A Proven System to Build Authority and Brand

Being an authority figure is simply a position you take that allows you to be in a place where it’s recognized that you know more than most individuals on a specific subject. In this place, you’re respected for knowing more than the person who is trying to get help from you.

We can go into this deeper, such as setting yourself up as an expert, or guru, or a coaching expert. The bottom line is, you know more than they do. If you meet somebody that knows 10% more than you do about something and you have a discussion, and you’re used to talking to people who don’t know as much is this person, do you not respect this person?

If you meet somebody for the first time and you have a conversation about one your favorite subjects. A subject that you’re learning about, even a subject that you know a lot about, and if this person that you have this met is able to match word for word on what you know, and even teach you a few things that you don’t know, you’re going to have instant respect for this person.

They might not know anything about anything else, they may have faults in other areas, and they may be a mess all over the place, but if they know 1% more about something that you value, then you’re going to respect a person.

This brings us to an important point. If you don’t feel confident in your knowledge about a specific topic, remember you don’t have to know everything in order to help someone, you only need to know more than the person that you”re teaching. This means you need to seek out people who know less than you do so you can help them and teach them. This way you become an authority in their eyes. To these people you’ll be the expert.

If you begin teaching 10 people that know less than you do, in six months you’re going to grow in knowledge and you’ll be able to teach people who know what you know right now, because you’ll have learned more. This is one of the ways I started in this industry, prior to being online I did have sales experience, but I was not familiar with the online landscape such as sales pages, email pages, opt-ins, etc.

If you look at what I know now, and in six months I will know a little more and so will you if you continue to teach and learn something new every week. As my knowledge increases, I will be able to teach people who are at a higher level than I am at right now. My knowledge and experience will position me to teach these people just like it will you.

How do you show authority? By showing people something that you have done that they have not. What do people respect? They respect you for the published article. Is that funny? They will respect you when you have a published article. I know that’s easy for us, we have seen how easy it is to publish an article on particular subject. However, not everyone is aware of this.

Saying this, there’s a level respect that you might have for most marketers that have done something that you would like to do. It may be difficult for you to imagine having a lot of respect for somebody who has one article. But, there are people that will respect those who have only one article because they have zero. Having more articles than somebody else will create more respect. Having more products than your competitors is going to create a level of respect and authority.

If you don’t have a lot of products, or articles, or even pages to your website covering specific subjects, you can start right where you’re at. Remember, everyone started at one.

Let’s discuss this for a moment.

Building Your Authority

Imagine if every week or every day for a year, you either create a product (per week), or you added a page to website covering a specific niche subject that would help to solve a problem that your niche is concerned about. How would your life be different a year from now?

Whatever real sacrifices would you have had to make in order to do either of these? Would they have been real sacrifices? Would you have had to forgo eating, talking with your family? More than likely no.

You could even take just a half an hour and reserve this time for either product creation, writing emails, or creating information pages on your website. Where would you be today if you did this 365 days ago? Even if you only work on working days, you’ll have 210 production days we set aside 30 minutes to work on a specific project.

When you break it down this way, it doesn’t seem too difficult. Even if no one ever read your content, this is an asset that you can use in the future. You’ll be respected as an authority by the sheer amount of content that you have written.

The next step is to write a book and publish it.

Writing a book and having it published on Amazon will also set you up as an authority. If you don’t feel as though you have enough knowledge to write a print book, then write an e-book on a specific subject in the niche that you’re in. If you choose, you can just upload a PDF and publish a short niche book that addresses just one question or problem in a specific niche.

After this, you can take your published book and try to get featured on an authority site in your niche. It may cost you $97 to get featured, but it would be worth it. This is because it would establish your authority. Some authority sites will have memberships that you can join. They’ll also have guest author columns where they’ll feature member articles. If you can get one of these articles published then it would further establish you as an authority and help your sales.

Why become a member?  Being a member of a website or a small organization on the web in your niche will help you be taken more seriously than someone who is just off the street and who has never invested in their cause.  This is another example (member versus nonmember) of the power of contrast when simply asking a favor.

What about YouTube videos? It’s easy for us as marketers to say. “Who cares about YouTube, everyone is on YouTube.” But, is this really true? Every single competitor that you’ll have in any specific niche is not going to be on YouTube. If you have viable content on your YouTube channel, you’re going to have a lot of credibility.

What if someone goes to one YouTube channel and they only have one video, versus if they go to another YouTube channel in the same niche and has 20 or 30 videos. Who are they going to trust more? Who are they going to feel knows the most information and is willing to share it in this niche? The person with the most videos.

In this case, who would this person buy from? The person has the most authority.

If it was us that only had a single video and our competitors had quite a few more, who would our subscribers buy from? Unless we have built trust through emails over time, at first glance, we would not have a chance.

Sidenote: One of the things that happens to me often is that people come to me and tell me that they’re not selling enough of their courses. Usually we are able to determine that they may not be driving up traffic, or the fact that they don’t have enough subscribers, or their sales letter is not well written. Usually we are able to track it back to these things.

Let’s bring up an important point. Our subscribers are not reading just our emails, they’re also reading our competition’s as well. All of us are more than likely reading our competitor’s emails every day. Perhaps we just want to know what’s going on out there, etc.

The people that we are seeking to help are no different than us. They’re reading everyone’s emails. They’re shopping around for the best training and this is why you need to have the best training possible for your customers.

If you don’t feel your training is the best in the market, then ask yourself what you could do to make it better. What angle do you need to take here to make your training better than your competition’s?  Could you be more accessible? Could you include more information? What could you do to literally be better? This will create contrast. We want people to contrast us to the competition and find that we are better.

A lot of people are afraid of the competition. We should be able to confidently send our subscribers to our page knowing that our products are the best that they can be.