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I just completed a Google search for the phrase “How to Become an Authority Blogger” and OMG, it generated 14,200,000 results. Say whaat…
No shame here. But I too would you like to learn how to create a profitable authority blog in any niche that converts? Starting today!
“A blog with a business backend (i.e. products to sell and a method to sell them) is the key to a six-figure income as a blogger.” ~ David RisleyClick To TweetHere’s the thing.
Writing a blog has become something that a lot of people have embarked on since blogging became more popular around 2002, a particularly big year for blogging. Today, owning a blog gives you the potential to reach many people globally.
It also gives you the chance to make money or just do something you really enjoy and have a passion for. I possess a deep-rooted desire to create an impact and make a difference in the lives of all those with whom I come into contact.
Accordingly, I personally set a goal to create My Online Business Empire, to facilitate those objectives. The simple formula that’s employed:
Blog + Email List + Digital Products = My Online Business Empire
What Is an Authority Blog?
An authority blog or an authority site is one of the main places people go to for information on a particular niche or topic.
One of the main characteristics of an authority site is it has more content or pages than any other site in that niche.
A 100,000-word website is a reasonable initial goal to become an authority blogger. To achieve this, you need 50 articles assuming an average article length of 2000 words each.
100,000 Words = 50 Articles x 2000 Words
But before we get ahead of ourselves, have you always wanted to make your own blog but didn’t know how to start?
Let’s cover this next.
How Do I Start Blogging?
Building a successful online business can be confusing and overwhelming. Here’s my simple 10-step process.
- Find Your Profitable Blogging Niche
- Choose the Perfect Domain Name
- Pick A Fast & Secure Web Hosting Provider
- Select A Dynamic Content Management System
- Launch with A Premium Theme & Website Design
- Create Content That Converts
- Promote Your Content Via Social Media Marketing
- Get Traffic to Your Website
- Start Growing Your Email List
- Make Money Blogging
“Without investing the time and energy to properly build your skills, your reach will always exceed your grasp.”
~ Melanie Duncan
The Struggle to Become an Authority Blogger
It’s a fact that one of the many ways to communicate with your audience is via a blog. Actually, there are over 600 million blogs in the world today, out of over 1.7 billion websites.
Yet, the stark reality is that many aspiring bloggers out there failed to ever become an authority blogger in their niche. Now, we don’t want that to happen to you.
Creating a blog surrounding a topic that is in high demand and becoming an authority has immeasurable benefits.
Not only are you able to share with the world, solutions to their problems, but you are also able to monetize it.
However, with that said, one of the many mistakes bloggers make is focusing on the monetization of the blog first. Rather, they should be fully absorbed in building it up in creating authority first.
But how do you go about creating authority?
Obviously, the authority has nothing to do with wielding a hammer; it’s the ability to gain trust by providing immense value.
Would you like to learn how to do that?
Would you like to learn how to create an authority blog that provides a continuous profit stream? And more importantly, would you like to learn how to ensure that you have unlimited amounts of in-demand topics to talk about?
Hence, I must ask: ‘What’s your passion?’
Benefits of Blogging Your Passion
- Just imagine being able to earn passive income, that requires little to no daily effort to maintain. In other words, your money will flow in even as you’re sleeping, traveling, or relaxing on the beach with family.
- You’re no longer exchanging hours for dollars and this is the point you need to get to if you want to really be free and financially independent.
- When you become an authority blogger, it means you get to earn that money by writing on a topic that you’re passionate about.
- Blogging is exceptionally scalable, particularly as there’s no ‘upper limit’ for what you can achieve. You can certainly create more margin for those who matter most and make a difference if you launch successfully.
There are many more benefits of blogging. However, let’s now dive in to learn a few good tips regarding how to become an authority blogger!
Find A Profitable Blog Niche
“Don’t blog about everything. Find a niche that you can dive deeply into and help others along the way. When people come to your site, they need to know why they are there. Don’t let your readers lose themselves between recipes, travel posts, and the best toys for Christmas. The riches are in the niches.” ~ Suzi @ StartAMomBlog
In Niche by Number, Suzi teaches 9 Steps to Finding Your Perfect Niche. You can also use Suzi’s infographic below as a reference for choosing a profitable blog niche.
Source: StartAMomBlog
Make sure that you have found a focus for your posts. Doing this means you’re much more likely to connect with an audience that has a real appreciation for your topics. This strategy can also help you to build a community around your blog.
Clearly you don’t have to stick to this niche forever, but it means you can solidify what you’re writing and who that’s for early on. Once you’ve built up a good audience, you can begin to cover more ideas and topics in your posts. Nevertheless, starting small is extremely beneficial.
Choose the Best Blogging Platform
“We believe that WordPress.org outperforms all other blogging sites. It is powerful, easy to use, affordable, and the most flexible of all available blogging platforms.” ~ Syed Balkhi @ WPBeginner
WordPress has evolved throughout the years into a powerful website builder and a robust content management system (CMS).
Without question, my favorite part about WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough to make different types of websites. This blogging tool has grown so much in popularity for this main reason.
According to a recent survey, WordPress powers 32.3% of all websites on the internet.
Other blogging platforms include Medium, Wix, Squarespace, Blogger, Tumblr, etc. Therefore, regarding the many options out there, it’s still best to do your research before jumping straight into one.
WPBeginner has multiple posts comparing various different well-known blogging platforms. Simply choose the best one for your purpose and the sort of content you intend to be producing.
Related: How to Set Up Google Analytics
Consistency Is the Core Strategy
“Showing up daily is key to setting your blog up for success. Especially if you’re just starting out, your goal is to build up your content repository and increase your traffic. Blog every day, if you can. Blog once a week, if that’s more realistic. The important thing is consistency.” ~ Rhiza Oyos @ The Purpose Blog
People often look for blogs that they know they can rely on to deliver the content they’re after. As a result of this, posting consistently is key if you truly desire to become an authority blogger! It is important to stay motivated in your approach to blogging as this is how you keep your writing strong, interesting, and to the point.
Once you’ve got hold of your process, you can obviously always increase the amount that you’re posting. You’re likely to be able to develop a flow and also begin to find generating blog ideas a bit simpler.
Consistency and regularity also mean you can start showing where your interests are and your writing style very quickly. In the end, you can build an audience that enjoys your style straight away.
Develop A First-Rate Content Marketing Strategy
Your content marketing strategy is going to bring more customers to your doorstep (physically or virtually) by giving them a reason to visit your website, follow your social media accounts, or subscribe to your newsletter or podcast.~ Becky Zieber @ DigitalMarketer
Ensuring that your content is also on autopilot is partially a continuation of the previous point. Employ the use of an editorial calendar because having a good schedule is key to being able to maintain your consistency.
The 12-Week Year Strategy is an aggressive tactic to fill your content calendar for the entire year. Alternatively, the 3-Step Perpetual Content Calendar is a way to pump out good content without spending every waking hour sitting at the keyboard, staring into a microphone, or standing in front of a camera. It incorporates ideation, production, and splintering.
Being able to schedule effectively means you will appear reliable to your readers and you also have a good idea of what you need to work on. Furthermore, if your blog grows then you may start employing content writers to write for you.
- You’ll be able to keep track of what everyone’s working on at any time.
- You can see what they’re writing so you can make sure it’s exactly how you want it (both, in tone and content).
Related: 10 Time-Saving Blogging Tools You Need To Use
Use Habits to Achieve Your Goals
“Great results don’t just happen. You don’t usually drift to a destination you would have chosen. Instead, you have to be intentional, force yourself to get clear on what you want and why it’s important, and then pursue a plan of action that accomplishes your objective.” ~ Michael @ Michael Hyatt & Co.
Many of us have watched from the sidelines as Michael Hyatt showed us how to become an authority blogger. He has devoted his life to pursue excellence, in himself and in others. Students who have been through his course, 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever, know that to realize your dreams, you must reduce them to written goals that meet the SMARTER standard.
By that, he means they are specific, measurable, actionable, risky, time-keyed, exciting, and relevant.
There are a million ways to achieve your dreams. Developing habits that serve your goals is one you can add to your portfolio and put to work today.
To become an authority blogger, it’s good to have an idea of what you ultimately want to achieve with it. There are many reasons why you’d want to start a blog.
These can include:
- Just being able to explore your writing style.
- Wanting to cover a topic previously ignored.
- To make money.
- To keep your audience informed.
- Or anything else you want!
Possessing a clear focus can give you more direction when you’re writing. Particularly, in terms of how you design your blog and the posts you upload to it.
Additionally, having clear written goals can help you to stay motivated even when your numbers aren’t necessarily going up. Understand that’s not all you should be focused on when blogging – it should be more about the enjoyment of creating the content itself.
You’re much likely to achieve your goals by practicing this one simple habit: write them down.
Related: How to Set Effective Blog Goals
Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content
“Learn how to leverage the power of SEO so you can turn your blog into a powerful traffic-generating, income-producing, list-building machine without the expensive tools, massive overwhelm, or pumping out new blog posts every single day!” ~ Mike Pearson @ StupidSimpleSEO
Effectively using SEO is paramount if you want to become an authority blogger. In order to climb up the rankings in Google, you need to step up your SEO game.
The idea of SEO is to design your website and write in a way that is going to gain you more organic traffic from search engine results. SEO relies heavily on keywords and categories.
Sprinkle keywords throughout your post that match the intent of your target audience. Then you’d be able to focus the rest of your post on keeping those readers there!
While SEO mainly focuses on the number of readers, it also looks at the quality of the people coming to your site. These are the people most likely to keep returning and who will interact the most with your posts.
By simply following the on-page SEO checklist below, you will quickly start to bring in more search engine traffic month after month.
Source: TheSavvyCouple.com
As your website grows, so should your goals on search engines. Then you’ll be able to do some link building to get other websites to link back to your blog.
Build A Community Around Your Blog
“With so many bloggers and blog posts storming in every day, it is hard to stand out. The secret to creating an outstanding blog is to cultivate a community around it. A strong community of fans then helps to generate new traffic to your blog.” ~ Darren Rowse @ ProBlogger
All successful blogs are communities and if you want to become an authority blogger, something that will grant you financial freedom, and something that will help countless people then you must create a community out of your blog.
Your blog should be a community of users, not just a place to host content.
Building a community can refer to two separate ideas. The first is that you build a network of readers. These are people who read your blog posts and with whom you can interact within the comments section of your post. These are the folks who are truly interested in what you have to say.
Getting your community to stay loyal to your blog long term, however, can be somewhat challenging, but certainly not impossible.
Your responsibility as a blogger is to make your first-time visitors and readers fall in love with your blog and content.
Yeah, you read that right.
As such, it really depends on how much value, resource, compassion, creativity, incentives, and perhaps a little humor from time to time, you are able to provide through your blog.
Secondly, you can build a network between yourself and other bloggers – whether they’re writing in a similar industry as you or not. Having these networks can be extremely helpful in supporting and motivating you throughout your journey.
Can you become an authority blogger without having a community?
You probably can. That said, building a blogging community is pretty important and an essential strategy that no blogger should ignore. Sure, it takes some time, none of it will happen by magic overnight, and you have to put in the effort.
“Succeeding in business is all about making connections.”
~Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin
Publish Quality Content That Gets Blog Readers
“Your reader personas should ultimately decide what types of blog posts you produce. You may have a preference for one type over another, but, unfortunately, you are not your own target audience. Your readers should make that decision for you.” ~ Allie Decker @ HubSpot
Being able to write in a way that both provides quality and information to people is important. Publishing quality content is a proven way to grow your blog audience and eventually become an authority blogger.
Yet, if most of what you’re writing is ‘waffle’ then you’re less likely to be able to keep people interested in your articles. Consequently, you may struggle to build up a loyal audience who enjoy reading what you’re talking about.
Regardless of what type of content you choose to create, always keep these questions in mind:
- What are your reader personas actually searching for?
- What is the intent behind their searches?
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- Which type of blog post makes them click, read, or comment?
While being the most informative may not be your original intention, it is important to have some useful knowledge or advice in your posts so people can go to them for help!
That’s why…
It’s a no-brainer that content is the major currency of blogs. As the first step to become an authority blogger, I would definitely focus on creating content in the first 3-6 months.
Honestly, if you ask me, I’d say, forget social media, forget email list building, just write good quality articles to build a body of content that is quickly indexed by the search engines. You can always go back and optimize those posts later to attract new readers.
Creating a Blog Post Format that Converts
“When you spend a fair amount of time crafting that blog post, you want it to count. You want people to read it. You want people to share it. You want to get some traffic from it.” ~ David Risley @ BlogMarketingAcademy
Next, while ensuring you have quality writing is important, it’s also important to make sure that your posts are easy to read and understand. Obviously don’t make it too simple for your audience.
Here’s the template/layout which I personally use for all of my blog posts:
- Compelling Headline
- Relevant Featured Image
- Free PDF of Post
- Thrilling Lead Paragraph
- Anchor Quote
- Share My Personal Experience
- Shareable Pinterest Image
- Educational / Informative Main Body
- Provide Internal Links to Related Posts
- Fun / Interesting Video
- Sprinkle Outbound Links to High-Quality Authority Posts
- Link to A Useful Product (include images)
- Free Resource to Capture Emails
- Discussion Question to Encourage Comments
Yet, it’s always important to write in a way that beginners can understand. This will make it easy for them to get into your writing and begin to learn more from you.
11 Smart Ways to Start a Blog Post
- Identify Something That’s Essential
- Feature A Captivating Photo
- Share A Personal Story
- Engage the Reader’s Imagination
- Takeoff with Quotes
- Ask an Intriguing Question
- Provide a Promise
- Make a Provocative Statement
- Employ Statistics
- Say Something Startling
- Create Tension
Write Better Blog Posts Using Great Sentences
- Put the Most Important Word in a Sentence Last
- Focus on Verbs
- Remove as Many Prepositions as Possible
- In Almost Every Sentence, Get to the Subject-Verb Quickly
- Experiment with “Branching” Sentences
Source: StartAMomBlog
Write an Epic Blog P.O.S.T to Rank High in Google
- Purpose: Create a catchy headline to grab your target reader’s attention.
- Outline: Write the outline before you start writing.
- Scannable: Break up your blog post into sub-headlines and short paragraphs.
- Teaser: Teasing future content can inspire readers to subscribe to your blog.
Source: BloggingYourPassion
21 Ways to Write Posts to Become an Authority Blogger
- Write something useful
- Write something unique
- Write something newsworthy
- Write something first
- Write something that makes those who read it smarter
- Write something controversial
- Write something insightful
- Write something that taps into a fear people have
- Write something that helps people achieve
- Write something that elicits a response
- Write something that gives a sense of belonging
- Write something passionately
- Write something that interprets or translates news for people
- Write something inspirational
- Write something that tells a story
- Write something that solves a problem
- Write something that gets a laugh
- Write something that saves people time or money
- Write something opinionated
- Write something that is a resource
- Write something about something ‘cool ‘
Source: ProBlogger
If you make your topics or content too complex then you may run the risk of deterring some potential readers who otherwise would have been interested in your work.
Ensuring you write in a way that doesn’t patronize but does give good information is a difficult balance to reach. However, it’s one that’s important in order to appeal to the biggest audience within your niche.
And remember, while you’re creating your beautiful blog posts, you can also use your blog posts to sell stuff. Just make certain that you absolutely crush the ending of your blog post.
Related: How to Write A Blog Post
Use Competitive Analysis to Make Your Blog Irresistible
“Knowing what works for your competitors is the surest way to confirm your own ideas for marketing, and to weed out time-consuming plans destined to fall flat.” ~ Sherry Gray @ Entrepreneur
It’s extremely key to be able to identify who your competition blogs or websites are in order to keep your content fresh, relevant, and focused. Understanding what other people are talking about and discussing means you’re not going to be writing on topics that are too similar.
We are all competitors, contending to convert readers into leads, and ultimately into paying customers. From the blog topics and keywords your competitors are blogging about to the headlines that drive the most shares on social media, these are the things you can model from your competitors’ blogs:
- The Aspects of Blogging Strategy That Work Best
- Particular Types of Content That are the Most Engaging
- Inbound Linking Opportunities
- Sign up for Your Competitors Mailing Lists
How to spy on your competitors’ social media marketing strategies? Obviously, this doesn’t mean copying everything they’re writing about, but you can gain an understanding of what your target audience is looking for.
Yet, let me be abundantly clear: I am not proposing that directly stealing content from your competitor’s blog is a good idea – in fact, that is a terrible idea.
However, effectively using these tactics, you can see what people are interested in reading about, and then you can follow that style but rebrand. It’s an approach that I personally call – duplicate but innovate.
Related: How to Use Your Competitors Sites to Your Advantage
Write First for Yourself
“How do you write honest and compelling content that will change people’s lives? Easy. Write for yourself. It will release you to write what you really need to write — the good, honest material that will truly move people (starting with you).~ Jeff Goins @ GoinsWriter
There is an old saying: “What comes from the heart reaches the heart.” The idea of ‘writing for yourself first’ is that you are more likely to write better content if you write something that you’d enjoy reading yourself.
Just think about it.
Doing this means you’ll be able to attract people with similar thought processes, senses of humor, and interests, etc. When you write content pleasing yourself, you create value not just for yourself but also for others.
Focus on creating content that brings satisfaction to you first. Your readers will eventually benefit from it and they’ll likely crave much more of what you produce.
This is opposed to writing content that will appeal to a larger audience. Because while you may reach further, you’re running a high risk of not finding people who are interested in what you’re saying specifically.
The example above represents an instance of why some bloggers believe writing for yourself, not your audience is terrible advice. Specifically, a reader who’s not your ideal avatar lands on your post and then quickly moves on without you having the chance to build a solid relationship with them.
Related: Link Building – Without the SEO Risks
We’re not through yet.
Just in case you got hit with my curveball and are now left trying to figure out what is the strategy for creating compelling content that converts:
Write for yourself, but always consider your audience!
Listen to Your Audience for Great Content Strategy
“If you listen closely, you’ll know what your customers want you to write.” ~ Mindy Weinstein @ SearchEngineJournal
Finally, it is important to listen to ideas from your audience.
These are your true fans. Here’s your community. In fact, this is your target audience that you carefully researched before launching your blog and now supporting you through your entrepreneur’s journey. Therefore, listening to what they’re asking for is extremely important.
- Agree to Learn by Listening
- Use Listening Tools to Help You
- Apply What You Learned
- Move from Strategy to Execution
Clearly, still being able to write what you want is key but listening to your audience is a really good place to find inspiration. Consider such strategies as:
- Using Surveys
- Monitoring Analytics
- Social Listening
Number 2 above involves analyzing which of your posts had the most positive reaction then writing something along those same lines.
It’s especially useful when you’re struggling to decide what to publish next as a follow up from the previous post, which hopefully garnered lots of engagement.
Related: Create Content That Your Audience Craves
Conclusion
After sharing many secrets from pro bloggers about how to become an authority blogger, I still feel like I’ve left a lot unsaid. A blog can be more than just a way of advancing your online presence. It can be a way of advancing your life… a platform you create to leave a legacy that outlives you.
However, you don’t need to know everything before you start a blog!
Here’s why.
There’s a low barrier to entry, you don’t need to be a degree holder, you don’t need years of experience, and you don’t even need big capital. Once your blog starts to grow:
- Invest in Yourself
- Invest in Your Team
- Invest in Your Products
- Invest in Your Marketing
- Invest in Your Community
But if you wait until you’re ready, you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life. I strongly suggest that you start today.
Questions: Do you have any other blogging tips and tricks to become an authority blogger? Have a case study to share? I would love to hear from you, so let me know in the comments
Recommended Reading:
=> 16 Things That Turn An Ordinary Blog Into An Authority Website
=> 20 Different Blog Post Ideas.
=> How to Build a Blog to Over 1 Million Monthly Visitors
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