Why Advertising Isn't A Good Fit For Authority Blogs (And What to Do Instead)

Building an authority site can be challenging.

It takes time, dedication and the will to hustle to reach the top.

But as always, there are a few mistakes that could drag you down and make it take a lot longer for you to reach your goals.

I'm sure you've heard this before.

Like life itself, it's a journey. If you come across a roadblock in the middle of the road, sure you could take an alternative route, but it will take you some time to get back on track.

Sometimes, you block your own road without realizing it, causing you to waste time and delaying your arrival at your goal.

One of the blocks that you might create for yourself is putting ads on your road. Are you surprised to think of ads as an impediment?

I'm sure you are.

Why new bloggers look to ads as a good way to monetize their blog

You see a lot of blogs out there, posting dozens of posts weekly, if not daily, and they place ads all over their site. People think that's the way to make money, so that's what they do.

And you often seen bloggers using programs like Google Adsense or Bing Ads.

Magazines sell advertising on every page, and even worse, they may dedicate a few entire pages a product they were paid to promote.

But that's not the way to build an authority blog. After all, most magazines are big companies, with millions of dollars and dozens of internal staff writers, and you shouldn't try to compete with that.

You don't have that kind of budget or staff, so you need to find another way.

So what's the best alternative?

Yes, you guessed it, build an authority site.

Authority will help you get the audience who wants to hear from you.

And you can't gain authority by writing dozens of garbage articles every month, or every week, or even every day.

You need cornerstone content to help you prove your authority.

So why shouldn't you do advertising?

• People may get annoyed with these ads, which decreases your authority status
• Out of every 300 people, 1 visitor may click on your ad, earning you a cent or maybe less. Guess how many visitors you need to just pay your bills?
• You send them to other people who are willing to spend money to get your hard-earned audience. You're better off meeting your visitors' needs on your own.

1. Build a magazine-like website and spend millions of dollars and hire dozens of internal stuff to compete with them.
2. Quit the idea of building a blog to generate a good income, and think of other ways to do it.
3. Build an authority blog, build a following, and sell them your products.

But if I didn't, and I was really desperate to make this work, then I'd ignore the second option and quickly move on to the third option.

I'm sure you're thinking...

But creating a product is a lot of work!

It may take you hours, or days, of hustling to build a product.

After all, it's a new product...

But there are a tremendous amount of benefits to doing so.

• It positions you as an expert: Imagine you don't know someone but you go to their site and see a $1000 product. What would your first impression of them be? I'm sure you know the answer.
• Getting more traffic: Many successful entrepreneurs have proven the validity of the idea of creating products and have talked extensively about how it changed their business. Shane Melaugh saw an increase in his traffic when he released his WordPress plugin Hybrid Connect, which is now Thrive Leads.
• You get 100% commission: Unlike affiliate marketing, your products will help you get 100% commission of the traffic you sent to that page. Add to this the money you make while others promote your product. You can get more people to promote you by networking with A-listers.
• And the tech problem is not a problem anymore: there are now a lot of companies out there that want to serve you and make it easy to build your store. One of the fastest-growing companies is Spaces, which seems to have great service. I'm in the process of trying them.

Conclusion

You're even more obsessed with the idea of creating a product, then let me give you just one quick tip: don't create a product before you validate the idea, or you'll waste hours of your time. I'll talk more about this later.

But for now, you have the option to either start earning true income in 2016 or keep chasing shadows.

This post first appeared on Blogging.org.