Establishing yourself as an online authority is essential to your success as an independent professional on the Internet. You can do that by constantly publishing quality content.
Why publishing quality content helps you become an online authority?
When you publish quality content it means you are an expert in that topic. When you publish quality content regularly, non-stop, people begin to trust you, they begin to trust your wisdom and consciously or unconsciously they begin to believe you. When they believe you, you become an authority. They seek your advice before taking important decisions.
Take for instance, you sell Android mobile phones from your website. The standard content on your website would be, descriptions of various mobile phones, their pictures, possibly their videos, and possibly, some feedback from your present customers.
Quality content would be comprehensive reviews of the mobile phones you’re selling coupled with your own opinion, whether it is negative or positive. Of course you are going to have limited negative opinions of the Android phones you’re selling because you wouldn’t anyway sell the instruments you think negatively of.
Quality content means people visit your website even when they don’t want to purchase an Android mobile phone from you; they are just seeking an authority advice they can trust. But if they don’t purchase from you, how does it matter how many people come to your website for advice? First of all, visitors, whether they purchase or not, are always better than no visitors, right?
Second, whenever it is possible for them to purchase from you, they would rather purchase from you than from a person they don’t know. They are also going to recommend other people to your website and this means more visitors, and possibly more customers.
Becoming an online authority by publishing quality content doesn’t just mean selling gadgets you can review, even if you are a consultant you can gain lots of credibility by expressing your thoughts and opinions on your website or blog.
For an example, have a look at Seth Godin’s blog. I’m not sure whether this is true or not, but people say that his blog posts appear even on Christmas. Due to the level of authority he has gained, he is able to sell more books and get more speaking gigs from his blog.
Similarly you can check out Problogger; Darren has been publishing his blog on blogging for years now and people really trust him as an authority. The benefit of this is when he recommends something, even when he launches a new business, he already has many people who trust him and know that he is never going to offer something inferior or spurious.
Why become an online authority
On the Internet it is very difficult to trust people. This is primarily because anybody can have a website in a few dollars and pretend to be a serious business person. Many people are hoodwinked into deceptive bargains by such people. Even if there are no deceptive bargains, just as it is very easy to start a business on the Internet, it is very easy to wrap one up because the stakes are not big the way they are in the brick and mortar world. The biggest casualty has been the trust factor. Even those people who have something genuine to offer find it difficult to gain trust.
That’s why when you become an authority, people know that you are not goofing around and you really mean business. They know that it takes many months and years to become an authority and if you can put in that much time, then your business really matters to you.
