17 Ways To Create Authority With Your Audience
When it comes to creating authority, there are certain factors that can allow you to build trust and bonding with your audience where you can eventually develop them into your own tribe.
When you have your own online tribe, this is when things can become lucrative for you.
It’s a main reason that drives experts and gurus to continually work on building up their own tribes.
Now it’s your turn.
But to get to that point, you need to take into consideration the elements that contribute to giving you an authoritative profile in the mind’s eye of your audience.
The kind of authority we’re talking about does not require you to be a TV celebrity since that level of celebrity status is out of reach for most of us not being household names.
However, you can still achieve a celebrity-like profile in your own niche. And, that is something you can share with your audience which many will respond to when you instill these 17 ways to create authority into your own personal branding.
Let’s take a look at each of them:
1. Share Your Background
One of the first things you’ll want to do is share your background to prove you are credible to be trusted by your audience. This will further prove why they should listen to you and opens up a good line of communication when connecting with them.
You’ll want to let them know who you are and how you arrived at the point of wanting to connect with them. Then literally tell them why they should listen to you.
By you telling them, it reinforces the “why” and is very powerful.
2. Create A Platform For Yourself
A big help on creating a platform for yourself with your audience is by getting a conversation going on your audience’s topic that you are well-versed on. Maybe you’re an expert or someone who simply knows more on the topic than they do at their level.
In any case, do not speak above their heads. Instead, approach things in a conversational tone with them so they’ll bring their guard down and let your ideas flow to them with less resistance.
This will break the ice and help create the platform you will speak from whether in email, audio, video or live in person.
You can think of it as if you are speaking to just one person or customer avatar in the crowd. Make it personal to one person as you are speaking to all of them at once and you will come of much more realistic to their expectations.
Doing this will help make your platform count when you go to address their concerns, thus, adding to your authority in their eyes.
3. Be Consistent
Being consistent and staying visible to your audience at all times breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds trust.
Now of course being consistently visibly does not mean all day, every day. What it does mean is staying visible enough with all the other noise out there that you don’t get lost or forgotten in the crowd.
In today’s busy-body social media driven internet, people can forget you easier than ever before.
So, you have to keep resurfacing and continue on with your message to break through and stay noticed. And by doing that, you will lose some followers along the way that may not like or want to continue on with your message.
However, you don’t want them in your tribe anyway. Just let them go quietly and keep focusing on the members who want to listen to your message and remember, be consistent.
4. Be Unique
To be unique and make yourself different enough to stand out from the crowd makes you become noticeable. But to be unique, you don’t have to be born special.
All you have to do many times is go the extra mile the other guy isn’t willing to go or simply has not gone where you will.
Then exploit that one thing and show the comparison between you and the competition.
They’ll love you for it.
5. Create Your Own Voice
When it comes to creating your own voice you are going to have to be willing to write in your own way, speak in your own way, create presentations in your own way.
But, by being yourself, you will develop your own voice just by doing. It’s usually those who are not willing to put themselves out there who are invisible.
Your own voice, though you may not think is special, will mean something else to other people.
And remember, your voice will be found as unique to those who like your message and thus you can develop your own voice in your own niche without being some creative genius. (Though any of that will help when you have a ray or two of genius hit )
6. Present Your Own Opinions
It’s a real authority booster when you can present your opinions in ways that stand for something you believe in. However, whether your audience is new to the idea or not, you don’t want to shock them with your opinions unless you can back things up and even sway their thinking on it.
But people really like new spirited ideas sometimes, and if you can align it to your audience, then you can experience a nice boost in your authority by standing up for what you believe in your opinions, especially when it can help your audience too.
7. Be A ‘Go To’ Helper
Be a ‘go to guy’ (or gal). When you are seen as good resource for helping people in your niche where they can trust you to answer their questions and solve their problems, you are on your way to developing your tribe.
Once they get a taste of your wisdom as the solution to their problems they’ll begin listening to you with trained ears. They will also buy your recommendations.
There’s not many better ways to start transforming your audience into diehard tribe members than solving their problems with your solutions. So become a good ‘go to’ helper and the word will travel fast.
8. Parallel Yourself With Experts In Your Field
Parallel yourself with experts in your field. Interview them to create a connection that will manufacture authority I the eyes of your audience as a byproduct.
Even write your own book and put it on Amazon.com can create good authority. In fact, you can interview an expert and turn that into a book. A plus factor of using an interview as content for a book is you don’t really have to write a separate book because the interview becomes the book.
You could have 4 versions of it. The audio interview, the hard cover book printed interview and the Kindle digital printed version. And let’s not forget the PDF version of the interview.
Expert interviews are still very popular and have not gone out of style and never will.
9. Present Case Studies
Presenting case studies that show proof of something you want your audience to know
about is powerful.
Case studies are seen as extremely valuable as stand-alone products or even as bonus incentives. Simply put, they carry clout and people look at case study documents with careful eyes and respect.
10. Do Guest Blog Posts On Authority Sites
Here’s a way to some niche fame with your own spotlight. Do guest blog posts on authority sites that will exhibit you as an expert in your area and as well get you authority backlink traffic coming back to your site.
What you can do to find guest blog posts to write for is by searching like this:
“write for us + your niche”
Put that search phrase in Google to start doing some guest blog posts.
11. Pitch less to your audience and teach more
Try to pitch less offers to your audience and teach more instead. What most likely will happen is your followers will buy more through your teaching and this will also boost the trust-bonding.
The reason is, people mainly buy when the recommendation presented appears more valuable than the money they are paying for it with.
This is a win win when you can trade real value for money.
This is also what building authority and developing your own tribe is all about.
12. Be Sincere
Being sincere will speak volumes for you in its own identifying voice without you looking insincere. Offer your personality as you are… be yourself but be honest and it will cast you as a sincere person that people feel safe with.
And then people feel safe with your then they buy from you more as your authority rises in their eyes.
13. Use Social Media To Build Trust
Another best way to build authority is to be consistently visible on important social media sites. That means posting on the main social sites and having a presence there.
You can get Likes and Shares which an also go viral keeping you visible in your niche market place.
In today’s internet, it’s impossible to expect to be visible and build authority while not having a social media presence.
14. Find Common Ground With Your Audience
No matter which medium you choose to address your audience, it’s important that you find common ground with them and reach out with shared values.
This will keep a good line of communication going between you and them by letting them know you are one of them.
Sharing a common ground with your audience is another great way to bond with them and is extremely important in gaining authority with your audience.
15. Seek To Be Generous
Always seek to be generous with your audience. Remember there are real people on your list and not just email names. They are people on the other side of the screen you are communicating with.
So, be generous with your knowledge and give away some of your best stuff. It will only bring you 10 fold back as you build your tribe.
16. Have A Professional Web Presence
This one is almost needless to elaborate on however many are still getting it wrong.
Having a professional web presence does not only mean having a Facebook business page.
It also means having a You Tube Channel and other various social media platforms in place with your presence.
But here’s where many are still missing it. They don’t have a correlating blog as their main hub and that is something they need.
So you need to have your own web presence and that means your own site too.
It simply boosts your authority higher than the ones who leave this important piece of the puzzle out.
17. Under-promise And Over-deliver
It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver. This is a real booster to your credibility and authority when people see you come through with the good you promise.
However, never make the mistake of over over-promising on things you can’t deliver, because that’s a serious number one authority and credibility buster.
There you have it.
17 ways you can connect with your audience bringing newfound confidence to the table that can elevate you up to the authority level you deserve and desire.
And, you can do it by helping people get where they want to go without selling them on the idea, but instead leading them to their destination using your authority that they can trust and identify with.
Now go build your own tribe using these 17 ways.
