Niche Authority Site Versus Niche Review Site

Sup folks.

Spending some time on forums and stuff, there seems to be a debate about whether creating an authority site or a review site is better. In my completely biased opinion, the authority website wins. Here’s why.

The Review Website

If you’ve ever done a search for “best [whatever]”, you’ve probably stumbled upon an affiliate review website. Basically, what the creator does is compile a number of reviews and rewrites them into a long article. Sometimes they’re for individual products, sometimes they’re list style like “top 10 [whatever] 2017”.

When someone finds the website, they read the article and decide if they want to buy the product. If they make the purchase, the website owner gets a commission.

Why don’t I like that?

Because that’s it. There is not much more that can be done with the website after the article is written. The are a few ways to diversify the income away from affiliate marketing like

  • the creator has big goals and private labels a product and recommends it on every page
  • advertisers paying for banners or popups

There’s no real way to reuse the content after it’s created. One and done.

Not only that, but there is no way to build a relationship with the visitor. They read the article, buy the toaster oven, then that’s it. It’s not like they’ll be coming back to your toaster website every few days to see what new reviews you have.

There’s hardly any way to continue marketing to those people.

Fuck that.

The Authority Website

The authority website can do everything a review website does, and more. You can gather email addresses easier with a good lead magnet to market to those people again later. I pulled in over 500 emails in one month that I could turn around and market to.

You can repurpose older content into new formats and make even more money. For the authority site/lead generation site I made, I took a compilation of the first 40 articles or so and made an ebook I sold on Amazon.

I planned and had a course created based on my most popular posts, and recruited affiliates to sell it for me. It’s hard to do that when your top post is the top 10 blenders.

People would reach out to me asking to advertise/collaborate because my website became an authority in the niche. I would find links on Reddit posts pointing them to articles on the site.

And I’m going to do it all again, but actually have a plan this time around.

Big dawgs gotta authoritateÂ