Having an online presence is an important aspect of building a strong brand. Positioning yourself as a credible source through engaging and relevant content helps others view you as an expert while gaining results-driven opportunities to increase revenue. These experts are considered content authorities, because they have gotten enough traction where audiences seek their opinions and are tuned in to what they have to say. There are a number of ways to accomplish this.
Build Authority in Your Niche
Building authority within your niche will give you credibility and increase your following. What exactly is a niche audience? Think specialization – for instance, weddings. The Knot has a huge following that views their team as experts on all things wedding related. Their blog posts and articles are broadcast across all their social media platforms and is shared by their team and followers, used in group discussion forums like Google+. By using social media, delivering quality, targeted content to your audience and sharing your information to drive traffic, your following will not only increase, but will propel others to share your messages as well. The more your messages are shared, the more you build authority.
Be Searchable and Clickable
At the core of any marketing framework should be creation of newsworthy, relevant content that’s leveraged to reach the right audience — and subject matter experts, authority and influence should be part of that. Once you have a publishing strategy, make the content work for you. Linking to relevant material and using call to action statements to link back to your own content helps your readers find you while making it easy for readers to click on the pieces you share. Using a program like Bitly can assist you in this process. Bitly shortens links for better looking social posts, allows you to track the activity of your links and even tag related links for better organization. Having links within content helps your search rankings while assisting readers in quickly obtaining the information they want.
Monitor Your Progress
Keeping track of your social media channels and the results of your content is crucial to your success in becoming a content authority. Using Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ help build your online presence. One advantage of using Google+ specifically is that your content is quickly crawled and indexed by Google which places your new information in search engines faster, making it accessible to your audience and others.
The bottom line is that brands that have subject authority and expert content will have the best results on Google, which lead to better brand awareness, web traffic and conversions.