Niche Site vs. Authority Site: Which is a better business?

Key Takeaways

hey what's up everybody I'm Jim miss Ricky Ricky and in this video we're going to talk about the difference between an authority site and a niche site which one we think is probably best to be working on especially for your first site how much income really you can expect to earn from both it cetera so we're going to do kind of a Mac versus PC thing I am going to be talking about authority sites and trying to convince you to get in to do an authority site and Ricky's going to take a niche site that's right so why should we do in this site well um first of all niche sites can be extremely passive you create some content and that's it you not a whole lot more to it than that you can build up a site put several articles on it monetize it and then mostly just kind of let it sit and it's just to generate income forever to move on to something else in terms of the passive income the niche site is much more passive but on an authority site you also have major advantages as well and one advantage you have on an on an authority site is you can build info products much better than you can on a niche site so let's say I have a website about home craft or like a home project you can do like home improvement stuff if I'm an authority site people come to that website with a certain expectation and Trust for you and the type of information you put out if you go to Bob's blog you don't know what to expect you're going to be afraid to put a credit card in that website you don't know the quality of information to expect and so it's a lot harder to sell info products from a niche site than it is from an authority site so +14 Authority yeah that's true um now the downside of info products or selling any of your own products on a website is you do have to deal with customer service there's always going to be issues even if it's a digital info product that people are buying you think hey they just download it and it's done that is never going to be the case people are going to email you and they're going to have they're going to questions they're going to have problems or it just didn't work I never got the download link whatever and you have to deal with that and so again it comes back to the passiveness of a niche site and I kind of alluded to this a minute Oh once you have kind of written some articles and you have this monetized site you can move on to other things so you can be a little bit um a TD when it comes to you can give this tract you have a short attention span yeah you could spend a month or two months hammering out a site and then move on to something else I love that I really love that because that's me I get into a hobby I'm like way crazier right now my thing is dirt bikes and I I watch all the YouTube videos under bikes I buy all the dirt bikes I can find I do everything dirt bike six months from now I know I'm gonna be on the fly fishing or whatever else here's like that 15 years ago I mean it was like it was like lacrosse then it was bow hunting that I mean we were in all sorts of stuff yep we had lots of adventures together in high school um but but that's a huge advantage because you don't have to say Photography is my career I'm doing this for 20 years you can you can be like that and that's totally cool you start a new hobby new niche site and about the customer service oh this is my website improved photography and we have tons of information products and I'm really grateful for what that site has become I mean it's awesome it's provided for my family for a lot of years but the customer service can't be understated it is a lot of work even if you do your very best to make it as simple as possible there will be customer service and that may not seem like a big deal we'll answer a couple emails but like what happens when you want to go on vacation for ten days if you have an authority site you can't just leave for 10 days people are going to dispute their credit-card transactions and flip if they didn't get their product for 10 days you can't just do that so it's a very different lifestyle running an authority site compared to the next site the same is true on our website income school right um there's a lot of you guys know we have we have some information products there and you know we sell we sell a course we provide email support and that comes at a cost because even if we're if the two of us are both on vacation we still have to have our computer with us we saw to be able to answer questions and consult for people and it's great it's a great website um does a lot of good things and we love it but you really can't understate that yep all right another one that I like as with having an authority site is you can target bigger keywords so if you just start a you know a tiny new blog about Teslas so Tesla's the big cool new thing everybody's going crazy about it on the web and you're like hey I'm going to make a website for people who want to want to know more about Tesla's well if you have an authority site one of the big you know electric or Tesla Rotty these big names in the Tesla world then you can write an article about model 3 review and you can probably rank number 1 on Google for it but if you're a tiny little blog and you write your review of model 3 where you're going to get hammered because they're going to be hundreds of reviews of the model 3 you don't stand a chance in of ranking on Google for that so you're going to have to target tiny keywords things like does the model 3 have a key fob things like how does the self presenting door on a Tesla Model S work you're going to have to take tiny keywords which you can have a lot of them I mean they're infinite but you can't go after the big hits you've got to go after small order articles because those other websites have way more domain Authority they stand a much better chance of ranking on Google for those topics that brings there's the flip side right niche websites where you can write about the really really specific stuff whereas on an authority site if you were to write an article about does the model does the model 3 and keyfob you know a lot of people are there to read about the model 3 in general and that questions just can annoy them if you made a whole youtube video about the key fob on a model 3 like that would just those people would hit unsubscribe because that's just not interesting to 99% of the people that are coming to that site or to that YouTube channel whereas on on your site if you are really really specific you can you can do that because again people are usually coming to your site to hang out and come back over and over again they're coming back they're coming to your site to get answers to these really specific questions so those are an inch down topics they don't annoy people so much I see that right here on improve photography I want to make videos like how to change the aperture on a Nikon d50 300 how to change the ISO on a nikon d50 300 because people are going to search that and I want to hit those all on YouTube but if I you know spend a few days and make 40 different YouTube videos on those tiny little topics and my youtube channel now gets hammered with all those videos well I have 50,000 people subscribed to that that on these videos only apply to 1% of them and so there are going to say this channel dumb and they on unsubscribe so you can do different things with a passive site because you don't really care if people come back to your website you know your goal is to just make great content put it out there and let Google bring them in one huge advantage of an authority site is you are less dependent on Google search traffic let's suppose that my Google traffic just got hammered something crazy happened and I had no Google traffic anymore I still have a Facebook page with 650,000 people on it that I can advertise articles to I still have an email list with a hundred thousand people on it that I can advertise those articles to and I still have many tens of thousands of people who every day just wake up in the morning they're like I want my photography fix improve photography.com enter and you can't take that traffic away that's the ultimate source of traffic is when people just type in your website and hit enter I pass incite you can really never expect to get any of that traffic and so huge event that's that's exactly true um but another kind of really cool thing about niche websites is that because we write this really specific content on this website it can actually be harder for either larger niche websites or kind of the medium or smaller size Authority sites to knock off or knock you off of the search results the top search results was really really specific keywords so you know if I have a little niche photography website and I make a youtube video or I write an article about how to change the ISO on the amount of time for yeah sure I can write that article though and I actually can have the potential to rank really well for that and it might actually be harder for kind of the medium-size affiliate or it's uh yeah I know exactly what you mean so if I have a website on like baseball for kids and I write an article on baseball training drills for kids I mean this whole website is about baseball for kids exactly and so if a medium-size site that you know has a lot of PageRank on baseball but it's not baseball for kids I you know the niche site has a little ranking higher yeah because that's your thing the whole website is dedicated to this you know yeah if I have yeah it can work both ways you don't have the paid drink but you have a very specific whole website targeted to that day well I guess maybe the last thing that there are so many different things we talked about the way kind of the overarching that I want to make sure we get across is when you're building an authority site you are building a job for yourself it's not a company it could become a company of course I mean there's a lot of Authority websites that have become huge companies but for a long time you're building a job for yourself you won't have enough money to hire a team of people to help you with the customer service and writing articles and everything so with you and you've got to be there you've got to show up for work every day and that may not be your goal and in starting their website I am really grateful for the the authority sites income school and improve photography that I get to be involved with they've been awesome however Ricky and I have been talking about this we have no interest in starting new authority sites like none we're building passive income niche sites that's where we're seeing the biggest growth in our company that's where we're seeing them the quickest returns the best promise these niche sites are awesome these are the sites that give you the freedom to you know there's the financial freedom and then there's the freedom of your time and here's some good examples here nice calm a website that Jim owns that he actually purchased which leads into one last point as well niche sites are more like a project than a job okay you start one up you again you put the content out there you can continuously add more and more content but in the end it's more of a project and it's really they're really easy to buy and sell and you know every bottom hold on we are bought and sold website easy to do uh-huh and and here's a perfect example of one that Jim bought made some improvements to it and it brings in a continuous stream of income without having to actively maintain yeah this this website was earning a thousand bucks a month when I bought it there were some crazy mistakes being made on the website that I knew I could quit like it fix easily I bought the website in 2014 I made those changes in you know a couple weeks the changes were done and it now earns almost five grand a month and I have not even logged into this website like not even logged into the back end in over six months I have not added any articles in over a year and a half I mean it just sits there and I cash cheques from it that's so cool and we have one we would like to give you for free this is sound proof expert calm it's tiny I think it's going to earn 65 bucks this month it's very small we just started up a little while ago it only has seven articles on there it needs some work to really grow into something awesome but it's really on a good trajectory especially considering how little content is on there we're giving it away it's all set up all the content learning a tiny amount of income and has some traffic all you have to do is go to is go to income school.com slash newsletter to sign up for our newsletter and then comment on this video that's it it's all you got to do and you'll be entered any between now and December 1 2017 one of you randomly chosen is going to win it for free pretty cool it's a small website but pretty cool to win a business awesome thank you everybody well there's no cost in you just get a run a website it's kind of immune money now dad so thanks are pretty fast