Build Your Brand Authority With As Little As 30 mins per Week

As a business owner or manager, there never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done. You know that you need to generate as much traffic as possible to get as many qualified leads and sales to your business, but struggle to handle all of your digital activity by yourself.

It’s getting more competitive in the online marketplace and those businesses that commit to positioning themselves as an authority will gain the lion’s share. The difference to your business’s revenue could be upwards of 100%.

Imagine that your business lost an extra $100,000 a year because you couldn’t devote 30 minutes a week to position your business as an authority.

In this post, you will learn:

1. Why it’s important to become an authority.
2. What you need to do.
3. The time you need to spend in order to execute it correctly

Position your business as an authority brand

Businesses that promote themselves as an authority build their perceived brand value to a position where they earn premium profit margins, loyal customers and passionate brand advocates. You just need to look at the likes of Apple, Star Wars and Nike who are established brands that command the best prices for their products and maintain legions of customers.

The brilliant thing with the Internet age is that any business can replicate a similar system to build their brand for their target audience in order to become the dominant player in their market. Brand leaders can earn around 80% of the total market revenue, leaving the rest of the players to fight over the remaining 20%.

If you want to be that dominant player, then see how you can execute these online brand-building techniques in your business.

Comment on your industry blogs

Time needed: 5 minutes

This is one of the easiest ways to establish your presence online. Simply sign up to blogs in your industry to get alerts on their new blog posts. Once you have done this, wait for the notification and then read their new posts and leave insightful commentary that adds to the discussion. Over time, the author and visitors to the blog should recognise your name and the business site that you represent. This could earn your business more referrals and even get you an invite to be a spokesperson for your business on another website.

Answer questions on web forums

Time needed: 10 minutes

Find the most relevant and active forums in your industry and dedicate at least 10 minutes each week for answering members’ questions. Make sure that you provide valuable answers and insights. Over time, your name should become familiar to people in the community and you should start earning referrals from other members or receiving enquiries through private direct messages.

Publish blog posts on your business website

Time needed: 2-4h.

The best way to improve the authority of your business website is by publishing valuable content on the site. You can easily accomplish this by setting up a business blog and publishing content that will be valuable to your target audience.

There are several content formats that you can use:

1. Guides
2. Industry reports
3. ‘Point of view’ pieces
4. ‘Insight’ pieces.

Publishing valuable content on your blog will give your website visitors more confidence and trust in your business. The content that you publish should improve your sales cycle and generate more qualified prospects that are likely to convert into loyal customers.

Guest Blog on influential websites in your industry

Time needed: 2-20h.

Guest blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an author and to build awareness of your brand in the industry.

Many business owners or managers don’t value guest blogging as much as they should because they feel that creating the post will take too much time from their day-to-day activities. Most of them fail to realise the amount new web leads and sales they can achieve if they implement their guest blogging strategy correctly like a PR exercise.

Creating a good guest post could take as little as 2 hours or take a few weeks, depending on the topic and amount of research that needs to go into it.

You should look for guest post opportunities on websites whose audience would benefit from your insights. The content that you publish should help the audience solve a problem or provide them with a point of view that will trigger a discussion.

What is just as important is ensuring that your post uses a call-to-action that will get you more leads. This link shows a great approach by Bryan Harris from Videofruit which helps him gain 500 blog subscribers each week. Thus, providing him with a large sales leads pipeline that allows him to pitch his courses and services.

Publish videos on your official YouTube channel

Time needed: 1-2h

Publishing videos on YouTube is a powerful way to give your business exposure and credibility. You can create your own community by earning subscribers that resonate with the values of your business. As long as you have access to a smartphone that can record videos in 720p or higher, you will be able to create high-definition videos that you can publish on your business YouTube channel.

Some simple video formats that are easy to make and that require little editing include:

Explainer videos
This is like publishing a video glossary. Many potential customers would like to learn the terminology, jargon and concepts in your industry that enables them to make an informed buying decision.

Video tutorials
You can publish tutorials that solve a common problem your customers are having. For example, if you run an auto electrical business, you can publish a video that shows people how to change their car battery successfully.

Video blogs (Vlogs)
A good example is the Entrepreneurship Answered show by Gary Vaynerchuk, where he talks once per day about different aspects of his business, provides his opinion on a relevant topic or answers questions in his niche. The video is usually filmed in one take and has an intro and outro clip.

You can implement this by recording, editing and formatting the video so that it is ready to be uploaded onto YouTube.

Marketing the videos on YouTube can be done organically or with a paid campaign that targets your audience. Here you can see some YouTube marketing strategies and case studies.

Newsletter marketing

Time needed: 1h

Promoting to your newsletter audience is an excellent way to build your brand presence and establish your credibility in the industry. Develop a CRM system that will allow people to sign-up to your list and remarket to them with weekly or monthly newsletters.

The brilliant thing with this tactic is that your business will remain at the front of people’s mind. When they are ready to do business, they are likely to contact you to become a customer.

These tactics aren’t complex. They need the influencers in the business to dedicate time to these activities in order to promote the growth of the brand, which will yield more revenue and profits over the long-term.

Think of it this way, if you spent 1 hour a week doing these activities and it gained your business an extra $10,000 each month, do you think it would be worth it? You wouldn’t need to tell me twice! So factor it into your workflow and business growth strategy today!