Authority is the active ingredient in unlocking digital marketing.
There is an ancient adage in online marketing: Content is king. And there are people, particularly writers, designers, advertisers—anyone in the world of marketing, who know exactly what that means because they create content every day. This adage isn’t always helpful to people outside the world of content creation because content is a generic term. Content is contextual; for example, content for a blog site is a post or article. But content for social media is an update, albeit it could be text or a photo or video, or combination thereof. If you have a website for your business or organization then content for you is specific to your industry or your service.
You are the authority
And if you do run a business or organization chances are that you are an authority in your industry. Turning that authority into content is what it takes to win at online marketing. I’m sure there are plenty of ‘experts’ in your industry around the world already blogging, tweeting, posting updates, making videos, and maybe there is a voice telling you that you are wasting your time trying to compete with other experts by posting a bunch of competing noise. Am I the only one who hears that voice?
Ignore it. You are an authority. You may not be the authority but this is your industry and you are an authority, certainly in your area—especially compared to your clients. What I’m getting at here is that you need to start writing copy for yourself. You are the expert!
I know you are busy
But you just don’t have time, and you are not a good writer, right? I hear those objection all of the time. I tell myself those same things. But it’s not true, and there are some really effective ways to get around the time issue. If you commute, use that time to write. If you’re driving just think up a topic and hit record on your phone’s voice recorder. After 10 minutes of rambling in the car you’ll have a bunch of great material to turn into an entire article. Later on you can type up your thoughts using your recording as a reference. Use a grammar checker and a spell checker and now you have yourself a bonafide authoritative article for your site that you could have paid a non-expert writer $300-400 dollars for.
Any subject matter authority that is not writing copy for themselves is just being lazy. There, I said it. Do this: just write one article a week. After a year you will have a minimum of fifty authoritative articles that can be shared online in wonderful, searchable glory. Not to mention that your copy writing skills after a year of that will be off the hook!
More than words
That’s copy. What about other online content? Graphics? Video? Photography? The secret here is to start with authoritative copy. Once you have that you can always find stock imagery or hire someone to come up with a graphic or a photo or even shoot a video. For the money you will be saving by not having to hire an outside writer and for the increased business you will get from all the new visibility coming in from all of those authoritative articles, you’ll have plenty left over to hire visual creatives to make your best articles hit home runs out of the park for you.
It all starts with authority. That’s the real magic of winning online. I’m no writer, but I wrote this article myself!
