An authority is someone who is publicly known for being knowledgable or having expertise in their industry. Whether you’re a one man band with a blog or a part of a business, you are an expert in your industry. You may not think you are an expert relative to others in your industry, however, variety is the spice of life and we all need to start somewhere! Any contribution that you see valuable, is likely to be valuable to others. Is there something interesting you’ve done research on that you can share? Or something interesting that you’ve come across?
We all know that word of mouth is a powerful thing, we are heavily influenced by the opinions of others. Be confident and share your views with your readers or customers. The more you put yourself out there and demonstrate your strengths the more likely you will be to gain respect and acknowledgement. This in turn will help attract people to your website or business to hear more of what you have to say.
There are a variety of ways you can build your authority. Having a blog is one way you achieve this. With the rise in the number of blog sites popping up on the web, more and more people are sharing their views about what they feel passionate about. At the end of 2011, NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey company) tracked over 181 million blogs around the world which had grown from 36 million in 2006. This demonstrates just how many people are out there sharing their views and the number of readers listening to them is endless. If you don’t have your own blog, why not offer to write a guest post for someone else’s blog in your industry. It’s also a great way to get a link back to your business.
You also need to embrace the world of social media and use it to your advantage, you can even share other peoples content and opinions and be involved in discussions. Even if you don’t consider yourself a creator, you can always become a curator.
Another common way to build your authority is to seek out opportunities to present at conferences, user group meetings or training sessions. You will have a captive audience ready to listen to you and it goes a long way in building your profile as someone that has a good understanding of the subject matter.
We came across this cool infographic in our travels from Vertical Measures that we thought we’d share with you, it’s a nice handy reference with some great tips to help you establish and build your authority.
