I came across this website that I thought was interesting. It sort of spoke to me as I began my quest to build something more than a mediocre click for cash site. I downloaded the free ebook called The Zero Hour Workweek. It’s your typical life coaching, you can do it, your life is better than 9 to 5, find yourself, zen, that you run across from those that have made the transition to working in the ether rather than dwelling in cubeland. There are some good thoughts and nice quotes that can give you a jolt from your reality, until you realize you still do not have a knowledge base that you think anyone would care anything about.
The author laid out some interesting suggestions that he uses when he is trying to write a blog post:
• Is this something that people would want to share with others?
• Are people desperate to know more about this? Or is everyone else already talking about it?
• If everyone else is talking about it, can I offer a unique or unconventional angle?
• Is anything about this contrarian, uncommon, or counterintuitive (my core writing themes)?
• Does it align with and build upon my core message?
And in reading these points I came to realize how difficult creating a website that anyone wants to visit is. Okay we all know the current get rich today method of building shitty little niche sites and hoping they are so freaking ugly and uninteresting that people will click the hell out. I get it. We hope to build a thousand of these little money makers and retire to our island with our fleet of Ferrari’s. Cool.
What I am referring to is really in conjunction with my efforts to elevate myself out of mediocrity and into my lofty expectations of building a decent interweb site. Regardless if there are riches to be had. I can pretty much say with honesty that virtually none of my niche sites fulfill even one of those bullet points. And as such I believe that they are all in danger of being flushed into the abyss by Google.
These points above are exactly what I have been ignoring for years. We all know they exist. Every time we build a website these points were the nagging that was your conscious. We all know that we mostly sling shit on the web. Admit it man. You know you do. We all do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be paying $100/month for some blog network to get backlinks. Or playing whatever blackhat games we have to to get our latest window treatment masterpiece ranked in Google. Unsustainable but money keeps flowing.
I’ve been building my opus. But as I read these bullet points I feel like maybe I am already failing. Look at those points. Is this something people would want to share with other people? I don’t think so. I haven’t really laid out a reason for anyone to brag about the site. It’s…boring. Are people desperate to know more about this? I don’t think desperation is the operative word. Is everyone else already talking about it? Not really. The topic is actually too general. But here is the kicker: Can I offer a unique or unconventional angle? Maybe, but I haven’t figured out what that is. And it may be that I do not have the resources to pull it off.
I am not interested in continued mediocrity. So far it feels like a fraud. I cannot find my voice. I visited some competing websites and felt like I’d rather have a visitor go to their website than mine. Like I said before the competition is just getting more intense.
I’m not trying to be discouraging. I’m just trying to figure out how to do this correctly. I do not want to be a copycat. I want to be original. Real. Unfortunately nothing that I am doing so far qualifies as originality. Sure I am writing my own shit but it reads forced. In my zeal to get a site off the ground I have basically created a really well-written niche site that is boring as shit. I have reverted back to niche site drudgery. How did this happen?
I love my topic but I can’t figure out a way to pull in people better than what is already out there. While I have been building my site I knew something was wrong. It took reading “can I offer a unique or unconventional angle” to really understand my problem. I don’t have any interest in building a website that is the same as any other. I can’t figure out that angle…yet. I think that if I am going to build an “authority site” it has to have the potential to be different.
Lost Ball is an unconventional site. I don’t know of any other that is doing what I do here. Whether good or bad it is pretty damn original. There are people interested in what I write. People talk about it (links). Maybe it could be more. I just don’t know how to, or if, I would want to leverage this higher. But I do know that this site is the standard to which all other “authority sites” I build have to meet or exceed. I can tell you right now the direction my other efforts are going fails miserably.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the Zero Hour Work week:
If I’m not being remarkable, I’m contributing to the noise.
Dude, I want to be remarkable.
{ 43 comments… read them below or add one }
nice post. for building authority sites, typically i start out with a list of topics i enjoy talking about (or googling). whether it’s fashion/makeup tutorials on youtube or building websites.
then i use the keyword academy methods to search for possible green-ish keywords and check out the competition. (being sure to include a bunch of long-tails)
after using the key academy spreadsheet and seeing my potential profits, i search for cool sounding keyword rich domains.
i’m far from an expert or living the dot com lifestyle, but my traffic is growing everyday. and even bigger than that, i wake up every morning with those authority sites on my mind. thinking of new topics, new tutorials and new ideas to make it better!
as for the money boring making niche domains i bought? i can’t even muster up enough enthusiasm to create an account for them on my hostgator reseller account.
a true waste of 9.45+ …
arsha
Very very well written post, I am impressed. And I can totally relate to it. Boils down to we want to do something worth doing. But coming up with that thing we can be 100% passionate on and 100% proud of putting our time in to, that be the bitch. Here is me keeping my fingers crossed you find that idea, something to add to the great stuff you are putting up on this site.
Splork,
Do you need a slap upside your head? Dude, this is THE site anyone with any damn sense reads immediately when you post to this blog.
All of your product review posts this year have been laugh out loud funny and right on target. I think you’re trying to hard to deny one of your real gifts — Humor.
When I come to this blog, I know exactly what I’m going to get and I for one love it.
I find myself sharing and using your famous splorkisms with my husband which totally cracks him up.
This blog is Comic Relief during a time when so many folks need a real laugh and escape from all of the crap going on in the real world.
Your voice and perspective are truly unique.
Please believe it!
Thanks for reading Dave.
Check out Problogger.com. I hear there is a great forum over there that will teach you how to be a better blogger.
Now you want to be famous and have social traffic because your material is so original? Sheesh. What’s wrong with you dude?
Seems like you are going backwards quickly.
You have the formula down to do just exactly that.This site has all of that qualities ,and is on of the few Make Money Online sites I actually enjoy reading.
Just keep doing the same
Hi Sam. I think you missed the point.
Thanks Martin. Just going to keep plugging away and see what happens. This site could be a model I suppose if I could re-create it in another niche. I can’t think of too many topics like politics and IM that gets people stirred up.
It’s like this decision of mine to concentrate efforts on an “authority site”. I’ve already alienated half the readers just by suggesting that I want to do something other than sling niche sites day by day. That I must be a complete dick to think that building a social site or whatever you want to call it is worthwhile. Really? People spend thousands of words on blogs to tell people not to build ProBlogger sites yet they are in effect writing the same type of blog in telling people what not to do. Maybe readership is a bad thing monetarily. It certainly doesn’t pay the bills here. But then again everybody’s model is for creating niche sites for Adsense. Screw that. Build a site that people like and trust and you might be able to sell products which I greatly prefer over a cash for clicks model.
I’ve done enough site spamming for a while. I want to see if I can create a site that follows the bullet points laid out above. There are still plenty of opportunities to spam the web with mediocrity which I will probably outsource.
Thanks Sunshine. That’s nice of you to say. Though I think any humor I may have comes from sarcasm and negativity which seems to bum people out to some extent as well.
I get what you’re saying. When one of my niche sites first started getting over a thousand visitors per month, I thought, “Wow. Thousands of people from all over the world are reading what I’ve written.” I realized I had an amazing tool at my disposal.
But how was I using it? Given the chance to say whatever I wanted to thousands of people, I decided to tell them about a product that I hardly even cared about. Sure, some of the information I provided was helpful if someone was in the market for that product, but it wasn’t the message I wanted to share.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with niche sites or making money by displaying ads and selling products. I just think the internet also has a higher potential.
I agree Russell. I talk out of both sides of my mouth. I’m more than happy to supply clicks for people on non-useful sites. But I also realize that you probably should create properties that provide something useful as well. We can all do both. I hope to do both because at the end of the day the site that is useful is the one that will be safe from any purging that may happen by free search entities.
Dude, read Sunshine’s comments again.
Call it what you will – humor, sarcasm, negativity, whatever. The point is it is ENGAGING. You bring flavor to the site.
And I would give my left nut to have an engaging writing style like you.
If I had your talent I would start a few blog type sites (sure build it up to authority sites) where your personality comes through, because in the end that is your USP. Build these sites in areas you care about and I guarantee you will build up a massive following.
It will take time and will probably be painful in the beginning, but in a couple of years from now you can have thousands of people in each niche hanging from your every word
Thanks John. Appreciate the comments.
Are you having an on line crisis? lol
First off, you have to recognize that the internet is 90% shit. Your a smart guy and you will think of a way to rise above the shit pile and offer something of value.
The frustrating thing is it will take time, it might even take 3 to 4 years, so if you set your goals long term and plug away it will be more rewarding.
Just start your authority project, let it take its natural twist and turns, learn from it, improve upon it and it will work out.
99% of the time when an entrepreneur (online or off) begins his journey he thinks he knows where he is going but rarely does it work out as planned. The world is too dynamic, opportunities come and go quickly. What seperates the winners from the losers is being there when it matters.
So start your thing and be there when it matters.
You will see
Bk
Hey BK. Not at all. You make some great points but the thing is I am never in a crisis. Not with IM anyway. I get lazy before I get in a crisis. I make the mistake of writing my thoughts and ideas for the 7 readers of this blog to critique, analyze, laugh at, admire or ridicule. Nothing is ever as dire as I write them out to be nor are they as great as I may allude to other times. I am simply like most people trying to make a buck online with a thousand thoughts and ideas swirling through my head. I just choose to share and it seems like I am losing my mind.
After watching you for several months (I go primarily for entertainment value above all else, on the web, TV, whatever), I was waiting for you to have the “noise” revelation. Everybody auto-generating 10000 web pages a day is helping nobody else, and probably not themselves. It’s an upstream fight with Google always intent on filtering you away.
Have you considered finding a REAL world business, that could make an absolute killing on the Internet – and offering to be their entire IM Team, for free? Only getting paid on commission?
Perhaps something like that, real-world products and services sold, for one of the world’s millions of cyber-blind companies who COULD make a killing online, could be your ultimate awakening and victory.
The infinite skills you’ve got could be put to work in a way that would knock even your own socks off, not to mention the socks of the companies you could be working for.
Growing pains suck big time doesn’t it?
Splork,
I have an authority site on a fairly interesting topic. I get over 50,000 page views a month. I rank first page or first line in Google for a lot of my keywords.
This is a site about my hobby. It took me a year to get the format and the structure straight, then I started getting good rankings.
Pick a topic you like — mountain biking? Killer road tours? and put it together. You’ve done it with that tour of the three states you did the other month; that was damned interesting and made me feel I was there and hurting with you.
Sunshine is right, you have a writing style and personality that make people want to read what you’ve written.
If you want to build an authority site, do it and see what happens. It isn’t hard to build one, but it is hard to cut the first page of code. lol.
Cheers,
Barry
How many successful blogs are really worth a shit anyway? Every time you start to feel inadequate, just visit Shoemoney and remind yourself that that illiterate spammer has a top 5000 website.
Or visit the front page of Digg to see the kind of crap that floats to the top of the web toilet bowl. How many writers on the entire internet do you really look forward to reading on a regular basis? I have about five, personally.
The formula for a successful social blog is pretty simple in concept, really hard in execution. Pick a subject, write every freaking day, link like a good guy to other blogs in the field without expecting anything in return, be helpful to your commenters, be a class act, offer something unique, if possible. Use a confident, authoritative voice (people want to be told what to think).
Pick a subject that you’re actually passionate about or you’ll burn out on posting every day – that’s the hard part. CalculatedRisk is the most read financial blog in the world. I remember back in 2004-2005, he was one of maybe 30 regular posters on a Silicon Investor message board thread I used to frequent.
He had a blogger blog, but nobody had heard of blogs back then. He wasn’t on the board to promote his blog, he was there because he was interested in the conversation.
He started making multiple posts on his blog every day he wasn’t on vacation. He didn’t do it for the money (retired + well off), he was just interested in the subject, and I suppose liked the ego stroke. Now he has 30,000 daily readers and there’s not a nicer guy around.
He is not remotely the most interesting financial blogger around, but is the most popular because he throws out content every day, is courteous to a fault, and never offends anyone. His unique selling point is that he make his own economic data charts that can’t be found anywhere else.
My thought would be to build that other site as best you can, and improve on it over time. Get your foot in the door so to speak.
I could be wrong though. But it just seems to me that you don’t necessarily have to be the top of the heap right out of the gate.
Hey Scott. Yea I’ve thought about that but the irony is that I can’t/won’t market or sell myself. I have this malfunction that I don’t want to disappoint someone or embarrass myself that I don’t take a risk at failure when someone else is holding the bag. Meaning I have no problem failing or succeeding on my own terms but when someone else is counting on me because of expectations they may have of me then I worry about not meeting them. I’m confident in myself for me. Just not for someone else. Hope that makes sense. But I realize how stupid that sounds.
Hey Denise. Pretty funny. Yea you could say that.
Barry starting out if difficult with an authority site because for the first few weeks or months it’s a struggle to find your voice. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll find mine on any topic. It just takes keeping interested long enough to find it.
By the way, I did three other rides since 3 State 3 Mountain. Each one with it’s own pain. I did Six Gap Century in the Georgia Mnts, Cherohala Challenge in east TN and H.O.T. 100 locally. Have a read if you like.
JDev. You’re right of course. I think Digg is mostly useless btw. I have about 5 I look forward to reading as well. But yea, you need to find that uniqueness or you’re simply noise and a hoping for a click for cash. I’d like to have a few that are not made for adsense and that are interesting and I can have fun writing.
Blogging has been described thus: “Never before have so many said so much that means so little to so few.”
True . Creating that one good blog that resonates with a large number of folks is oddly very satisfying. whether you are pissing them off or entertaining or educating. Having people visit is kind of cool but man does it time, effort and patience. And even then you may never succeed.
Is Political Lipskip your blog? I was thinking of starting one with a friend but there are thousands out there. My friend is pretty much a professional in the realm of politics but doesn’t do the Internet so I thought I might set something up and try to ride his coat tails a bit. Don’t know whether it is worth my time though other than to maybe someday have an authority site.
Hey Sam. Yea it is. I found politics to be incredibly difficult to write about. Political opinions are not something people seem to give much of a shit about. And unless you are a badass like Gateway Pundit having visitors and monetizing it is kinda difficult. Like mentioned above I never found my angle or uniqueness with that website.
On the other hand, with politics you can damn sure write and argue some awesome linkbait. But you better be prepared to get hammered by those that want you to think like they do. It’s terribly caustic.
Thanks for that Splork. Those were very good points, we’ve always known that for a site to last it has to have something special, but those pointers put it directly into a bullet list, so thanks!
First of all, avoid all that new age “blog your passion to your tribe” mumbo-jumbo. It’s as much BS as something my Blog Content Wizard creates. Sometimes I think the Wiz actually makes more sense than they do.
Like I’ve said before, put yourself in the position of being a publisher or producer, not a writer, musician or actor. You may not be the popular ‘face’ but you’ll be the one making the real money.
Thanks for reading Brawnydt.
Good point Frank. Though I’m not so quick to dismiss what the artist creates anymore because Google has their back.
But my main point is that if I personally am going to create a so-called “authority site”, one which I define as something that I will be interested in writing, creating videos for, etc., then I need to at least like the topic. In that instance I will seek to do what I love. I seriously doubt anyone outside of the *groan* tribe will give two shits about the topic. In that regard I will continue to spread niche crap far and wide to snare as many people as possible into my website where I hope to 1) have them click, and/or 2) provide them with the info they seek in the form of an affiliate offer/product.
At this point I am sick of, and bored of, creating, maintaining and promoting producer sites.
BTW- I will say I am pleasantly surprised at how well Hubpages is doing. Writing 600 words and just leaving it creates a nice little extremely low maintenance income. Like most crap efforts on the web it won’t last long but it sure gives me ideas for building even bigger crap sites and I’ll take the money it’s spewing in the mean time. Ben suggested on his SEO site that he thinks it is falling out of favor (again) by Google. I’m not so sure.
Have you ever visited Frank Kern’s “blog”? (masscontrolsite.com/blog/) I’m not holding Frank up as an exemplar of outstanding blogging (or anything else for that matter), but his blog site violates just about every rule of “authority blogging” I’ve ever seen, like post a lot, create pillar posts, etc., etc., and he reportedly has tens of thousands of subscribers.
Yea his money is in his list. And his relationship with other guberus
Seriously Splorck!
Blogs are for poor people, if you wrote the best blog in the world about a niche topic and had 10,000 readers a day that wouldn’t mean much to your bottom line.
Monetizing that shit is hard work and frankly making $2000 per month from a blog is more work than I care to put into it.
Push yourself up the chain. Create something! I don’t mean some useful Clickbank piece of junk, create something valuable that REALLY satisfies a need. Invest some money into testing the concept then work your butt of promoting it.
In my opinion that is the easiest and most viable way to build a REAL business on the net.
Whatever you decide to to bro, good luck with it and ill be tunign in regardless
No doubt. I just don’t know what to create. Unfortunately I’m not creative that way it seems.
Hey Splork, visit the TKA forum, search for Fraser and read his “advanced method” thread. It will make you feel better.
Hi Splork,
I’ma bit late commenting here – I’m on a prolongued trip abroad right now. But I have to comment here.
This post and the comments show just how you can stir up interest and conversation. And that’s with only 7 regular readers (what happened to the other 4 or 5?).
Nothing much to add except that yours is the blog I recommend first to anyone who is thinking about MMO. and I’m sure others do too.
Now if you can do that with another subject, and then build on that, your dilemmas are solved.
You don’t appear to care that much how many people read lost ball, but with an authority site you want to promote, that’s the only thing you have to get over – caring whether people read you or not – whatever you say in your posts.
The only thing I would be concerned about is the structure of your new site – do you want a blog on the domain or a website with a blog in a directory? Thinking about resource use when the site gets lots of hits, etc.
That’s the starting point – the rest will develop by itself.
Good luck
Thanks Zania. Have fun on your trip. Too cool.
Hey Amanda. Couldn’t find the thread you were referring to but I came across many of his posts. He thinks like I do I guess but I still feel the need to maintain and build some niche sites. Like Ben mentioned on one of the threads spend 60% of your time on authority sites and the rest getting links to well-deserving niche sites.
Funny how people are bobbing and weaving from tactic to tactic. In 6 months people will be back to throwing up micro niche sites again and will have abandoned their authority site(s) because they weren’t getting traffic/money.
People think I’d lost my mind because I suggested that building a couple authority sites might be worthwhile. Other people start speaking up on the benefits of starting one, having one, and it’s genius. Interesting place I find myself.
Really? If you’re interested you can email me and I’ll send you the link. It’s really worth reading. It got me excited about building up my authority sites again and gave me a much-needed confidence boost. His approach reminds me of Griz and can easily be applied to niche sites too (just bigger ones). I don’t think I’ll ever want to touch a “microsite” again.
I am really into making money online and have made a blog about the different ways to make money online, but I really need SEO help!