Daydreaming about a five figure income per month is easy, but getting actual money into the bank can’t be done while you’re stuck in imagination land. Come on, aspiring content site owner. Pull those sleeves up and let’s get to work.

Niche idea? Check. Mad marketing skills? Check. Before you jump into creating a content calendar, you have one important decision to make, “what type of authority site do I want to build?”

You’ve got three choices: the micro-niche, the classic niche site, and the real authority site. They vary in terms of size, scope, and quality. Accordingly, the effort and investment fo each type is different too. Are you ready to publish a thousand articles, or would you rather build several mini-niches?

To help you make a smart choice, let’s dive into the three types of authority sites and all their differences.

Micro Niche Site

If you want to test the waters first, you might want to consider starting small with a Micro Niche Site. Although some might say micro niche sites are so 2012, there is still room for them nowadays. Google values topical relevancy a lot more these days. This means that it is easier to rank a 20 page site for “best socks for runners” query if you have all 20 articles about socks as compared to 20 articles about running and just one about socks. Needless to say that this your content site is MUCH more relevant to the socks topic than to running topic.

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As its name implies, it’s usually built with only ten pages or less. It focuses on one product with a few review articles and buyer guides. Expect around 300 to 1,000 Google searches for your covered keywords. I would not go for higher search traffic because it makes it harder to compete. “Find a niche and stick to it” – a motto to live by and Micro Niche sites take it to the extreme.

All these efforts are going to make you somewhere below 1k USD if you monetize with Amazon.

Advantages

  • Highly recommended for beginners
  • Simple rinse and repeat model
  • Involves much less work than the other types
  • Great for gaining more experience with a niche
  • Prioritizes specific keywords, steering you away from the competition between the big bosses of large authority sites
  • Easy to sell and buy this kind of websites

Disadvantages

  • Low earning potential
  • Non-diversified revenue streams
  • You are limited by the domain name or by the topic.
  • Once you are publishing articles outside of the microniche you picked, you need to be careful to not lose the contextual relevancy in Google’s eyes

We love how micro niche sites can help you save enough to invest in bigger sites in the future. When done right, you can even rank high on Google in a relatively short time with low amount of linkbuilding.

A Classic Niche Site

After taking your time grinding up the learning curve to betterĀ  the learning curve, you might wanna check out the Classic Niche Site. It boasts of 50 to 100 subpages that discuss a topic in a more detailed manner than a mini-niche would. After a few weeks’ worth of work, your efforts will be paid off with 2500 to 8000 monthly searches and can generate an income up to $10k per month.

Advantages

  • Higher passive revenue than Mini-niche Sites
  • Ability to scale into different subniches
  • Meaningful Advertising Revenue
  • Can compete with authority sites
  • Suitable for average-skilled content site owners
  • Opportunity to master SEO better, since it requires you to play around with longtail keywords and backlinks to get higher search rankings

Disadvantages

  • Need to learn how to run a content team
  • Need to learn how to run linkbuilding effectively
  • Higher budget for these two

Expect that the competition will be tougher. If you wanna strike gold with a classic authority site, keep on producing keyword-enriched articles and gaining strategic backlinks. From my experience, it’s actually possible to earn as much as $10k USD in a month with a brilliantly managed content site!

Real Authority Site

Once you’ve built several successful microniche or smaller authority sites, it’s time to put your expertise to the test with a real authority site. Get ready to build over 1,000 pages with high-quality articles, professional photos, advanced plugins and high quality links. Even if it would take over 3 years and tens of thousands of dollards just to build a site this big, you get to access to full trust of Google to rank on 10k/month+ keywords and a site like this should net you more than $15k per month.

Advantages

  • High link building budget
  • Paid link placements make sense
  • Diversified revenue streams(affiliate, ads, infoproducts)
  • Best for advanced webmasters
  • Highest revenue opportunity
  • Targets an entire market, not just a single product or niche

Disadvantages

  • Have to spend time managing a 5+ people team
  • Higher budget for links and content

While a Classic Niche Site focuses on the longtail “best bed for toddlers” your Real Authority Site will expand your scope to the main keyword “best bed”. Competition for clicks will be more intense than ever, and each product page will have to rank high by themselves. This will only be possible if you’ve mastered Google’s algorithm and have built great amount of quality links.

Conclusion

You can get a decent income and great learning opportunities with any of the authority sites we’ve explored, but your skills and ambition will ultimately determine how high your earnings could be. The equation is pretty simple. The more effort you invest and knowledge you acquire, the more money you can get. Take it from the hundreds of thousands of webmasters who have proven that this business model can be a stable and long term revenue stream.

Which type of authority site are you interested to build?

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