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I’m sure that one of your main objectives when you enter a niche market is to boost your authority and profile as quickly as possible. Being recognized as an authority in your niche means you’re more likely to get people linking to your blog, and people will be more inclined to share your content (if it’s of good quality). You’ll also position yourself as a trusted advisor in your niche, which means selling products (your own or as an affiliate) becomes far easier.

In this post I want to share some of my favorite strategies for quickly boosting authority in any niche. These strategies work best if you have your business setup with a centralized blog where you can send traffic to (as I discuss in my free course), but they will also work well for any online business.

Have A Great Looking Site

It doesn’t matter what anyone says about graphics and conversions, the fact is that if your site looks great, people are going to pay more attention to you. If your site or blog looks like every other site out there in your niche, you’re not going to stand out. You might have great content on your site, but it will take people longer to pay attention if you’re just using a standard design that 20 other blogs in your niche have.

As a minimum, I recommend you customize your blog or site with a custom logo or header. You can get a professional logo from a site like 99designs or try out a site like Fiverr to get quick logo to get you started. You should also use a custom theme – see some of my recommended themes here.

Write & Publish a Book

Although publishing a physical book won’t make you rich overnight, there is a degree of credibility and authority associated with anyone who has a physical book published.

It’s now easier than ever to publish your own book – you can use a service like CreateSpace to publish your book to Amazon for free, and you also get a share of the royalties from any sales. Amazon also handle all of the printing and fulfillment of your book so it’s totally hands off once you have written and uploaded your book.

Interview Experts

Interviewing experts is a fantastic way to raise your profile in a niche. By interviewing an expert in your niche, you will be associating yourself with that expert and this raises your status in your audiences mind.

You’ll find many experts are happy to be interviewed, especially those with their own blogs or products. You can find experts on forums, on Twitter, Facebook, or through their own blogs (use Google Blog Search). I’d recommend contacting your expert and building a relationship with them before you ask for the interview, this way you’ll get better content in your interview and they’re more likely to say yes.

You can record your interview over Skype with software like Pamela or Audio HiJack Pro. Post your interview on your blog, format it into a money-magnet free gift (with mp3 and transcript) or format it into a product and sell it for a profit and to start building a buyers list.

Do Interviews & Give Testimonials

An alternative to interviewing experts in your niche is to actually give interviews for other sites and blogs in your niche. You’ll obviously need some expertise on your niche in order to be interviewed, but if you have some specialist knowledge, this is a great way to build authority.

I recommend building relationships with other blog owners in your niche and ask them if they’re looking to interview anyone with knowledge on your expert topic. You could also place a link on your blog offering to do interviews – and telling people how to contact you to arrange one.

Even if you don’t get interviewed by a blog at the top of your niche, the more your name and content is spread across your niche, the greater the effect you’ll have on your status in your niche.

One other simple way to get your name in front of people in your niche is to offer to review and provide testimonials for high profile products and launches in your niche. If you can provide a testimonial and get this on the sales letter of a new product launch with your photo, (or even a video testimonial), you’ll be further spreading your reach in your niche. Of course with this strategy you should only provide testimonials for products you truly believe in and would recommend, otherwise this can have a negative impact on your profile.

Integrate Your Content Within A High Profile Funnel

This is a bit of a sneaky tactic, but it can really work well if you can pull it off. Here’s how you do it:

1. First you need a great piece of content, or some kind of free gift which provides huge value. Ensure within this content/product you link back to your blog/site. Ideally this would be a PDF ebook, video or MP3 interview and transcript.
2. Next you need to approach information product owners in your niche and ask them if they would like to offer your product as a bonus for their product or as a bonus on their thank you page. Ensure in your email/initial contact you also provide a link to your content so they can see the value without having to contact you.
3. If they agree, your product/gift is offered on their thank you page, and is exposed to all of their buyers – boosting your visibility in the niche

Another way you can do this is by offering to provide content for other marketers in your niche. This could be offering to write a followup message, a blog post (see below), or some kind of membership content which is high in value but provides you with a valuable link back to your site and boost your perceived authority at the same time.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is another way to generate authority and traffic in any niche. Providing high quality posts to other blogs in your niche allows you to grow your audience fast as you can easily leverage the audience of the blog you’re guest posting on.

If you need to find blogs to guest post on, search on Google for “niche name guest post” or “niche name submit guest post” and look for any blogs which will allow you to submit your content.

Create and Distribute Video Content

Creating video content for your niche is a great way to get yourself recognised fast. It’s now easier than ever to create video content in the form of on-screen content (using a pocket video camera like Kodak Zi8) or screencast content (using Camtasia or Screenflow).

Share some of your best content and ideas in the form of video, and then share them on sites like YouTube for maximum exposure. You should also distribute your videos to other video sharing sites using a service like TubeMogul to further its exposure.

Host a Web TV Show

Using a service like Ustream.tv, you can host your own web TV show and broadcast yourself live to the world from your own home with nothing more than a computer, a webcam and a microphone.

Hosting a web TV show or going live on the web and interacting with your niche is a great way to build you reputation and authority within your marketplace, especially as it’s unlikely many other people are doing this in your niche, so you immediately stand out as being different.

Ensure you’ve got some great content to share, and it’s often a good idea to set an agenda for the discussion on your web tv show so you keep things focused and on topic.

Syndicate Content on iTunes

Most people don’t realise you can actually get your content in front of users of iTunes, including users on iphones and ipads, and also Apple TV users, if you format your content into a podcast. This can include PDF content, mp3 audio or even video.

To do this, you need to create an RSS feed of your content and then submit this to iTunes. You can find out all about how to format your content with this guide from Apple.

If you’re using Nanacast (the business centralization system I use), this can be used to generate feeds which you can submit to iTunes to quickly get your content in front of the audiences there.

Post On Forums As An Authority

Sharing great content and helping others on forums can help you position yourself as an authority in your niche. To do this effectively, you need to ensure you are answering questions, and not asking them.

You can quickly become recognised as an expert if you help others in your niche with their questions and problems. You can also generate traffic back to your business through the use of a subtle signature link back to your blog or website.

Webinars

Webinars can be a fantastic way to build an authority presence for your business. Webinars are a great way to engage with large audiences from your niche and provide them with high quality content which can be created on the fly.

You can also organize webinars with experts in your niche and benefit from their content and the reputation benefits of associating yourself with other experts in your niche.

I recommend using Gotowebinar for hosting your webinars. Discover how to run your own highly profitable webinars with the How To Run A Webinar Guide.

I hope this post has given you some ideas on how to start boosting your profile and authority in your niche. Whether you’re just starting in a new niche, or you already have an established business, I recommend giving some of these strategies a go to see what impact they have on your business profile.

Let me know which of these ideas you think you’ll be applying to your business, or if you’ve used other strategies in the past, I’d love to hear from you – post your comments below!

Tags: boost authority, boost reputation, build authority, build niche authority, establish authority