Newbie Bloggers: Commanding Authority With Your Blog
When I started to write this post, I just checked out “Command Authority With Your Blog” by Ryan. This post is very relevant to what Ryan is talking about, but I am concentrating on newbies here.
Not to mention, commanding authority is not an easy thing. With blogging, it takes a lot of hard work, persistence and patience. But for newbies, they must first know the “how to” of it. This post is exactly about that!
Every person who is established in a particular niche or a business has been a newbie once. That is unavoidable. No one can start in a new field as an expert, because no one is born expert.
Every person becomes authoritative in a particular field only when he/she is established in that field, has achieved success, and is an expert. The same thing applies with blogging. Darren Rowse from Problogger is a blogging authority because his blog(s) are well established, he has achieved great success with blogging. and he has displayed his expertise on his blogs.
Authority is something that comes after these stages. However, newbie bloggers do not want to show that they are newbies, and every newbie blogger wishes that she is able to display her authority.
So what do you have to do to become an authoritative blogger if you are a newbie?
Become an Expert In Your Niche
Expertise in any field is something that you develop. It is something you need to do by yourself. You can expand and deepen your expertise in a particular niche by reading other blogs in your niche and investing in courses or books that are worthy to mold you in the right direction and so on.
When you are a newbie, your first goal should be to educate yourself on the topic. You cannot write about a particular topic if you are ignorant about things in that area. You not only have to know about the topic, but you also need to know it in a critical manner.
For instance, if your niche is traffic generation, then instead of just learning the methods that help you to drive traffic to your blog, you have to try them yourself and research all possible methods. You should be able to tell others what works and what doesn’t. You must be able to answer your reader’s questions on a particular technique.
Display only The Positives
This is a little bit of a trick. Don’t display negative aspects in your blog. For instance, if you have very small number of Facebook fans, take down that Fan box on your blog. If you have a small number of subscribers, do not display the number. Just put the “subscribe” button.
If you have very small number of comments on every post, then don’t display the number of comments in the post excerpts at the homepage. Make sure that you do not display any thing that shows that you are a newbie and that your blog is quite new.
Have a Pro Blog Design
The design of your blog is what hits your readers first. Even before reading your content, your design will be captured by the readers’ eyes and that will get into their heads before your great content.
Many times, newbies are clearly visible because of their design. I can easily identify that a blog is very new and that the blogger is immature if I see any or all of the following:
- dark letters on dark backgrounds
- white letters on light backgrounds
- flashing ad banners all over the place
- misaligned text and columns
- too many widgets
It is quite important that your blog “looks” mature. If you can afford to, go for a custom designing of your blog by hiring a professional designer. If you can’t afford that, you can still make your blog look professional by carefully choosing colors and checking on the ads and widgets you are using.
Unique Content:
Of course, many will think that this is so trivial, and many will overlook this aspect, especially when they are starting out. While a blogger is just starting to blog, he will have many other things to worry about other than just posting content to the blog – design, submitting blogs to search engines, setting up accounts in social sites, getting the banners and logos done, taking care of the alignments and other aspects of the look of the blog, endless tweaking and so on. This list can go on endlessly.
A newbie blogger will be under pressure when it comes to creating content for the blog. Many will be drawn to the tendency to post hot content in their niche and would like to create popularity (mind that popularity cannot be created!). But it is quite important to understand that people won’t take the pain to find a “new” blog with some content that can be found anywhere else on the internet.
Rather, people will surely take the pain to come to a new blog which is delivering unique and useful content – content or a perspective which cannot be found anywhere else. And this helps the newbie blogger to acquire authority. That’s for sure and you can’t disagree with me on this.
Your About Page
I am not going to re-write what Ryan told at his post. But this point needs a mention here for sure. Why? because every newbie blogger easily shows that she is immature through their About page. Craft your About page carefully.
Don’t boast about yourself alone. Even if it is your About page, it should care more about your readers. Rather than mentioning what you are good at, people would want to know what they can get from your blog.
As Ryan points out, don’t write down all your achievements in life. People are not interested in knowing about that. Just tell them what you will do for them; include your expertise in relation to that.
For instance, if you promise that your blog will help people to develop better blogs in future, then you must also tell them why they should listen to you.
On to you…
As a newbie blogger, have you had issues in commanding authority with your blog?
If you are an established blogger, what would you suggest all those newbies out there to be able to build authority for their blog?
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