How to Become an Authority In Your Niche

If you want to make money online through blogging, affiliate marketing, selling your own products, or running a business, then you need to accomplish one goal. You need to become an authority in your niche. Once you have established yourself as an authority, then the money will naturally come because those who follow you will trust in anything you have to offer, whether it's recommendations of other people's products, your own products, or other services. So how do you build yourself as an authority? Try these simple things. They'll also get you a lot of great traffic too, so it's a win-win strategy!

Create Valuable, Informative Content

There are three great places to publish informative content about your niche: your own blog, popular blogs in your niche, and major news networks in your niche. When people read informative content by you, they will see exactly how much you know about your niche. Be sure to skip placing great content on low-level article directories that might not get a lot of traffic. The goal is for lots of people to find out what you know, not just put it out there for SEO bots and crawlers. So how do you know whether to devote your best content to your own blog or to others? It's simple - your blog should always have amazing content by you. Guest blogs tend to vary based on the audience. You need to write for the blog's audience - some will want short and simple, others will want long and intermediate to advanced level content. Cater to their audiences, and those who like you will circle back to your blog to get the chance to be blown away by even more of your superb information.

Answer Lots of Questions

Becoming an authority in your niche means being recognized for knowing the answers. Hence, to demonstrate your knowledge, you will need to answer lots of questions. Some good places to answer questions include:

• Twitter - Run a keyword search on Twitter for keyword ? -filter:links. This will give you anyone who has recently tweeted a question in your niche that you can answer. This can also help you build followers on Twitter too!
• Question & Answer Networks - Sites like Quora, LinkedIn Answers, and similar are built specifically so people can come in, ask questions, and answer them. Be sure to complete your Quora and LinkedIn profiles before getting started that way when people like your answers, they can find out more about you including your website.
• Niche Forums - Good niche forums (i.e., the ones that haven't been overrun by spammers) are usually full of people with questions. Answer them thoroughly and, if possible, have a good forum signature with a link back to your website.
• Blog Comments - You should always answer any questions that come up on comments for your own posts. But don't forget questions on other blogs as well, especially those using comment systems like Disqus and Livefyre - these comment authors will usually get notified if you have answered their question in a comment reply. Be sure, again, to fill out your Disqus / Livefyre profile so people can easily find the link back to your website.

Build a Strong Following

Authorities in most niches tend to have a lot of followers on social networks. Not just any followers, but followers who are engaged with them and tend to interact with their updates with lots of likes, comments, shares, retweets, and so on. Hence, if you want to be an authority, you need to have an authority-sized audience. The good news is that while you are building your authority and doing things like create great content for your blog, write guest blog posts, answer questions on Q&A networks, and participate on blogs, you will gradually build your fan base with those you interact with. The key is to capitalize on all of those opportunities by including links to your main social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.). If you can, include at least a link to your top three profiles (more if a site allows for it). If it's a guest author bio on a blog, try to include at least one social network link. Also, take advantage of getting social fans from your own blog by incorporating social profile buttons and badges in your sidebar, author info box, about page, and contact page. This way, people can connect to your social networks no matter where they are on your website. Be sure to keep an eye on your followers - you might notice you're doing really well on one network, so now you need to work on building a following on another. You can't be an authority with a 100,000 fans on Twitter but 5 on Facebook - you will want to have a decent sized audience on lots of different networks. That's what makes true niche leaders stand out from those who might have found a way to game one social network over the others.

Start a Mailing List

Last, but not least, you will want to make sure you are capturing your best leads on your mailing list. This way, you can communicate with them whenever you have something important to announce, like the launch of a new website, affiliate product, or product of your own. Services like Aweber are best because they are affordable and allow you to do things like affiliate marketing. While there are lots of other mailing list services, be sure to check their terms of service before signing on - some don't allow certain kinds of promotions and you could lose your entire list if you get banned.