Authority marketing involves positioning your brand as a thought leader or expert in your business niche or community. Through sustained effort continuously providing valuable information, it positions your brand as a source of knowledge which others can trust.
The challenge is acute for new brands and websites as their chances of getting high-quality backlinks, which is one of the most critical aspects of acing search rankings, is fairly low. If you too are experiencing the same issue with your brand, we suggest you actively consider exploring authority marketing to build up your search presence.
Authority Marketing – Separate Yourself from the Crowd
Irrespective of the niche in which you are competing, there would be hundreds of businesses trying to tap the same audience through search engine rankings. For example, let’s say you are a real estate consultant, looking to build your business in Houston, Texas. Expectedly, there are other consultants and established companies who are competing in the same market. To separate yourself from just about everybody out there, consider building your brand authority.
Build Your Brand
The first step towards building your brand authority involves focussing on your specialty and making yourself well known. For example, a real estate consultant can brand himself as a highly successful consultant in high-end properties and focus on building his brand around the concept. The focus would involve showcasing how you were successful in your niche and the approach you use to help your clients.
Developing the brand authority also involves making sure your website has everything presented upfront that assures a visitor that they are looking at an expert individual or firm. For example, a hair transplant clinic can showcase a range of successful case studies, user testimonials, research papers, panel discussions, etc. to showcase they mean business. This approach takes a lot of time and effort but it instantly can differentiate you from your peers and make people reach out to you for advice.
Pro Tip: When you are creating a brand you would need to make sure that your brand looks professional and appealing. Invest in developing an elegant logo and imagery for your website and social handles. Ensure your website is regularly updated and every content piece includes branding elements. For example, an interview video that you post should be professionally created with branded intro footage.
Building High Quality Backlinks With Authority Marketing – Key Steps
Once you have developed the key constructs of your brand, you would have to engage in a series of steps that will lead you to be recognized as an authority in your niche. Let’s discuss these steps in detail and look at how we can develop quality backlinks through them.
Thought Leadership Through Content Marketing
To be recognized as an authority in your niche, you need to build yourself as a thought leader. This would require you to create tons of content on topics people are interested in learning in your domain. You would have to provide answers to their pressing problems, address concerns, build elaborate content pieces to push your viewpoint, and basically come across a person or firm who can be approached to solve their needs.
Blogs – Cover Topics of Interest and Fill Content Gaps
As a thought leader, you need to write blog posts on relevant topics. Some of these topics can be those on which people have a difference of opinion. You can put out your own point of view about addressing issues related to your business niche. It is ideal to create several content buckets on your blog and try to cover each of them in elaborate detail.
Blog posting has to be consistent and it should cover topical topics that would interest your target audience. You should be able to identify existing content gaps and try to fill them. For example, you run a real estate consultancy and your peers have basically covered most topics related to purchasing a beach property. But probably they have missed out covering topics relating to maintaining such properties and what hassles one can experience at a later date. You can strive to fill such content gaps and showcase your expertise, which is not readily available.
Listicles and Infographics
Detailed listicles and interesting Infographics are some of the easiest ways to gain links in quick time. Create well-designed detailed infographics with tons of interesting facts. Make sure they prominently show your brand logo and include copy-right details at the bottom. After the infographic has been posted on your sites and social handles and shared over other digital touchpoints, you will slowly observe bloggers and other sites start linking to it. Much of these links can also come from social sites and influencers. Always request people to credit a link back to your site if they publish your content on their websites.
Create Interesting Videos, Presentations – Repurpose Content
Visual content is far more readily consumed by internet users than written content. Moreover, there are already tons of articles on most topics, and creating long-form skyscraper content takes a lot of effort. You can instead look to create videos on highly contested keywords which gives you a better chance of featuring on top of search rankings. You can also post part of your videos on your social handles and encourage people to visit your site. If your content is good, you will find people linking to your videos from their websites and social handles.
At times you do not need to always create fresh content for your videos or presentations. You can consider repurposing content contained in your articles and research papers and convert them into videos or presentations. In fact, it is always a good idea to take old articles and convert them into videos and while updating any relevant concepts.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging has been around for a long time and it has given exceptional results to many websites. However, one needs to ensure that guest blogging should be done in a genuine manner and it only makes sense if you are blogging on respectable sites. To get your content posted to websites that are popular would need both effort and insight.
First off, you would need to figure out sites in your niche which are covering topics that you would be interested in. Once you have made a shortlist of such websites, you can individually pitch to them about creating a piece of interesting content for them and how it would help their overall website. It would be helpful if you can provide content backed by original research, graphical elements, and maybe even videos to sweeten the deal. In exchange, you would request your profile to be featured with a do-follow link.
The chances of collaboration with popular sites to a large extent depends on synergies you can build up with them. For example, if you are an interior decorator looking to feature on a top property blog, you can create a detailed featured article about popular interior themes for beach properties. Your content will complement the content present on the collaborators’ site and would prove beneficial to both of you.
Build a Help Forum or Section on Your Site
When you are looking to position yourself or your business as an authority in any niche, one of the best ways to advance your cause involves providing valuable advice to people who actually need it. So if it is possible do create a help section or a discussion forum for topics related to your niche and allow your visitors to post queries.
To manage this section, you may need to put in some extra effort but it would invariably lead to a lot of relevant content threads building up. Many of the queries you are likely to receive would be very close to exact searches people are making on the internet.
A discussion thread on a focus keyword with hundreds of questions and answers will invariably figure up in search rankings. Add to it, when you answer queries in the threads, you can push internal links of other content, infographics, videos, etc. in the answers. As people discover your website through your forum, you are likely to get many organic backlinks.
Create Valuable Research-Driven Content
When you are looking to quickly gain a lot of high-quality links, you should have extremely valuable content present on your site that people feel compelled to link back to. Some of these include research papers, detailed guides, surveys, blueprint documents, etc.
Surveys and research reports are one of the surest ways to get high-quality links from reputed sites including top news sites. To create such content you need to first focus on creating a survey or initiating a research initiative on a pressing topic. For example, a specialized hair transplant clinic can conduct a survey amongst 100 people who have undergone a transplant about how their social life improved after the transplant. Once it has the survey data, it can create a detailed report based on the insights gained from the survey and publish it on its website. At the same time, it should email a summary of the report to different local news outlets and media portals with a link to access the report from its website. A well-done survey or research report invariably gets picked up by the press, hungry for catchy stories and interesting facts.
Newsletter and Email Marketing
It is important to build up a subscriber base for ensuring your content marketing efforts reach a sizable audience. You can place newsletter signups options in between your blog posts, and other important pieces of content on your site. Especially if you are offering content for download, ensure that people enter their email ids before accessing them.
Over time, you will build up a substantial subscriber base. However, you need to keep nurturing them by sharing interesting content. Email marketing becomes the core driver for ensuring such content reaches your subscribers in a timely manner. Plan out a newsletter schedule and publish regularly. If possible, get the help of marketing automation software to send different newsletters to different audience groups based on their engagement with your content. Use all kinds of content that you have created including blog posts, videos, report snippets, etc. to enrich your newsletters.
Some of your subscribers are likely to be individuals who have their personal blogs or are associated with news sites or even mainstream press. Not everyone has the time to regularly visit your site, but if they discover an interesting piece of content via your newsletter, there is a good possibility they may like to cover it and link back to your website.
Pro Tip: Newsletters need to be well designed and showcase brand elements in an aesthetic manner. It is always advisable to get a professional to design several newsletter templates for your business.
PR and Media Outreach
Many small firms and individual-driven brands do not actively engage in public relations and media outreach. It is a mistaken belief that the media only covers large brands and celebrities. To be true, media outlets, both digital and traditional ones are in the hunt for interesting stories, strange facts and insights, and messages that can resonate with their audiences. The trick involves creating interesting nuggets of information that media outlets would be interested to cover.
Even done to death press releases can be made interesting if you put in a bit more effort rather than just push out templated messages. For example, if you are planning to release a press release related to a new SaaS product you are launching, it may make sense for you to provide a catchy infographic attached with a problem the platform is expected to solve.
Reaching out to local media outlets can present you with an interesting opportunity to quickly build up your popularity. It may take you a great deal of effort to get showcased but the end results would most likely justify the effort. Create interesting video and interview series which are more easily picked up by local media outlets. You can even include interviews with your clients who were positively impacted by using your product or service. For example, an interior decorator firm can showcase the story of an old restaurant that got a new vibe and more footfalls after renovating its interiors to a futuristic theme. It possibly ended up saving jobs and highlighting such a human angle can make your story feature connect easily with media outlets.
Public Speaking and Events – Build a Loyal Fan base
Engaging in public speaking and participating in events is one of the surest ways of engaging with your current and prospective customers and turning them into loyal fans. This is not only important for individual driven businesses but for any firm that is looking to build a strong brand connect with its audience. Successful events and speeches are typically well covered by media, social influencers, bloggers etc. and they can get you high-quality backlinks.
When it comes to public speaking, you may initially need to create opportunities for yourself. Coordinate with organizations who are hosting events in your niche and request them for a speaking spot. Alternately you can hold digital webinars or fireside chats under your own brand and bring in known people to pique the interest of local media and bloggers. If your speeches are well received, you may be surprised to find invites for paid speeches and workshops at events conducted by industry associations or companies. Whenever you get such an opportunity, try to make the most of it by distributing your marketing collateral and encouraging people to reach out to you for any help. Speaking engagements can lead to positive word-of-mouth referrals and help you generate valuable business leads.
Companies can consider hosting annual events for their customers and fans. The same is equally true for launch events which are eagerly awaited by loyal customers. Of late digital events are becoming increasingly popular as they allow a lot of people to participate. Make sure when you are conducting a large-scale digital event, you do send out invites to people who continue to associate with you. These would include your customers, subscribers, prospects, etc. To increase participation in your events, you can offer free merchandise, discount coupons, etc. through your website to those who join the online event.
Pro Tip: Create an event page on your website and encourage your fans to share it on their social handles and friends. Also consider bringing a celebrity to participate in your company event, even if he/she can be present only digitally. The presence of a celebrity can quickly trigger the interest of the local press and gain you tons of quality backlinks.
Final Thoughts
With proper effort and passion you can become an authority in a specific niche. The trick is to provide exceptional value to your audience and remain helpful. If you are able to successfully showcase your brand as something special, you will be surprised how easily you will get quality links.
Author’s bio:
Blake Bobit has been an entrepreneur and business owner for over 25 years. He founded Solution Scout to provide the most helpful answers to questions about business solutions. Blake has helped businesses in many industries nationwide and enjoys the challenge of staying up-to-date on all things HubSpot.