How do you become a major influencer in your industry? The answer is-by becoming an authority. Learn how you can build your online authority in this video, as David Jenyns talks about the steps to becoming an expert in your field.
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Video Transcript: I’m going to have a look at the three areas that I feel like you need to work on to build up that authority in your marketplace. There is the core authority, which is who you are and what you’ve created. Just take the words I say and substitute them with your business name, if you’re a business or you are business. Those words are interchangeable. That’s the core of it.
Your website is the reflection. Regardless of how authoritative you are or are not currently, if people are going to do business with you in the current day and age, they’ll google you. They’ll try to find your website and they’ll use that as a way to get to know you. So you want to make sure your website backs your story up.
Also you want to make sure of your social authority. What proof do you have outside of you that backs you up? You can stand here and say, I’m awesome, I’m the best. That’s important, that’s part of it but you also need to have someone else say, yes, he’s really good. I recognize him as an expert. That’s a part of it.
Let’s consider the core authority. The way to get core authority is you want to think about the problems your target market is having. What are some of the problems your prospects have? You need to be better able to articulate their problems than they can. That’s really key.
If you know who your target market is, if you know what problems they’re having and you can articulate it better than they can, then you embed that into your website and into the copy and into the emails and into every communication that you have with them. At a subconscious level, someone says, they get me. That builds that trust. Then because you know my problem, you must have the solution. You need to understand what that problem is that they’ve got.
Experts over time also express community concerns. They have opinions about things. You want to make sure you get to a place where you feel like you’re actually adding value. It’s not always just about the dollar. It’s that Jim Rohn quote about adding enough value, and if you help enough people get what they want, then you’ll get what you want. By doing that and putting them first, you’ll get a much better engagement and you start to build up that authority.
You also want to build up a body of work. This may be written, audio, maybe it’s podcasts like Tim was talking about for the audio. Maybe it’s YouTube, maybe it’s written, it’s blog posts on your site, maybe it’s all of them. You probably should be doing all of them because everybody engages in different ways. You want to have all of this content that backs your story up.
So when they do get to the website and they start digging around, you’ve got a body of work. You’re not just one of those websites that is five pages deep. You’ve got actual, useful, relevant content. On the left we’ve got the Melbourne SEO Services blog. We do some work with podcasts and we’ve got a lot of YouTube videos as well. That’s the first thing, core authority. That’s what you want to really think about. How do you present yourself, because you weave that through all of your marketing.
Then you feed it through to your website which is the second area of building up this authority. You want to make sure that it is clean, it’s consistent, it matches with what the prospect is looking for. I think it’s really important to tell your story. People really engage with stories. I don’t see enough storytelling on the web. But that’s how people engage. That’s how you differentiate.
One of the things that gets people to understand who I am is by me telling my stories. Lots of you have watched lots of the videos that I have put out. By telling those stories, that separates me from the rest. It explains who I am, how I got to where I am and is the proof behind it.
You can pick stories that resonate with your target market. All of that feeds into the website. I think storytelling is a huge part that a lot of people are missing. That goes for every business. They should be telling their story and why people should be working with them. It’s not because you’re cheaper, faster, and easier, they’re all throwaway terms. Everybody is that. What is it that makes you different?
If you have a look at the way that Apple’s website is, it’s consistent throughout the website. It’s the same font styling. When you get an email, it feels all congruent. When you go to some of their social media platforms, it all ties in. This is part of that point system that I was talking about. People are subconsciously adding all of these up. Some of these elements you’re going to have, other elements you might not have. We want to try and tick as many of these boxes as possible. By doing that, that’s how you get that authority positioning.
You don’t want a website that is a mess. Oftentimes people come to me at Melbourne SEO Services and they’ll say, we want you to do some SEO. I say, even if we did get people to your website, I don’t think they’re going to buy. Step one is make sure you’ve got great user engagement. Make sure people are easily navigating around the site. Make sure they feel like they can trust you. That has to be step one, before you even consider traffic. A lot of times I’ll say to someone, look, we’ve got five other things we need to fix first.
When I go through a lot of these slides, and I put a lot of time into these slides, you’ll see as we progress, I’ve put them in the order in which I think things need to be fixed. I’ve thought about this. So firstly you need to get that core authority right, think about it. Over time, we’re going to build that body of work. Give it some thought upfront. Then we need to move to your website. We do that even before we consider SEO and getting some of this content out there.
Then the other component of this authority building, there were three, and the last one is social authority. At this point, now you’ve got your core authority, you’ve got all of your content that backs up what you say. Then you’ve got your website authority because that now really backs up your story as well. That gives you the fully rounded picture. Then we’ve got social authority. How can you then get other people outside of you to say, yes, they’re an expert? How can you get references from someone else about you or your business being an expert in the space?
It may be through industry awards, or you get recognized for something. You can use those logos. It might be past clients having case studies and things like that to back it up. I’ve got that daveraves.com website if anybody has seen it. I just collect as much proof as I can and I put it all on one website.
Regardless of what business I’m currently working in as an entrepreneur, I can point them back here and say, here are two hundred testimonials of people saying that I will deliver on my promises. You want to start collecting these things now. We want to build all of these up so it gets to the point where it’s beyond a shadow of a doubt that hey, this person is the real deal.
Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level with these steps to building online authority? Authority Content can help you become expert in your field. Visit authoritycontent.com for more information.
