How to Make Money with an “Authority” Blog

This is a guest post by Brian Garvin, a commenter here on OutOfYourRut.com. He runs an online business so I asked him to write a post describing what it is he’s doing to make that happen.

If you’ve worked in the Brick & Mortar world for any length of time, chances are you’ve picked up a skill that could be applied to the internet to start your own blog. Basically an Authority Blog is a large, content based blog lots of other bloggers and the Internet Community at large visit and respect as one of the larger blogs in that particular niche.

Most people think of Authority Blogs as being run by just large companies, but that’s not the truth. In fact many single people are running some of the largest Authority Blogs in some of the most competitive industries, such as Internet Marketing, Real Estate, Forex, Health & Wellness and Dating. So the main question to be asked is if building this type of blog is right for you. We’re gonna go over a list of questions you should answer. Answering the questions below will determine if setting up a blog is right for you.

Do You Enjoy Writing Unique Content?

If you’re considering starting an Authority Blog, you will be writing lots of blog posts and articles. If you are already an expert in a particular area this will make things much easier for you. Blog posts can be any length, usually the longer the better since Search Engines love unique content, but should at least be 150 words when possible. You will want to write articles and use what they call the author biography to point relevant anchor text links back to your blog. You will want to submit articles you write to the major article directories such as Ezine Articles, Go Articles and Articles Base.

However if you don’t like writing, you can outsource all your content but it could end up being pricey. Articles typically run $6.00 to $15.00 each depending on the length and the quality of the article. Blog posts can usually be outsourced for $3.00 to $5.00 each. We’ve used a company called Need An Article for many of our ghost written articles for almost 3 years now and have had major success with them. The beautiful thing about starting a blog is you can do it almost totally broke as long as you write all the content yourself. It will usually take from 500-1000 blog posts before you site receives any decent traffic.

How Do You Monetize Your Blog?

I assume you’ll be spending lots of time and/or money building a massive blog so you can earn an income with it. So you’ll need to decide now how you’ll be monetizing it.

• You can earn money each time someone clicks your ads with companies like Google Adsense or Chitika.
• You should also offer a free PDF download that offers good solid information in return for them subscribing to your email newsletter.
• You can start promoting affiliate programs on the backend and start making sales this way via automated follow-up messages.

What we do on our Total Health At Home blog is write small 300 word reviews on products inside the health niche. Then we send them to affiliate programs related to popular products within the health niche. Many of our terms rank well in the search engines, so when people click through the Google listings to our site and review the product, and they click through and actually buy the product, we earn a commission on each sale we make. Sometimes the commissions can be as low as 25 cents, but we have products we earn over $160.00 per sale for.

How Much You Can Expect to Earn

One common belief when creating a large niche blog is that you’ll throw up 10-20 pages and the income will pour in and you can just take your long vacation that you’ve been planning. Sorry but it doesn’t quite work this way. I’ve been spending 8-12 hours per day on our blog for 2 months and in the last 30 days we made close to $120.00. This doesn’t sound like much, but assuming the same growth rate and assuming I put in the same amount of work each month we could easily be at $1,450 per month within a year at this rate. And to be honest I feel very lucky to earn this much this quick.

As a general rule I wouldn’t expect to see much of anything for 6-9 months as far as monetary returns go. First you need to get your pages up and then you need to get backlinks to those pages. Then you need to get more than your competitors for each page you want to rank on to expect a top 10 search result. So in summary, getting your posts up is only 50% of the battle; the other 50% is getting backlinks to those posts.

How Do I Get Backlinks to My Blog?

The great news is there are plenty of “white-hat”, or ethical ways to get backlinks to your blog posts. You can write articles and submit them to the major article archives as I mentioned earlier. I’ve found that posting comments on blogs is probably the best way to pass on Page Rank and help you rank for your posts. Keep in mind when you write comments on other blogs, that Page Rank is borrowed and not owned by you.

To maximize your chances of your comment staying on the owners blog, write relevant content based on what the blog post is about. This way if the blog owner decides to “clean house” and delete all the spammy posts, yours won’t get trashed right along with them. Another thing you can do is send out an occasional Press Release.

The income strategy for my health blog will be to pick out 3 super competitive keyword terms and try to rank on these over the next 2-3 years, the type that get 30,000 or more visitors per day. Then I’m going to be working on about 30 medium competition keywords, the kind that will make me about $200 per month each when I rank on them. Then the site will have hundreds of other “long-tail” keywords. These won’t make much income per page but will typically be very easy to get top rankings on.

I use a tool called Market Samurai not only for all my keyword research, but to find all the blogs I need to post on. It took me a while to get the hang of this tool, but now it’s working as a godsend and is helping me build my entire business. For my super competitive keyword terms, I plan on sending at least 500-1000 blog posts to each of these. For my medium level keyword terms, I plan on making 200-300 posts each and I’ll randomly choose long tail keywords and make 5-10 blog posts on these for keywords I see that are close to ranking in the top 10 and just need a little push.

So yes building an authority site is hard work, especially the first 1-2 years. But the dream of relaxing and working a few hours per week is a definite possibility once you build one. There’s a bit more to building one of these sites than I explained, but what you just read are the basics and if you follow these rules it’s just a matter of time before you succeed. My biggest word of advice is to start as soon as possible and be patient.
 

Brian Garvin & Jeff West run the Total Health At Home blog, which is a Health & Wellness blog that reviews popular Nutritional Supplements and other Health Related products.

Do you have a blog you’d like to make money on? What are you doing to make that happen? What have you tried that hasn’t worked?

Tags: blogging, online business, self-employment, side business