MY #1 ONLINE PROJECT

Why I’m so excited about about niche authority websites and how you could profit by creating your own

If I was to start a new online business from scratch, what would it be?

Well, I can answer this with total hand-on-heart honestly as right now I’m focusing on just one online project – and that’s creating a niche authority website.

What is an authority site and what does creating one involve?

First up, I would like to refer you back to last week’s email, in which we looked at content curation…

Curation is a fantastic tool to master alongside the creation of an authority site. Do so, and you’ll find content curation not only requires less writing than you would expect, but also very much makes it fun.

Authority sites are high-quality websites or blogs that are devoted to one specific niche.

The content on a site deemed an ‘authority’ should be held in high regard by people with influence in that niche.

The site should have relevant and useful content that is updated on a regular basis. That covers the basics.

If, when searching online, you’ve ever landed on an authority site, you were most probably glad that you did, because you found the information about the topic that you wanted, and you trusted that it was accurate information.

That’s what I want to achieve with my new website and that is what you’d be aiming for with your own authority site too.

As I touched upon just now, authority sites not only publish information that visitors can trust, they also curate other trustworthy information within a niche for their audience.

If you want to create an authority site, you will need source and/or create lots of accurate, trustworthy, detailed and valuable information and offer it for free to your reader.

It might not all be text. It doesn’t need to be all about SEO or keywords. Indeed, you can pretty much forget about that stuff. It’s just about the quality.

You’ll create or curate a variety of different forms of content to inform, instruct, inspire and to encourage interaction.

Essentially, you’ll be giving away your knowledge, freely. This will encourage the readers to trust you and value any information that you give them.

For your site to pass from just another site to an authority site it needs to:

• Be to the point… Choose a specific niche and target audience and don’t veer off course. You don’t want to make your authority site confusing. Know who it is for and what you are giving information about – your target audience will recognise the relevancy and respond!
• …but don’t be afraid of detail! All the content you put on your site should have a level of detail (I’m not talking length of content; only that it is not too general – you can be detailed in an infographic!). It should also be very accurate (double-check facts before publishing). The content should cover your topic in a more insightful way than a ‘superficial’ website.

Note on this: You know when you have something wrong with you, like, say, a sore thumb, and you Google it? You might go to six sites that have somehow found themselves up high on the rankings but where the information is pretty rubbish…

But one site will stand out as having all of the potential causes for your sore thumb; all of the relevant treatment options; maybe a questionnaire; and, if it’s a really great site, some personality about it too.

That’s the site you’ll stay on. That’s the site you’d revisit. ??You site should have many – perhaps even hundreds of pages (eventually) – of content related to your niche.

• Be up to date! Content needs to be updated on a regular basis. Don’t worry: you can always do a half-day creating and curating content and then drip feed it on to the site! But when you pick a niche you’re passionate about it’s quite possible you’ll very eagerly cover any news in that niche.

Curation tools that you can use on your phone can make this very easy and time-efficient to achieve. You could even keep your site up-to-date in the bath or on a morning commute.

• Entice and encourage interaction, participation and feedback. Your content should ask for commentary – indeed it should be created in a way to encourage it – and be open to comments from readers. You want it to provoke a response.

The feedback and participation you get from your audience when they comment on blogs, articles and other content on your site is very important to move you to authority status.

• Rank high with search engines. Of course, at first, your authority site won’t ‘do well’ with Google, but doing all of the above will eventually do the job to move your site up high enough on (the right) people’s search results to be considered by others to be an authority on your given topic.

WordPress is the simplest tool to use to create a site from scratch. But we won’t go too much in to the technical bits this week. (If you’d like me to cover simple WordPress site creation in next week’s issue, please let me know!) ??As I said at the start, this is the project I am focusing my energy on right now…

My own authority site is still lurking in the shadows of Google as I preen my site and get my first content at the level I’d like it to be when I ‘unveil’ it to the world.

If anyone asked me what business to start right now, this is the answer I’d give.

Coupled with curation, this is a long-term, highly satisfying, back-to-basics online venture that, with the right focus (and with the stripping away of all the rubbish from ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ about fads and crazes and shortcuts that rarely ever work), will achieve for you everything you wanted when you signed up to read Internet Income Detective…

That’s about it for this week, but please let me know what you think about the idea of creating an authority site.

Have an amazing week.