Content Desk was established in 2004 as an article repository, and is now the 3rd largest article site online with 250,000 articles in 220 categories. Peter also runs a membership site called Authority Site Center teaching people how to become authority sites.

From his experience creating software that pulls content from article sites, Peter and his team realized that the real success now lies around generating quality, original content, and in building authority sites. Authority sites are, in a nutshell, sites that people will happily bookmark and return to again and again to find the information they need. The site will have fresh, regularly updated information. You might have 40% of your traffic being return visitors.

The good thing with this method is that you’re no longer at the mercy of the search engines, because people will keep returning to your site, even if it drops off the search engine rankings. It’s about forming long-term relationships with your visitors. Instead of building many sites, you build one big site. Even though it’s just one site, you’re still able to segment the site into different sections, with different content feeds and different community lists. Authority sites are about refining and targeting your information and your monetization so that you’re able to get much more out of each single visitor to your site.

10 Traits of Authority Sites

1. They have original content

   Original content is what drives the enter internet. You need to think about how you can create more fresh content and deliver that to your visitors. Your visitors will be returning to your site again and again, and they will notice when your content isn’t fresh or isn’t new. Once they reach this realization, they’ll very quickly unsubscribe from your RSS leads and newsletters. You want to stop that happening by constantly providing fresh, original content. This content doesn’t need to be long articles -- posts of a couple of hundred words work just as well.

2. The sites have high traffic

   Everyone thinks that getting lots of traffic to your site is hard, and that it takes a lot of work. In AuthoritySiteCenter we have a blogging platform based on Wordpress called WordPressMaster. It helps to create dynamic content and get the attention of search engines very fast. For example, a site we put up a few weeks ago managed to get ranked in the first two pages of the search engines and started good traffic in just a few days with a few posts. That was for quite a small niche, but it shows what fast results you can achieve with this system. It’s not like traditional SEO with its onsite and offsite factors, meta tags, keywords, link buying and all that tweaking. It simply involves putting your content up and then our system uses Web 2.0 social networking technologies to start driving traffic to your site. It still takes a bit of time, but it’s easier and more fun than traditional SEO.

3. The sites are beautiful

   You really need to work on creating an attractive website. Until now it hasn’t been so important. What was important was your sales letter. These days you need to create a site that people will love to come back to.

   Because you’re spending a lot of time and effort getting people to your site, you don’t want to lose them. You want them to look around, sign up to your list, download your free report, and then STAY on your site to immerse themselves in your content. If your site is mediocre and doesn’t give them the information they want in a way that’s easy and attractive, then the person won’t come back. Graphically, you need to think about your colors and your images, and try to make them outstanding. In Mark’s experience, he finds that sites convert better when they are graphically nice and appropriate to their market. He says it didn’t used to matter, but is becoming a much more important factor. It’s worth taking the time and effortto think about your site’s branding, colors and logo. You might even go so far as to consult with a graphic designer.

4. The sites are dynamic

   All your content has to be dynamic. You need to be able to implement tools to broadcast content to your site and allow visitors to grab your content and plug it into their desktop RSS reader. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it allows visitors to display your content in a reader on their computer so that they don’t need to keep going through your site and looking for the fresh content. Many readers can even alert their users when new content is posted. The AuthoritySite Center tools allow you to create RSS feeds from content on any page, not just from your blog. This makes it possible to create multiple RSS feeds so your visitors can subscribe to the feed best suited to their interests. More and more people are using RSS technology these days as a much easier way to get content than through email. It’s growing exponentially, and authority sites are the ones able to tap into this growth.

5. The sites are self-promoting

   Gone are the days of going around tooting your own horn. By using Web 2.0 technologies like RSS feeds, tag and ping, post and rank, the simple act of posting new content is enough to promote your site. When your content is distributed to social networking/ranking sites it’s essentially like a listing in a directory. These directories get a lot of traffic from people looking for information, and when people look for information they’re going to find your site. This technology is already built into WordPress. It means you don’t have to focus on promoting your site all the time... simply by publishing good content, you’ll be getting good press!

6. The sites are self-optimized

   When you put up your content through a dynamic platform, all you need to focus on is giving the visitor the right content. Give them good content and people will come. A lot of people are saying that SEO is dying -- it’s not dying, it’s changing. The old processes are gone. The idea of entering keywords and writing content specially designed for the search engines (which might not be useful for humans) has gone out the window. You now have to keep the visitor in mind: What will they think of your article? If your articles are focused on the reader, and focused on giving value, then they will be self-optimized. This means that outsourcing your writing to the cheapest bidder won’t be the best option anymore. You will really need to find people to write good, quality content for you.

7. The sites are sources for other sites

   Your content should be so good that people will want to link to you. You won’t need to go out buying one-way links, because people will naturally want to link to you. Other people will come to you and ask to use your content. Other bloggers will start asking if they can interview you, or if you can write an article for them.

   You will develop relationships with other sites in the same industry. First you might be the small guy referencing the big guy and trying to build up your expertise, but it will get to the point when the even smaller guys will start looking up to you. So you really need to develop good material so people will want to use it.

8. The sites are obvious experts on their subjects

   You need to try to become the obvious expert for your particular niche. When have a question on a topic, or want to know about a particular subject in your niche, yours will be the first site they go to. For instance, you might be an expert on fingerpicking the guitar. If someone wanted to know about fingerpicking, your site would be the site everyone would recommend. In this way, the authority site is a kind of teacher. It’s the first place you look for information. Examples of obvious experts in their fields are Ben Edwards for Jamorama, Brad Callen for SEO, John Reese for the "make money online" market.

9. The sites are properly monetized

   They use different channels and strategies for making money. For example, you could start with AdSense, but it’s not particularly good for an authority site because it leads people away from your site. But you could cleverly use AdSense to figure out which pages of your site get the most clicks, which blocks of ads get the most clicks, and then use this information to develop a strategy for placing affiliate links instead of AdSense. Now you’re getting $25 instead of 25c. Then once you see which affiliate programs are earning the most money, you might think about creating your own product in this niche. And so on. Authority sites pay attention to what is working on their sites, and then find ways to get the most money possible out of it.

10. The sites are updated often

    Think of it as your daily job -- posting something to your site. At a minimum you should be doing it a couple of times per week. If this is difficult, try outsourcing, or hire some in-house writers. Remember that people come to the internet for information -- not to buy, not to be sold to, but to learn about their chosen topic.

How do you build these sites?

The first thing you need to do is find yourself a platform for building these sites. Some good platforms are TypePad, Movable Type, Joomla and WordPress.

With AuthoritySiteCenter we have a proprietary version of Wordpress with a lot of plugins added. We’ve turned it from a simple blog into a whole content management system, with lots of tools for RSS incorporation and search engine optimization.

Some examples of sites built with our tool are:

http://www.onlinesecurityauthority.com

http://www.craftyplaces.com

http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ fridaytrafficreport/

About AuthoritySiteCenter

It was started about 2 years ago as a membership site teaching people how to build authority sites and become "obvious experts".

1. How to research markets
2. How to produce and publish content
3. How to market the content
4. How to monetize the content

In Authority Site Center you’ll find audio and video lessons, as well as live coaching "webinars" teaching this method. With the webinars you’re able to see what’s being done live on the internet, as well as interact in real time. Webinars can be downloaded after they’ve been recorded.For more information visit http://www.authoritysitecenter.com/