Creating An Authority Presence

As I mentioned in the video above, I think that creating an authority presence is going to be pretty important when it comes to Internet marketing and getting traffic online in the coming years,  so I decided to dedicate most of this year to one big project (in addition to my PLR  business,  of course).   This big project will depend heavily on social media and with me being a knowledgeable person in my niche as well as developing relationships with other people in the niche – both my potential customers and other experts and authorities.

My Plan

I recently become obsessed with publishing books on the Kindle so my big plan hinges around publishing a series of books in the healthy eating niche. Now I’m not saying that you HAVE to publish kindle books to be an authority – that’s just what I am choosing to do.  You can just have a regular ebook or no ebook at all.  You don’t need your own product to be an authority, but it can make you a lot of money if you do.

There’s a couple of reasons that I love publishing on the Kindle.  First of all they have a gazillion customers looking for books to read all day long so you can actually make sales without doing any promotion, and if you have your link to your blog and facebook fan page, you can gain new customers from the books they buy!

The second reason is that having a book published on Amazon gives you instant credibility in your potential customers eyes as well as the eyes of other authorities in the niche.  When it comes to asking for guest blog spots or connecting with people, it can go a long way to say you are the author of  “blah blah blah” instead of just some faceless person who has a blog in the niche.

The downside is that the price point for Kindle books really is only about 2 or $3 and when you compare that to what we are used to getting ($27 or more) for e-books that can seem like a mere pittance, however because of the volume of buyers over at Amazon you can really make a lot of money selling books at this price point if you can get enough people buying it because the way their search engine works over there is that the more sales you have for your book, the higher it is in the different categories and, therefore, the more people buy it.

So driving more people from your Blog/Facebook/Twitter to your books on Amazon will result in a higher ranking on Amazon which will result in more sales from people browsing the Amazon marketplace which will result in more customers that you can send to your blog and fan page!

Of course, it goes without saying that this is all predicated on having super high quality books that people love so that they want to hear more from you, visit your blog and buy more of your books (and maybe even click some affiliate links on your blog too – more on that later)

So my plan is to have these books, as well as a blog,  Twitter account, Facebook, Google plus and Pinterest.  I will be actively participating in all of these almost every single day – unlike my niche blogs that I usually set and forget.

The Blog

For the blog, I’m really trying to focus on only posting stuff that can really help my audience. I’m trying to put any thoughts of SEO and things like “buying keywords” out of my head and post stuff that I think the people who are interested in healthy food will want to read.

The design is pretty simple, no fancy stuff, no pop-ups, no exit pops, I just have  a featured post on the top and then the latest posts on the homepage and links to my books for sale on Amazon on the sidebar (I currently have two in the series published over there now).  Eventually I’ll add an e-mail capture form on the sidebar too but I haven’t gotten around to creating a freebie giveaway for this niche yet.

I actually just put the blog up all about 4 days ago and was shocked to find that I’ve already gotten a small trickle of visitors from organic search which is really astounding because I haven’t done any back linking or SEO on its aside from one article that I posted on e-zine articles.  The thing is that I’m writing about food, and not any “buying” type stuff so there is not much competition from people that do SEO in that area.

I’m going to try to post every day even if it’s a short post but once a week I’m going to make a bigger “ authority”  post like the one I made today that was 1600 words.

For the  small posts I’m not going to do any SEO or back linking other than Tweeting and posting to the Facebook fan page.

For the authority posts, what I’m going to do is a quick search in the Google keyword tool to see what keyword phrases will be appropriate. Then I’ll do a competition search using Market Samurai to figure out which one has the least competition and that will be my main keyword phrase that I work into the title and most of the backlinks.  I’d like to find 5 phrases that could work in the article and then work them in as much as I can but not enough so that they sound forced.

Then I’m going to do in e-zine article (totally different from the one on the site)  that links back to it (using the main keyword phrase).  I’m also going to make 5 posts over on the blogging underground system each having the anchor text of one of the phrases I dug out in the google keyword tool (so each one will have a different anchor text).  And, finally I will write a totally unique article to use as a guest blog post through myblogguest  and will link back to the article using my main keyword phrase.

Twitter

I plan to use Twitter to communicate with my customers as well as other people in the niche. I found that twitter can be a great place to find out what’s going on and get ideas for new blog posts as well as find interesting blog posts that you might want to point your subscribers to.

Basically I’ll be doing all the things I talk about in this post but so far all I’ve gotten around to doing is setting up the account and tweeting all my posts thus far.

My to-do list is getting it set up in HootSuite finding some good people to follow and setting up automated following I talk about in this post.

Facebook

I have a fan page for the niche already set up and eventually I’ll add my free giveaway and e-mail capture to this. I might consider doing some contests and even some Facebook ads to get fans but I haven’t really work this all out yet.

Google Plus

Admittedly, I should know more about Google plus but I really can barely even use the account that I have for IM stuff. That being said, I need to create some new circles or however it’s done for this new healthy eating niche and start posting  links to my videos and blog posts there.  That’s a little bit lower down on the list as I think some of the other social media platforms are more important right now.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a new social media platform where you have different pages where you “pin”  stuff that is “interesting”.   Now this might not work for every niche, but in the healthy eating niche I think I’m going to create a bunch of pages that have healthy recipes pinned to them. Now I’m not just going to pin my own healthy recipes even though I will have some of mine on there, I’m going to create themed pages that have healthy recipes that I find from all over the web. So I might have one page on healthy bread and I might have another one on healthy chocolate desserts etc…

I haven’t really used p interest at all actually I only got a set accepted a couple days ago but it’s high on my to-do list to check it out and see how it can be used to help connect with my subscribers. Notice how I’m not thinking about how to use it for marketing and selling stuff, but I’m thinking about how to use it to connect with people.

How I Plan To Make Money

Okay now for the good stuff, how I plan to make money. Obviously I’ll be putting a ton of effort into this project and I need it to be able to pay off.  Believe it or not, one of my main methods of monetizing it is going to be the books that I sell on Amazon. I’m going to have them available on the Kindle and also in print form through Create Space. Each book will have a link to the other books in the series inside so hopefully when people read them and like them they will buy more from that series. So, I’ll be using the Amazon site itself for marketing the books but also my website, Twitter, Facebook etc. for getting more buyers. On Amazon the more buyers you have the more buyers you get.

There’s also going to be additional opportunities for making money on the blog because I have a lot of recipes that use ingredients that may not be available everywhere so I’ll have links to buy those ingredients on Amazon. I’m also going to do a whole series of smoothies using the Vita mix which is a super high-powered blender and so I’ll have  my affiliate links to the Vita mix store. And I might also do a series on growing your own herbs and vegetables using the Aerogarden and, once again, I’ll have my affiliate link to that product to.

I may also sell advertising on the site once it is built up, or not depending on how much my other income is making.

Now I know that building an authority site isn’t going to be a quick overnight money maker. This is the kind of project that is going to take quite a while before I start to see some results and, to tell you the truth, that’s kind of scary because a lot of work is going to go into it before I will be able to see it paying off so I  have to be really stern with myself and keep working on it even when it seems like it’s not making a lot of money for the effort. I need to keep the faith and realize that my efforts will be rewarded in the end with a more passive type of income.