort.
Of course, we were also at the mercy of Google’s mercurial ranking system. When they decided that article mills were gaming the system far too much, they would come out with another algorithm change to clean out the spammers.
The importance of regular high-quality material is something I appreciate after battling for years to generate revenue through content marketing websites.
“No Research Without Action, No Action Without Research.”
At risk of beating a dead horse, never start your content strategy without proper research. When making your website, it’s important to think about who the site is for.
They are the ones who will use your content and services, after all. You can find out who they are by doing a market analysis.
This will help you figure out what they are looking for and what worries them. When you know this, you can start making content that is useful and relevant to them.
Use case studies, real-life examples, and the opinions of experts to do this.
Be a Little Smarter Than Your Audience
The cool thing about building an authority site is that you don’t automatically have to be an expert. You just need to know a little more about the subject than your audience. You can also hire others who are smarter and more experienced to help.
Ongoing research allows you to be ahead of your competition, pass on priceless information to your visitors, and show your expertise and illustrate your value. This all comes from doing the work.
Follow a few best practices when setting up your niche site. These include:
- Organize your content.
- Create broad categories and build silos of sub-categories for each main area.
- Include LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords in each article or blog post to increase relevancy for the readers.
- Identify the key topics that you would like to cover and divide them into sections.
- Create headings for each section and populate them with subheadings.
- Add original images, infographics, videos, and other supporting content.
- Canva, Photoshop, and online video creation tools can help to create a visual hierarchy for your content.
- Don’t forget meta-tags to organize your content by topic or category.
- Create supporting content like YouTube and Vimeo videos to promote your content.
- Publish helpful, comprehensive product descriptions
- Add very detailed customer reviews
- Useful tips and guides for using the product
- Detailed images and videos that illustrate how to use the product
Start with Market-Based Priorities
Ok, managing content in a large authority site can lead to overwhelm. It can get crazy to be sure. This is because, unlike a small niche site, an authority site represents a collection of subsets of a large niche.
As for what to focus on specifically, that largely depends on your niche and what’s most popular in that market. However, some general tips to keep in mind include:
- Organize your content for easy navigation
- Focus on visitor needs and wants
- Tailor your content to be engaging and informative
- Create positive brand awareness
Focus on One Long Term Project at a Time
Whether you hire out or do it yourself, you can gain solid skills in several key areas. I recommend doing as much as you can on your own for this type of venture.
When you gain production experience, you’ll be able to create more internet properties and even work on other people’s projects. It’s the process that feels daunting at first, but over time, the benefits accumulate.
Build Your Brand Now and Profit Later
Just like with traditional real estate, the investment you make over time will become predictable. You may have heard of the Huffington Post. It’s a news website that was started by Arianna Huffington.
AOL purchased the site six years after it debuted for $315 million. The site was pulling in 25 million unique visitors every month at that point. There are plenty of less profitable examples, but I think you see the point.
Fail Often and Still Come Out a Winner
Build a high-performing website and, over time, it will pay you back handsomely. One of the best thing about this type of investment is that you can make mistakes along the way and as you adjust your strategy and learn from your mistakes, you eventually get it right.
Take the pain and hard lessons from your first project and perfect the process in other projects along the way. The reason I belabor the point about planning and market research is because I learned my lessons the hard way.
A Word About Profits and Perfection
If you’ve been following my series on building an authority niche site, this may just be a reminder with a few more details. If you haven’t gotten started after reading the series, it’s OK. Patience and perseverance will take practice.
The biggest obstacle to a successful authority site is rushing to make it profitable. Your website should not just be about selling products or advertising. That comes after you’re widely known for giving your audience useful information.
No One Cares If You Want to Make Money
The selling will come later, but initially, you’ll want to build content that attracts lots of targeted traffic. You may build an affiliate marketing site with plans to take it to profitability, then cash out. That’s great.
However, just like a real life marathon, you’ll need to go the distance before you cross that finish line. No one should expect all their planning and hard work to come off perfectly. It’s a fantasy.
Visitors only want to gratify their own needs. They’ll tell others about your site if their results prove useful and satisfying.
When you’ve spent a lot of time and energy creating a site that has natural authority, you’ll find that Google will respond favorably. Monitor traffic and pageviews. As you progress, it makes no sense to bring in CPA offers, Google AdSense or other affiliate offers until you have daily traffic volume.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best time to add monetization to your niche site will vary depending on the industry and your site’s current traffic and engagement levels. However, some tips on when you might want to monetize your site include:
1. When your site is generating consistent traffic and you’re able to convert high volumes of visitors into leads and sales, this is generally a good time to monetize your site.
2. When you’ve built a strong audience and can generate more than enough organic traffic, this is usually a good time to include ads, sponsorships, or other forms of paid content to your site.
3. After you’ve identified an area of your niche that’s underserved or has high potential for growth, this can be a good time to add paid products or services that focus on that area.
4. Whenever you feel confident that your site is ready for more complex monetization options — such as ad networks, ecommerce platforms, or premium membership sites — consider adding them.
As always, it’s important to contemplate all the options available before deciding about monetization. By doing so, you’ll be able to decide which will work best for your site and audience.
Connecting with People You Want to Reach
You can discover who your ideal client is by conducting market research or consulting with a seasoned marketing firm. The next step is to make sure your website appeals to and convert visitors into paying customers in your niche market. Spend some time studying other popular websites to become familiar with the procedure, such as outdoorgearlab.com.
Follow these key steps:
The first step is to identify your target market.
Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to figure out which keywords your website is targeting.
Connect with Google Trends to see how often people are searching for those keywords.
Subscribe to tools like SEMrush to see where your website is ranking for those keywords.
Try Google AdWords to target people who have similar interests as those in your niche.
Join freelance sites like Fiverr to find freelance writers who can help you target your website’s content to the right audience.
Implement Facebook advertising to reach out to people who live in your locality or who have similar interests.
Make it easy for your target customers to find and move around on your website. Focusing on the right target audience will be worth your time and effort in the end.
Conclusion
I hope you get started with your project or pick up where you left off. Start with a comprehensive marketing plan. Create an attractive, user-friendly website. Develop a strong brand identity for your online business.
Follow these steps in your checklist:
Make sure that your website is fully optimized for search engines.
Use a secure and encrypted connection.
Verify the accuracy of the information you provide on your website.
Use a verified SSL certificate to ensure the security of your website.
Make sure that your website is regularly scanned for malware and other viruses.
Spread your message using social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
And don’t forget to make the navigation easy to use and put clear calls to action on your site. Once you have a good foundation, you can figure out who you want to reach and start writing content for them. With consistent work, you’ll be well on your way to building an authority website that will help you achieve your goals.
Catch my ongoing series on building your online real estate investment. Sign up for a membership with Medium.com and subscribe to my feed for more in-depth training.
Read more on setting up an income generating authority website by subscribing to my feed. I cover marketing, writing, and content creation.
