Authority sites are the magic of the web.
They are YouTube.com, About.com, TechCrunch.com, Digg.com, and Technorati.com.
But they are also The Friday Traffic Report, Content Desk, Online Security Authority, CopyBlogger, ProBlogger, My Scrap n Craft, More4Kids, Early Signs of Pregnancy, Origination Club, MP4Soup, Simply Anti Aging, and many more niche authority sites.
Why Are These Sites Authority Sites?
Because they are built with the right priorities. Their visitors’ experience and loyalty is paramount. Nothing comes before a good user experience on [tag-tec]authority sites[/tag-tec] and that attracts loyal followings for each site above.
It’s not really anything ground shaking or something you even have to think about. The evidence is in our faces everytime we surf our favorite sites. You don’t have junk in your bookmarks. At leas not according to you!
Any you are a targeted visitor for a lot of sites on the web. You can tell if they care by the content and service they provide. You bookmark them or not based on your interest in them.
Traffic Shmaffic
Some sites attract less traffic than others, but authority sites with smaller daily hit counts have much higher visitor loyalty. Which means they attract and keep more paying customers pound for pound than sites with thousands of daily visitors.
Remember this…
As you seek more and more traffic for your site, it is the actions visitors take when they get to your site that matter. It is not a contest of who gets the most traffic. Traffic alone does nothing for the bottom line.
It is what your traffic does, buys, clicks, and subscribes to that matters.
And the only way to get the results a solid online business needs (sales, clicks, advertisers, subscribers, loyalty) is to treat visitors to the most delicious, irresistable content, products and services in your niche.
In short, you have to CARE.
So many sites are thrown up and marketed with absolutely no thought about what it is like to land on them from a visitor’s standpoint.
That is, other than getting them to click on ads or buy things outright, which a tiny percentage of people ever do.
The old trick is to build a site that appears to be what visitors in that niche want, get them there, and bore the tears out of them so that they are in a rush to escape. Usually through the paid advertising on the site like Adsense.
Google and the other engines have been onto this scam from the beginning and they do not rank those sites anymore.
Good.
Google has come as closer than any search engine to sniffing out whether the site owners actually care about their visitors’ experience!
Forget link popularity.
Care Popularity is what drives traffic. People link to sites that care. So link popularity is a by-product of giving a damn about visitor experience and loyalty.
Good rankings are a by-product of giving a damn about your visitors.
Your bottom line in 2007, more than ever before, is tied to visitor experience, good content, something of true value to offer BEFORE you ask people to buy anything, and trust.
The only exception to this rule is if you sell something everyone already wants and no one else can offer. Unless you are Sony trying to belch out millions of Playstation 3 units to keep up with rabid demand, forget about that goal for now and build authority sites.
You can be Sony when you have built up enough momentum and capital to go to that level. If that is even your goal.
Mine is to live the rest of my life on a beach and travel the world. I don’t have to sell 10 million Playstations to do that!