| Authority Site vs List Building - Which Is Best, Part I |
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What are the main differences between an authority site and list building as internet marketing strategies? Read this article to find out which is best for you!
What should you do, make an authority site or create content that sends your traffic to squeeze pages so you can build a list? Can you do both at the same time? What are the pros and cons of each? Let's look at these two philosophies of getting web traffic and turning it into money. Authority sites An authority site is a site that focuses on a certain niche, has lots and lots of pages of content about various keyword phrases in that niche, and depends mainly on organic search traffic to be seen. There are a ton of great authority sites out there. Let's talk about some examples. Take the "quit smoking" niche. The CDC has a great site devoted to helping people quit smoking. There you'll find lots of articles about the dangers of smoking, studies about smoking that were done by the Surgeon General, and also lots and lots of material about how to quit smoking. The CDC doesn't run this site as a commercial money maker. They run this site to spread the gospel about the dangers of smoking and also about quitting smoking. You can run an authority site as a commercial site. Google "diabetes", you'll find several sites devoted to diabetes. Take a look at a few of them, and I'm sure you'll find a few that are authority, commercial sites. Some of these are used as platforms to sell affiliate products, some make their money through AdSense. Some do both and more. From a marketing point of view, authority sites are a long-tail marketing play. All those keyword focused pages are built around relatively small sub-niches within the niche. The idea is this: if someone is searching for a relatively obscure, narrowly focused keyword phrase, they have a good chance of landing on your site, if you have a page optimized for that very phrase. Once there, they do something that makes you money. I own a number of these authority sites in various niches. I like them. They're like owning rental property I don't have to think about or manage. They make $50, $100, $500 a month and I don't even have to touch them ever, if I don't want to. This is a very passive way of making money! I'm not a very passive person! We're going to explore list building as an alternative to authority sites in Part II of this series. Part II talks about list building, why it's superior, and how you can benefit from it. |