I am going to share a big time secret today. It is the common thread that runs through every single successful, high traffic business on the web.
You already know the secret just by being on the web. It’s one of those truths just under the surface which is available to us at all times but rarely noticed.
This secret will change your business into something more if you allow it to sink in and apply what it has to teach you.
After I expose it, most people will ignore it. Or appreciate it, but not take action.
Others will blow it off as too simple an answer to account for successful, profitable authority site building and think, therefore, there must be far more to it than I am saying.
I can assure you that the core component of any success you have online from this day forward is in this post and it is complete in its description.
What An Authority Site Isn’t
First I will tell you which sites never make it to long term, meaningful success by any measure.
Those are the blogs people throw up either with no intent to monetize or bring attention to them, or, more common, sites people use to scam the entire internet community.
Notice I didn’t say “scam the search engines” or “scam visitors into clicking ads with crap content and SEO tricks.”
The sites I am talking about damage the entire internet experience for millions of people. They give the web a bad name. They don’t just affect search engines and they don’t just affect an isolated group of surfers. They affect the entire web.
These are sites people set up just to drill for money and that have no passion. No substance. No meaning in and of themselves and no reason beyond sucking in traffic for a short while to suck money out of the pockets of their visitors for nothing in return.
That last one might make some people perk up and go “I’d like to own a site like that!”
No. You wouldn’t.
Because sites like that are only built and profited from for awhile by criminal masterminds. Technical wizards who have forgotten more technical expertise than 100 average marketers and coders will ever compile in their lifetimes.
After they have used up the techniques they develop, a marketer will come along and say, inevitably, “The party’s not over friend. You still have a lot of money to make off of what you’ve developed. We will package this thing and sell it and no one will ever know you aren’t even using it yourself anymore because it is light years ahead of what everyone else is doing or aware of right now.”
He will go on to say that the first order of business is to get a couple of people to squeeze some more money out of the technique so they can have some social proof. Yes, the search engines are already gearing up for combating your technique, but by the time they catch on completely, a couple of people will have gotten it to work and they will tell the rest of the web about it.
“And that,” he’ll say, “that is all we need to make another million out of this.”
The sites I am talking about are barely legal phishing sites. No one can go to jail for building them, but they steal from people and businesses nonetheless.
They go by names like scraper sites, blog farms, directory sites, link farms, and automated content sites (a misnomer of grand proportions).
No, you don’t want to own one of these sites because they have no future. Most have no present. They were done being effective a year ago and are now, and only now, being sold to the gullible public as miracle money makers.
There are a lot of things that are not technically illegal in this world. But the last time I checked my conscience, being legal or illegal doesn’t make a thing ethically right or wrong.
Somewhere along the line, people with decent parents learned this early in life.
The Kind of Site You Must Own
If you are in online business for the right reasons, one of your goals is long-term viability and growth in whatever you sell. Be it content, affiliate products, or your own products and services.
The big secret that is shared by every successful site on the web, including and even more so for blogs, is visitor value.
Value doesn’t just mean life-saving information or tools. It also means entertaining, fun, funny, serious, educational, or useful.
Visitors value all kinds of things on the web but the bottom line is they have to feel as though they just found a site they want to bookmark and come back to or share with friends.
People will argue this point to death, but remember the context of my argument. I am talking about sites that have a ton of new and repeat traffic, that are very profitable, and that can be sold for a lot of money once they reach critical mass.
Given that definition, one cannot argue that “I am just going to rape and pillage for a few thousand bucks until this party ends and damn the consequences for the poor souls who get sucked in and sucked dry by my actions. This is business!”
No. That’s not business. It’s wrong, short-sighted, and immature to set up sites that benefit no one but yourself. Sites that legally steal from everyone who uses the internet. They steal bandwidth, traffic, money from advertisers, and precious time from people who have not a lot of it.
In the real world, companies like Enron followed the same logic and paid the consequences.
Longevity and profitability come from someone driving a site with passion to serve up the best content, product or service.
Caring whether people actually get something out of what you create is the secret to building a profitable business. If don’t care, or worse, don’t even know what’s on the page, why should your visitors and customers?
Delivering true value and/or high quality service or experience is the secret behind the most successful businesses on the web. It is the one thing they all have in common. They bring content, utility, entertainment, products, or services to a group of people large enough to make the business profitable and stable.
Everything else (and I mean everything else) is just a short term gain. Usually at someone else’s expense.
Provide your visitors with true value, cool factor, usability…something remarkable no one else is providing. Go the extra mile in some way such as giving away something others charge for or doing something no one else is willing to do in a market where that effort will be appreciated in visits and dollars, and you will succeed.
There are many business models you can tackle online, but you won’t succeed with any of them without a passion for the subject or service.
A passion which will drive you to work hard and provide something of real value to a target market willing, in some way, to pay you in return.
You can buy marketing courses. You can buy established businesses. But you cannot buy passion. And you cannot buy your way to respect, authority, or profits.
If you apply this lesson to your current business you might find that you need another course of action. If you find that you are only into something for the promise of riches without any passion for what you are doing, you will not succeed.
I can say this with such absolute confidence because I have watched hundreds of clients over the years in both camps come and go. The bigger camp, as you’ve probably guessed, is the camp who thinks the world owes them something that it doesn’t.
They are no longer with us. They are back at their jobs hoping someday someone will just hand them a “secret” to making money without any responsibility, learning, ethics, work, or passion involved.
I’m a product of the much smaller camp. I have discovered you really can be rewarded handsomely for hard work, dedication, and a passion for what you do.
I have never met a successful person in life, business, love, or happiness who is lacking in passion for what they do.