Going to build an authoritive niche website. Advice and suggestions?

Staying away from "micro-niche websites" is probably a good idea (if we're thinking of "micro-niche" as meaning "targeting one or two specific products". We've already had that conversation in another thread, right?).

Ok - here's the thing: it's a very vague term without a real definition, and different people mean very different things by "authority". My strong impression is that most people, in this forum, who use the term "authority site", are thinking about some definition that's more or less centered around an SEO context for "authority". If you mean it that way, a big re-think will help you.

If you don't mean it that way, then so much the better.

Ok - sounds perfectly reasonable.

I don't understand the "vs". In what sense are these things opposites?

I do all that (attract repeat visitors, build an email list, and communicate with subscribers, and so on) but I have small-ish niche sites (you wouldn't call them "micro-niche" in the sense people usually use the term, I think). I update my sites only 2-3 times per month each, with a new article. For me, that's plenty. It wouldn't help me in any way to update them more than that. (Why do you think that would help you?).

My perspective and context may be different from yours, Daniel. I'm an affiliate marketer. So I need content-rich little sites in order to collect the email addresses of my "potentially best customers" (they're the same ones who typically won't opt in to a squeeze page, which is why I need a website of some kind, to make money).

Why do you associate "how much people trust it" with its size? That's never occurred to me, beyond the obvious fact that having a little content-rich site can collect the email addresses that a squeeze-page cant' collect (as I proven over and over by split-testing).

And why do you associate "how much people trust it" with how regularly it's updated? (Don't understand this perception at all, if you'll excuse my saying so ).

I don't share these premises, at all. Which is probably why I don't really understand why you want to do this, and how it will help you to make money, and why I'm suggesting - again - that a re-think may help you, here.

The problems here (it seems to me) are ...

(a) The answers to those questions have nothing (or almost nothing) to do with what you've said above; and ...

(b) You don't need to do most of those things you've said above, to get traffic and make money: almost none of what's above really relates to traffic-generation or monetization at all.

As you can see from the replies above, people don't understand why that's your framework, or why that would be a helpful framework.

It's a framework apparently based on assumptions which the respondents-to-date don't understand or share.

I sense you're going to hate my answer (and many apologies for that! ) but I think the answer's "it doesn't matter". Because that probably isn't what you need.

What you do need is to choose a business model (for example, "affiliate marketing"); choose a niche (for example, "grape-growing/wine-making", or "learning Japanese" or whatever - those two are both potentially very good niches, by the way ) and choose a traffic-generation method (or more than one traffic-generation method - but probably one "primary" one, to start with. And make sure it's a non-SEO based one).

Please rest assured that nobody's criticizing you, here. You're in a very similar position to the one we were all in when we started off. But you're seem to be using some strange terms which make me suspect - skepchick that I am - that you might have been reading something very SEO-oriented, or maybe something very out-of-date, or maybe something translated badly from another language, or whatever else that makes me suspicious of it, because it doesn't make much sense to me.

Seriously, Daniel, where did you get these terms from, and why are you using them? What have you been reading???

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Pardon me if someone has already addressed this. I wouldn't be surprised if Alexa has, I just don't have the time to read everything at the moment.

The bit I highlighted above is the question you need to answer before deciding that an authoritative niche website is what you need. I tend to think it isn't. I think it would be a shame to spend a lot of time creating something you later find you didn't have to, though on the upside you'd probably learn a lot.