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This is the second part of a review series as I report on the wife’s progress with an Authority Site Center blog.

Read Authority Site Center review part 1 here.

Clare spent all weekend doing the research as instructed. There are 16 steps to follow and each step includes instructions as well as a webinar explaining the reasons behind the step and other videos with tutorials on certain parts of each step.

I think it is recommended that you do 2 steps a week but she is on step 6 already. She picked out a few niches, then researched each and made her final decision. Then she had to look into which categories she would be concentrating on to get the blog going and breaking those into sub categories.

She chose her domain name, a title and color scheme and then submitted her details for her site to be created. I must admit I considered this as a bit of a gimmick but once she got the mail asking her to have a look and see if it was ok I changed my mind.

The header was professionally done and she was told unique for her blog. The blog really looks the part and is laid out to look professional. It was what was beneath the hood though that got me really interested. An armoury of plug ins, quite a few of which I’d never come across and can only assume they are unique to Authority Site Center blogs.

The platform is obviously Wordpress but its been customized by themselves and is very heavy on Web 2.0 promotion. Not suprising really as the owner Jack Humphrey is the leading light in Web 2.0 promotion techniques.

Having at first thought the idea was gimmicky, I now agreed with Clare that she would have never been able to create anything that looked as good on her own and obviously because it comes with all those Web 2.0 tools and plugins already fitted means she doesn’t need to understand how they work or even what they do. It means she is free to get on with creating content and the blog will take care of all the rest once she posts it.

Looking at the rest of the training, they push you hard and to be honest it’s a little hard to see how the blog would fail. What I mean is, anyone writing at least one unique post per day for the first 90 days as the Authority Site Center has its members doing on a given subject is going to see some traffic. Add the right plugins and promotional methods and that traffic will be quite substantial but I keep looking at it from my perspective or as if I had signed up for myself.

Clare is a novice and as such she has found it perfect for her. The tutorials on writing for instance would be ignored by me but she found them very helpful. She also admitted to have been dreading the installation process and the other “technical stuff” and was made up that everything was done for her.

I think for someone like Clare who wants to build something of value and that will grow into a genuine money making business the Authority Site Center is perfect. For someone like me, $97 a month for a professionally designed template, unlimited bandwidth hosting and some pretty neat unique plugins might just be on the steep side. However, it’s early days as yet and the proof in the pudding will be in a few months when we start to see just how much traffic these plugins and training methods pull in.

You can read the sales pitch for the Authority Site Center here.


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