How Do You Create An Authority Site?

Basically, An authority site is a site that has the content that people want, this could be targeted content or of multiple topic themes, much like an article directory, you get all of the categories that make them searchable by anyone who visits the pages.

Authority sites are built upon frameworks, usually of an advertising revenue model, that builds up quickly through increased traffic and ad click throughs, the benefits of owning an authority website are massive and the only downsides I can see, is that you will have to outsource the maintenance of technical stuff in the background once things increase in membership volume and traffic that will use more bandwidth, this will cost, but remember the revenue potential of an authority site grows over time.

Authority sites are usually free to join and are customer focused for easy usability and may include all of the standard social networking tools like uploading photo files, videos and tex documents as well as the ability to create specific article content on the fly!

Like any business venture, making a plan is imperative, this is also important if you need to obtain funding (that's if you can in this day and age) as you will need a business marketing plan that will explain in brief what it is that you want to achieve with your idea. Laying things out on paper is also useful for your promotional campaigns later on as you have a solid description that you can re-write as an advertisement or which just serves as a permanent reminder of your online objectives.

Knowing the market is one thing, but understanding all the other websites out there that are similar in concept to your idea is an important truth you must study, your competition are your future partners really in some ways, although direct competitors, you want to be better than them, you still need to have an understanding of who is currently performing better than you, so that you can research and find out what marketing they have in place.

Getting your site design right is equally important, because it will be a social enterprise if you will, a way of getting people to act and place their content at your site, so you need to think about your target audience, design your site navigation for the customer in mind, make it easy for them, and they will be a member for life.

Customer feedback will be an integral part of your overall customer service, as you do not want disgruntled members complaining about issues, and they then leave your site. Try to be as helpful as possible towards issues and be proactive for achieving solutions.

Furthermore, within your plan, you need to allow for problems with software upgrades and troubleshooting issues, this is very important at the beginning and will continue to require a hands on approach throughout the life and ownership of your authority site. This, however, can be outsourced at a later stage or at the start, depending on your budget.

To Create An Authority Site

There are a few options:

You could hire someone to create an authority site from scratch, although quite expensive, it is an ideal solution to have it created for you.
Buy or download a free clone script of an existing website and tweak it to your own design and specifications, this option requires some technical knowledge that may be researched and studied beforehand or again this could be outsourced to a professional. Good Script Sites -
Build one yourself, to do this you may need a few years to learn advanced html, Javascript and css, as well as installing a CMS (Content Management System) in your web host account, some are free like Drupal and Joomla.
Hubpages is an example of an authority site, so any research into how one is operated can be found by studying sites like it, Ezinearticles and Squidoo are two other good examples of quality authority sites.

The revenue potential from the advertising that the authority site generates from it's users and more importantly web visitors, is what makes owning one a great business move. There are lots of ad revenue alternatives to the most used and popular Google Adsense, so it is just a matter of using one that you are most comfortable with for your websites income potential.

Other forms of income could be derived from a few highly targeted affiliate programs and there are lots to choose from, you could add a free report giveaway or a great resource or software tool, these work quite well on a site with growing targeted traffic, but this will be addressed within your affiliate marketing plan in more detail.

Also remember that a site that will be for current members and brand new members who create new content pages, will help drive more traffic to the main website anyway, so the possibility of potential revenue for the user must come into play as the motivating factor for them to come back and write more specific content.