He was in dire financial straits. So in sheer desperation, Jeff Walker turned to the internet and started selling investment advice. Starting with all of 19 email addresses, he has since built a multimillion-dollar business around his Product Launch Formula.
Along the way, Walker has also helped other businesses including Foundr launch their own products and rake in millions. He’s now considered an authority in the product launch space and his advice and services are highly sought after.
It’s a noisy and chaotic world out there, and yet, Jeff Walker still managed to carve out a niche for himself in which he is an authority, and starting with relatively little at his disposal. Why is building authority so important when establishing your business?
Because authority attracts attention, communicates credibility, and inspires action.
Without authority, your voice is just a whisper. With authority, you don’t have to shout to be heard. People seek you out and consume everything you offer.
So how do you get authority? How do you go from being a nobody to becoming an obvious go-to person?
There are two important pieces—gaining proof of authority and exerting it. Consider two academics—both spend years studying, but only one of them steps forward to appear in public talks, publish in top journals, and connect with media. Only one will become an authority.
That means to build authority quickly, you need to gain knowledge and experience while putting yourself in the right contexts that suggest that authority. This combined with the right psychological techniques can set off a chain reaction that will position you as a respected expert in your field.
So how do you build authority quickly when just starting out online? In this post, we will examine 15 ways to help you build your authority and exert it when starting out online.
1. Develop your origin story
We know that people love stories. In fact, they are hardwired for it.
People are also curious—they want to know where people and stuff come from.
What does that have to do with authority? When people don’t know you or your business or where you come from, it makes it very hard for you to show up with presence or authority. You’re a shadowy unknown instead of a human being.
That’s why it’s important to share your origin story.
Your origin story provides true credibility. It’s also a way to reveal your motivations. In other words, why it is you do what you do.
Consider the origins of these companies.
charity: water got started by a nightclub promoter who decided to throw a kickass birthday party.
Google got started by two Stanford nerds in a dorm room obsessing over an algorithm.
Courtesy of Unsplash
Each of these companies had a very humble origin story before they became household names.
Why does it matter?
As a business or innovator you are doing something that is new or different and you will face doubt in people’s minds. Imagine you’re speaking to potential customers, and all these questions are racing through their minds.
Are you for real?
What are you talking about and why do you care about it?
What do you want?
Who are you to offer this product or service?
In other words, you are facing doubt, or worse, disbelief and cynicism. These will need to be addressed if your audience is going to hear what you are offering.
For another good example, Jacques Torres’ origin story is an inspiring example of the start-up experience, which also provides inspiration and simulation.
How to apply this to your business
You need to ground your message in what is real and what your audience knows to be true. Take them into your past circumstances to build a bond with them. Explain the story of your struggles, obstacles, or fears and the hardships you have faced.
Tell them the story of your search to prove that you are a credible expert. Share the details of what you have gone through to master your craft. Paint a picture of what success looks like to inspire your audience and get them to ask you—where do we sign up?
2. Share your mission and vision
You can always demonstrate your expertise and performance, but to become an authority in your niche, you need to let people know why you do what you do. Not just what you do. Consider Copyblogger, I quit sugar or our very own Foundr Magazine.
The key ingredient to their success at building authority is expressing the mission they are on. Their audiences see that they really care about their subject matter, and that leads to a certain level of trust in what they’re putting forth.
So share your mission.
What do you believe that drives your business? What is the core message that you need to share with the rest of the world? What difference are you trying to make?
Share that with the world, and it will lift your business from being just another face in the crowd to the heartbeat of a movement.
Even if you’re a wizard in your field, that still doesn’t guarantee that people will remember you after watching that video or reading that blog post. But people do remember and get behind movements.
It’s the reason people still refer to Apple’s ad and why Nike has become a worldwide sportswear company. They represent something aspirational and bigger than themselves.
It’s also the reason that your business will evolve into something that truly matters and become an authority in your field.
How to apply this to your business:
Create a mission statement. For example, consider the mission statement of Starbucks Coffee: To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.
Or that of Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
These statements give people a sense of what drives these brands, giving them an air of authority and respectability that they might not achieve for simply making a nice cup of coffee. Then foster an environment that reflects the mission, through customer and team activities and engagement.
Write a bold manifesto. You can send a fierce message about what drives you and what you’re seeking to accomplish in your work with a manifesto. Writing a manifesto is also a great way to clarify your beliefs and examine your motivations, create and express the principles that guide your business, and articulate your goals and vision.
A few manifesto’s worth checking out are:
279 days to overnight success
The expert enough manifesto
Wrecked for the ordinary
Chris Guillebeau’s “A Brief Guide to World Domination: The Art of Non-Conformity” also stands out, as it outlines his views of the world and our roles in it, which run counter to traditional lines of thinking. It sets the stage for a paradigm shift and made Chris something of a celebrity in his niche.
3. Make a human connection with your audience
Picture a bicycle store owner who shows a customer a series of helmets for her teenage son. He goes through the details of each of the helmets and even demonstrates the features. The customer seems unsure and looks like she is about to leave.
Then the store owner pulls out his iPhone to show the customer what one of the mid-range helmets looks like in action. He bought one for his son, whom he had taken on a recent mountain bike challenge. In that moment, the customer makes up her mind up saying, “If you think it is good enough for your kids, then it must be good enough for mine.”
Someone who has faced similar circumstances and challenges is always more believable because we share that sense of connection. Customers don’t want just to be persuaded, they want to believe.
To build authority, we can’t just provide a logical message, because people really buy with their hearts.
Coca-Cola uses this premise extensively in its advertising.
When launching in Colombia, they used a campaign in which college freshmen received bottles of Coke on their first day on campus. The caps to the bottles, however, could only be opened when clicked together with another cap. This forced students to collaborate to open their bottles of Coke and started conversations between strangers on a day when students usually don’t know many people and are often lonely.
For the students who participated in the campaign, the brand could have played an important role by making freshmen meet. So apart from helping diminish the awkwardness of the day, Coca-Cola could be directly associated with the start of important friendships and thereby joyful and lasting memories.
How to apply this to your business
Continuing with the Coca-Cola example, consider some of the ways they have directed their message to their customer avatars and engaged them over the years:
Embed storytelling: They used storytelling to create emotional content while weaving its brand deep into the story for the 2014 Soccer World Cup.
Personalize the experience: Coca-Cola produced bottles with people’s names on it.
4. Strive to be unique
Tea shops can be found on just about every other street in China. So peering into a specialized tea shop in Beijing, I was expecting to see racks of teabags behind a glass counter. They didn’t have any of that.
Instead, I saw three people drinking tea under the glow of a warm yellow light. They were chatting around an irregularly shaped wooden table that looked like it had been taken straight from the set of The Hobbit. The table had teapots and cups of different shapes and sizes. Off to the side was a wooden shelf with teapots of different styles.
Noticing us, a man smiled and said, “We drink tea every afternoon. Want to come in and sit with us?”
The two men and woman at the table seemed like ordinary folk from the neighborhood enjoying tea and a chat. Not having received the sales pitch we were expecting, we were disarmed and sat on wooden stools around the table.
Courtesy of Unsplash
The man handed each of us a tea cup with only a mouthful of warm Oolong tea. Tea that seemed quite different to tea we had before, in that it felt smooth and relaxing.
I started asking about the array of teapots and cups on the table. The man showed how he used them. Pointing to the tiny cracks on the sides of the cups he said, “Only good china shows such cracks as it ages over the years. You don’t see these on low quality ones.”
I started to feel like I was in a scene from an old martial arts movie. Only no martial arts master imparting wisdom, just a tea master.
We spent all of 20 minutes there, and sure enough, we left with a couple bags of Oolong tea.
As we left, the owner presented us with a leaf-shaped business card on the bottom of which was a QR code. The QR code is like the password to Aladdin’s cave.
Scan it with your phone, and you get taken to their online store on the WeChat platform to be greeted with a message that says “Welcome! We have been waiting for you for so long.”
To this day when I brew tea, I get taken back to my time in that shop.
Even seemingly mundane industries or niches can be made interesting if you are willing to find something unique you can bring to the table.
In the online media space, Andrew Warner of Mixergy and Nathan Latka of The Top each have their own styles that court the attention of listeners of their podcasts. They are also known for the revealing and hard questions they ask that serve to educate their audiences.
How to apply this to your business
Begin by looking at what your audience is after, and focus on what they want, need, and like. Then, look at yourself. What about your work and your personality will connect with your audience? Once you’ve identified those qualities, lean into them, making them into a unique style that conveys who you are. Use that style like a wrapper around everything you do, consistently signaling to your audience that uniqueness that makes you a one-of-a-kind authority.
4. Generosity works better than sales pitches
How do you earn permission to speak to a group of people? How do you get them to engage with your message, buy what you sell, and share your ideas?
Give away what your audience values for free.
Courtesy of Unsplash
To get your name out there as an authority, it may feel like you should be constantly trying to close a ton of sales, to build word of mouth. You don’t have to. In fact, that may even undermine your goal. For example, whose advice are you going to take?
A personal trainer you have seen a few times at the gym comes over when he sees you working out. He asks if he could show you a couple of corrections that would make a significant difference to your work out. You accept, and he shows you what you need to do. Note the offer is provided for free without ever mentioning his services. Also you can tell straight away, the difference his recommendations make.
A personal trainer assigned to you for a session because it was part of the package you signed up to.
You’ll value the former, because it will feel more genuine. It may also actually lead to more sales, subtly using the psychological principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity leverages the psychology of wanting to pay people back.
It also can secure sales by using the concept of bundling, best explained by neuroeconomics expert George Loewenstein. He says that all consumers prefer to complete their purchases in one easy transaction rather than purchasing multiple accessories separately. This means that by offering free products, you are also likely to be able to upsell to paid products.
How to apply this to your business
Give away high-quality content without asking for anything in return, and you will find a much more receptive audience when it comes time to promote your service or product.
Copyblogger does this with their free membership library. They have built a thriving, tuned in audience that happily pays for their products. Dropbox famously grew their user base to over 300 million by offering 2GB of free storage space and then offering paid plans. WP Curve grew their list and customer base by offering free content upgrades with their content.
Another way to engage an audience with generosity is to package up free resources like reports, videos, e-books, etc., and watch them spread across the web. You can also reach out directly to your audience or influencers in your niche and ask what problems they are grappling with, then offer to help solve them.
A great tactic is highlighting in your content the people you want to connect with, either as case studies or through an interview, to make it onto their radar. Then there’s the time-honored best practice of delivering more than you promise.
5. Just Ship it
There is no way around it, you can’t build authority without putting in the work, and getting your expertise out there into the world, NOW. This holds true with building a business, writing a book, or building a membership site, whatever ideas you have in your head carry no weight unless you put in the hard yards to deliver it to the world.
Not only that, people respect others who get the work done and take action. In other words, prove your expertise by delivering in spades. This process also build massively scalable social proof and word of mouth through ubiquity.
How to apply this to your business
Are you an online marketer or life coach? Consider holding “live hot sets” where visitors share their problems, and you offer instant solutions. Bam, you are out there, making things happen in real time.
Consider Derek Halpern, who went through 300 live critiques of websites including the likes of Laura Roeder, Amy Porterfield, and Pat Flynn. By doing so, he not only publicly was able to build authority, but it came with the implied endorsement of each.
Are you a designer? Consider holding live sessions where in you revive an outdated web page into something that captures attention and speaks powerfully to the intended audience.
Josef, the digital typographer of The Guy Behind the Letters, began by cranking out free logos and names for personal use. People started to know about him, and the demand grew so much that he then set up an online shop to sell his services.
Can you get in front of someone else’s audience? Then run a webinar or workshop in front of them.
6. Establish a reputation for 1 outstanding quality
At a food market in the Middle East, fruit vendors vie for the attention of all those who pass by. The favored tactics adopted by most vendors is to discount and holler based on the time of day and the stock they have left. The aim is to appeal to the bargain hunters in the crowd.
The result is that for the average shopper, the experience is like being inside a pressure cooker, with every pitch signaling a state of emergency.
Contrast this with a fruit vendor who consistently provides a small range of quality seasonal produce. She doesn’t offer any discounts or shout for attention. Instead, she is patient, consistent, and predictable, resulting in the same people returning every week.
Some customers even mention her to their friends. So over time, her customer base grows. All with no hollering. Her strategy is an intentional act of differentiation.
Just like the fruit vendor, your marketing needs to be as deliberate, differentiated, and aligned with your values as the products or services you offer.
How to apply this to your business
You don’t need a stellar combination of differentiators, just one that persuades your audience. One that also is your calling card. It should announce who you are and get people to listen.
Mari Smith, for example, has a reputation for passionately helping businesses with Facebook marketing strategy. That’s how she gets the opportunity to be a speaker at the Social Media Marketing World conference. That’s how she is sought after by businesses, media outlets, and magazines.
Discover that one thing that defines you. Then work it until it becomes a must-have.
7. Take pride in the sources of your knowledge
One way to determine whether someone is an authority or not is if they connect their advice to trusted sources. This strategy leverages the psychological principle of association.
Real authority figures in an industry have deep knowledge. They know the past, present, and future of their fields. They know the trends, myths, and facts. And they know that wearing the sources of their wisdom on their sleeves makes them look smarter and more knowledgeable.
Look at posts by Neil Patel on the Quicksprout blog, and you’ll notice he links to a number of sources to back his statements. The folk over at Buffer do the same on their blog as well.
How to apply this to your business
The next time you produce content or otherwise communicate with your audience, look outside your own experiences and call upon the latest studies, books, journals and interviews that will lend weight to your advice. Not only will your content be better, your credibility will also increase.
8. Become a trusted curator
When you think of the word curator, do you think knowledgeable expert or amateur enthusiast? Most likely the former.
The objective of content curation among 85% of marketers, according to one survey, is to increase thought leadership.
When starting out online, the roundup post can be an easy way to get into content curation. This is a post that lists the top something or the other in an industry. You round up the best and brightest in the industry and feature them in the post.
It not only establishes you as an authority on that issue, it offers you an opportunity to learn, and it allows you to connect with other authoritative figures in your field by letting them know they have been featured. This opens the door to new relationships and networking opportunities, aside from the fact that they are likely to share the post with their audiences.
How to apply this to your business
We do a lot of roundup posts here at Foundr, and find them very rewarding and useful. For a couple good examples, check out this one or this one. You can otherwise create content around influencers in your industry, like this post.
A good place to start is by using tools like Scoop.it to help gather and curate the latest happenings in your industry, or by following the Moz Top 10 or This Old Marketing podcast.
9. Take your expertise offline
There is such a huge focus on having a presence online, that it can be easy to ignore the offline world we all actually live in. However, a combination of offline and online communication can deliver a huge boost to authority.
Consider Emma, for example, who blogs on parenting teenagers. She goes to her local library to talk to staff about holding a free talk on parenting teenagers. The topic is of value to the library members, so the staff are happy to feature her and promote the talk.
Emma also lets her audience online know about the upcoming talk to boost her expert status. You see, she is now not just a blogger and knowledgeable person in the area of parenting teenagers, but also a speaker.
On the day of the talk, Emma asks a friend to snap photos and gets attendees to record on video their thoughts of the workshop. Emma adds these photos and video testimonials to a new page on her website and invites people to contact her for speaking opportunities.
Courtesy of Unsplash
With a visit to the library, a few hours work, and a morning talk on a topic she loves and knows, Emma is now able to stand out in a crowded and noisy marketplace.
How to apply this to your business
For one good starting point, follow the example of Troy Dean, founder of wpelevation. He started out building his authority by going to meetups and then speaking at meetups to drum up business.
10. Join established authorities
Governing bodies and associations carry credibility, weight, and influence. This is true even if they are not directly part of your industry. Take, for example, the Better Business Bureau. Attaching yourself to such organizations grants your business a piece of that unquestionable authority.
There’s extensive research, including a recent study by Conversion XL, that proves the power of trust seals and site seals in increasing conversions of visitors to a site. Conducting a quick Google search will help you find organizations in your industry that you can align with.
How to apply this to your business
Add the organization’s logo or seal of trust to your site, for starters. But you can also write for the organization’s blog or newsletter, participate in conferences or related events, and even get a speaking gig for the industry, like Pat Flynn did at FinCon.
11. Create a signature framework
Businesses often dart from one take on their topic to the next without any apparent method or unifying approach to their work. This prevents people from considering them an authority on any particular topic.
For example, imagine a visiting a site that offers a number of posts on parenting and parenting-related issues like BubHub.
Compare that to a site that focuses on a proprietary method of parenting kids called Triple P parenting. The feeling is entirely different. They have a proven system that takes a person from start to finish to achieve the parenting objective the person needs.
The framework they use underpins everything they teach. It implies a history of experience, knowledge, understanding of customer circumstances and results.
Also consider Masalabody.com. It exists in a crowded space—the weight loss niche. Yet founder Nagina Abdullah has been able to take what many others have spoken about, and combined it with her take on using spices to form her unique weight loss program. She has created a structure and a particular pathway for women wanting to lose weight and keep it off.
How to apply this to your business
Map out the path that a customer would need to take to achieve their desired results. Then break that path down into key concepts that can stand on their own as a theme. Build out each theme with your best tricks, tips, and strategies to go from one to the next.
12. Break into the inner circle
When you associate with influencers and authority figures, you become seen as an authority. We come to this conclusion almost instinctively.
What is bit of a mystery is how a person starts off and builds those powerful relationships with people that matter.
Consider Jon Nestor of Hack the Entrepreneur, who started off by asking influencers to participate in interviews for his podcast. As the podcast grew, so did his authority and his ability to launch more businesses and help others.
How to apply this to your business
Kick things off by chatting to influencers or authority figures at a meeting or conference. Enroll in a course and get to know attendees and instructors. Sending a persuasive email to engage authority figures in your industry. Check out our article on finding a mentor for more ideas.
13. Humble yourself
So you want your audience to trust you. You want to build authority and dissipate your audience’s skepticism. Then act against your self-interest.
Research by social psychologist Fiona Lee suggests that admitting shortcomings is a great way to simultaneously highlight your strengths.
See, if you have an obvious agenda, your audience is less likely to believe you. However, by admitting to honest errors in judgment or gaps in knowledge, you help your customers relate to you better. They know that you, like them, are focused on overcoming problems and challenges and are less likely to make excuses or pretend to be something you’re not.
This theory explains in part the success of budget airlines. At launch, they admit that a trade-off for low prices would be compromised service. In other words, no meals and a small luggage allowance. If they hadn’t admitted as much, customers might have assumed the cost-cutting had come at the expense of something they aren’t aware of, maybe even safety.
How to apply this to your business
Tone down your confidence about your abilities and convictions. Avis quite famously advertised that they were no.2 in the car rental business to communicate that they were trying harder.
Reduce your audience’s skepticism by pointing out your weaknesses. Guinness shared that it took longer to pour a drink but that it was a sign of quality and was worth the wait. Invite people with differing opinions to the discussion, and keep your emotions in check.
14. Restrict access to create scarcity
Are you good at what you do?
If so, people will want your time and attention. The number of people who pursue you will depend on demand and how good are. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough time in the day to help everyone who wants it. So you will need to turn away business. Your audience, however, will assume that an expert forced to turn away business is in demand.
On the other hand, a person who is not an authority is open to working with anyone and everyone. Your audience will conclude that a person who is willing to work with anyone at any time cannot be an authority figure.
The harder it is to gain access to your paid services (not including your acts of generosity), the more people want you. So charge a premium price.
That can be a challenge for some of us, but setting prices too low is a mistake.
I used to think that just about anyone could write. After all, didn’t everyone learn to write in school? Is it really that different from learning to walk or run? It was only later in life that a couple of individuals pointed out that this was not the case. That what I did was unique and valuable, and with ongoing training and practice it would grow in value.
So charge accordingly. Ramit Sethi, for example, refuses to sell to anyone with credit card debt. Jay Abraham set his hourly rate at $2,000/hr for consulting.
Creating a sense of scarcity or exclusivity also leverages FOMO, or fear of missing out. This feeling has proven to be stronger than the desire to gain something of equal value.
When British Airways announced it was closing the London-to-New York Concorde service, sales for the route increased dramatically. Nothing had changed about the service or the cost. It had just become scarce.
When AppSumo’s Noah Kagan created a course on marketing, he only allowed for a seven-day enrollment period and then put everyone else on a waitlist for the next round of enrollment.
The result—he tripled his email subscribers to his marketing blog okdork.com from 12,000 to 50,000.
How to apply this to your business
Make your free content easily available, but restrict access to everything else. How? Use tactics like waiting lists, premium prices, limited editions, special invitations, and customer prerequisites.
Produce a limited number of products/tickets or take on a limited number of clients. Provide limited time offers. Share this level of scarcity with a large audience, by telling people how many customers will receive the offer how many openings there are.
15. Rally your tribe
Like most people, your followers or tribe want to belong, feel special, wanted and understood. A tribe caters to this need. By developing an identity for your tribe and turning others away, you are in effect giving them a sense of belonging.
Research has proven how powerful this can be. So give them a sense of identity and badge of honor.
In return you get authority. John Lee Dumas, for example, refers to his followers as “Fire Nation.” Gary Vaynerchuk has “Vaniacs,” and Lady Gaga has the “Little Monsters.”
How to apply this to your business
First you have to find your tribe—define the characteristics you want in your followers, the people you are best-positioned to help and want to help. Understand their problems and deliver effective solutions.
Then rally that tribe by giving them a banner or label to unite under. Use something that fits with your personality and topic. Call them out and let them know they are in the right place when they visit your website.
Reward the tribe. Consider adding a label to their account or product that gives them a higher status level. Provide badges or seals that they can place on their website to say they are certified members or have a certain status etc.
Step up and claim your authority status!
No matter what your business goals, building authority will help you achieve it faster. It’ll help you stand out in a crowded marketplace, attract a passionate audience and connect you with the movers and shakers in your industry.
You do not have to wait a lifetime or wait for permission.
The authority hacks above will help you go from being an unknown entity to a sought after expert with all the benefits that come with authority status in your industry.
Question is: Will you step up and claim your authority status? How are you making this a reality with your business? Let us know in the comments!
The post 15 Surefire Ways to Build Authority Quickly When Starting an Online Business appeared first on Foundr.