How to create an authority site for passive income

This a long post about how to go about creating an authority site. It comes from an email that I have sent to my 'students' learning how to do internet marketing. I thought it would be useful to produce that here:

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As you guys know, Google undertook some serious cleanup for the past few weeks. I have already told you guys how to position your blogs to be sustainable in the long run. I am going to summarise this in this email as well as to rant a bit of other stuff, so do stay with me for a while.

One of the thing about making money online is about commitment. It is all about doing CONSISTENT work for the first few months before seeing any results but they will come. To show you evidence, here are the adsense earning trends of my fellow marketers. As you noticed, the shape is all the same although the amount earned can be different i.e. a flat line for the first few months and a sudden jump in earnings. This is because age plays an important factor in the ranking. All the good work done in the first few months is just to convince Google that your site is genuine. Once Google trust, they will suddenly release your content into the SERP, resulting in a jump in your traffic and money.

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Hopefully, these will help you set the right expectations. Nothing good in this world comes easily and it is the same with passive income. You need to put in the work first before seeing any result. I had quite a number of ‘students’ in the past and 95 % of them failed because they didn’t really commit. Sure, verbally they will say they are ‘in’ but action wise, you know they are not committed. By commitment, I mean do mean commitment. The kind shown by sportsman who want to win medals, who trains everyday rain or shine. That is commitment. Not the type where “oh, I need to go out with my friends today; oh, I need to do XXX”. All these are excuses.

One way to commit is to set targets. A lot of my students didn’t. They work as and when they like and whenever I gave them a push. So for you guys to really succeed like me, you need concrete targets. These targets should not be in the form of earnings or rankings or traffic, they should be in terms of work. More specifically, they should be in the form of articles produced per day, per week or per month.

You might say this is easy for me as I have been through this already. Fair comment. So, to work along with you guys, I am setting myself a new challenge and target. For the next 2 months, I am going to master Amazon. Currently, my Amazon earnings are pitiful as they range from 20 cents to 20 dollars a month. I don’t know how to do this properly but I am going to take these 2 months to try. For this experiment, I going to use 2 new sites and create content on them that targets the grilling and toy niches respectively. My target is terms of workload for May and June is this:

- 50 articles on 1 site with each article focusing on reviewing one specific model and brand

- 50 backlinks to each article

That means a total of 200 article within 2 months. I am going to throw these out and see what happens in July. In the meantime, I will not check my stats or ranking or traffic. The only thing I will be checking is the work I have done.

I hope you can commit yourself to some target along with me. I suggest you focus on one site and create 100 articles for it within these 2 months: 50 to be posted on your site and 50 to be used for backlinks. 100 articles within 2 months means an average of 1.6 articles per day, very doable if you commit.

Guys, this is a great time to start. A new month is coming and that is good to start something new. With the Amazon experiment, I am now on the same footing as you. I will be working on the new site as well and I am will figuring out how to do things. If I can try something new, I am sure you guys can. Remember, I am still be doing work on my Adsense sites even when doing this experiment so my personal workload will be much much heavier.

Ok, as a recap on how to create an authority site, here are the basic things you need to be aware of:

1) Pick a wider niche that obeys the same principles:

a.Competition: PR3s and below in the Google search result page. PR4 is ok if the main keyword didn’t appear in the heading of the search result


b.Potential: I would recommend more than 500USD to worth the effort, even 1,000USD.

Notice that I didn’t say pick keywords, I say pick a niche. A niche can have lots of keywords. When calculating the potential of a niche, you need to sum up all the profit potential of all the keywords within the niche. For example, if I am picking the niche “ rain boots”, I would sum the profit potential of not only the keyword “rain boots” but for all related keywords such as “women rain boots”, “rain boots for kids”, “red rain boots” etc. So, a keyword itself might not give you 500USD but the summation of all the related keywords in a niche can easily hit that target.


2) Write 50 articles for your site:


a. Each article should target a long tail. I have sent you guys some info about how to do that yesterday. Read that again to understand what is long tail keywords. In the beginning, your site will only attract long tail keyword searches and the more you have, the more traffic you will gain in the short run. Once you are ranking of many long tail keywords, your main keyword will start to appear.


b. Your long tail keyword must appear in the article title. However, do not make it spammy by including just the long tail keyword. In the past you can do that but with the new changes, you will want a post title that appears natural and yet contains your keyword. For example, if you are targeting ‘yellow rain boots’ in an article, you should use titles like “best looking yellow rain boots”, “where to find the cheapest yellow rain boots” etc.

3) Write another 50 articles for backlinks:

a. Nothing much to say except that each article should target the backlink to one of your articles that you have written for your site. The good thing is I have a backlink resource you guys can use. When I started by myself, I need to literally beg for these backlink resources.

4) Enforce what Google already recognizes you for:

a. By the third or fourth week, you should start to see some traffic if you have been diligent and have put up more than 15 articles in your site. Use analytics software like StatCounter to monitor what keywords are bringing you these traffic. For example, you might find that ‘green rain boots’ is giving you traffic even though your article was about ‘yellow rain boots’. You just happen to mention the word ‘green’ in the article and got ranked because of that. If the traffic is good for this keyword, you might want to write a new article that just targets ‘green rain boots’.

If you finish these within 2 months, I can safely say you will have your first click by July. However, the full effects will come only in September or even October when the site has aged and there will be a sudden jump in your earnings. If you do have your first click in July, I think that will motivate you enough to continue what you are doing and you should have a good passive stream in the future. The tough part is always the beginning.

So, how badly do you want this? Take a moment and think for yourself. If you are not willing to do the work above, I suggest you stop now. Seriously. No point wasting your time as you wouldn’t get anywhere with half hearted attempts anyway. I have seen this happen to my old students so many times so I don’t want it to happen to you.

Are you in or out?

Posted in: authority site,seo tips