The age-old proverb of ‘fake it till you make it’ is a good cosmetic solution to increase your confidence in the moment. But that’s in no way a reliable content strategy.
How do you become an expert for highly profitable niches when starting from scratch?
You are an ‘expert’ when the audience perceives you as a reliable authority in your industry. You need to know how to find information and share it in a credible way to create the perception of being an expert.
‘Expertise marketing’ is about using content marketing to brand your services in a way that customers come to you for help, instead of going to your competitors.
The definitive process to build authority through content marketing
To create authority in any niche through content marketing, the core process still remains the same — Know your audience, write helpful content, and conduct a persistent outreach process through relevant high-authority sites.
Step 1: Check if the niche to profitable and viable for you
An understanding of the earning potential of the niche can help you direct your content marketing efforts towards profitability.
To understand this potential, conduct a meta analysis of your target niche to verify if the size of market is big enough to invest your time and efforts on it. Check out the way your competitors are making money in that niche.
What kind of products/services are they giving away for free to capture a new lead? What are they charging people for? What are the categories of products, solutions, and services they offer? What is the average price for each of these categories?
Collect this data and combine it with general industry insights. This will help you make data-driven decisions instead of depending on unverified recommendations by some niche content guru.
Step 2: Understand your niche audience to create your content marketing funnel
Once you are committed to the niche, understand that content marketing is spread across multiple channels and your traffic comes from various sources.
When you define a content strategy, start by defining how you will address the audience across all of these platforms. Find out what topics your audience likes and in what formats. These insights will inform your long-term content strategy.
In the long-term, a potential customer goes through various stages in the buying journey — from being a first-time visitor to a repeat customer.
At each stage, different types of content will appeal to them. The goal for marketers then is to create content that directly aligns with their audience’s interests and buying stage and able to move them closer to conversion. Simply put, knowing your customers helps create content that helps achieve business objectives faster and more efficiently.
Audience analysis also improves the performance of your marketing efforts to do well across all channels.
If your content is customized to the audience’s buying stage and includes the right buying stage keywords, its relevance increases, which brings more people to your landing page and increases chances for conversions.
High-value customer-centric content posted consistently and delivered through an engaging medium assists in creating loyal relationships between your brand and its customers.
Step 3: Create a personalization strategy
Content Personalization is a way to make content marketing efforts effective by using data from several channels. Personalized content shapes and strengthens the customer journey on the website and in wider marketing campaigns.
Content created keeping the user’s needs in mind gets users excited; it shows you care as a brand. This is a very powerful connection and is universal to all fields with leading brands focusing on one-on-one marketing communication and personalization.
In your analysis of a competitor’s target audience, you will discover groups and subgroups. We call them segments and sub-segments in marketing and they are the backbone for creating personalized content and marketing strategies across all channels.
Step 4: Scale your blog’s visibility through guest posting
Working really hard to research and write a piece of content only to hand it off to publish on another website sounds like a counterintuitive strategy. On the flip side, a single-author blog has its own disadvantages.
According to a Social Marketing Writing study, more than 60% of respondents replied that they find a blog with multiple authors more credible.
Google does not grant you domain authority for only posting content regularly. Your blogs must have backlinks from high-authority sites in your domain. This indicates that other websites in your domain trust the content on your website enough to link to it. Without links from other higher-authority websites, it’s highly unlikely for search engines to trust your blog.
Indeed, guest blogging opens up opportunities for high-quality content from other experts, attracts new audiences, and builds brand relationships — for everyone involved in this transaction.
Therefore, you must include guest posting in your content strategy to achieve hockey-stick growth in your blog traffic and search visibility.
High-authority publications keep a strict check on the quality of the content that they publish on their website. To make it a win-win transaction, you must show them unique topics with a high relevance for their audience that adds to the quality of content on their website.
Therefore, before you pitch any topic, have at least a few well-researched content ideas with a higher chance of acceptance.
As these guest posts go live, their link authority gets passed on and Google uses that to calculate a new domain authority for your own website.
Step 5: Implement content hacks while creating high-authority content
Formalize the scheduling process to create a Content Calendar. This will keep you on track for posting and ensure consistency — one of the most important factors for your content marketing success.
Visuals such as annotated screenshots and GIFs help you to present your content professionally without the support of too much text. With videos, visitors can consume a lot of material quickly while staying on the website longer. This increased time on site is a direct SEO benefit for your website.
Finally, find the highest performing blog posts and repurpose them across different formats.
Final Words
Gaining authority on a brand new blog from scratch is difficult in any niche.
With accurate keyword research, high-quality posts, content repurposing, social media branding, and a consistent focus on guest post pitching, you can get to high authority in a relatively short amount of time.
