I’ve been talking a lot about how your website can build your authority, because it’s something I’ve seen to be incredibly powerful.
But I want to be super clear: Your most important asset isn’t your website.
I wrote about it on Copyblogger waaay back in 2012, and it’s more important than ever:
How to protect your business’s most important asset
Your most important asset isn’t your website or your list, even though those tools are incredibly important.
Your most important asset is your relationship with your audience
Let’s start with a quick definition of what “audience” even means — because it’s not a synonym for your customer list or even your email subscribers.
Your audience is made of the people who are paying attention to what you do. It’s your readers or listeners, your customers, your potential clients, your vendors, your team, and other publishers in your topic.
When your audience finds your work valuable, you start to develop authority.
That word “authority” carries some weird baggage, mainly because some people sorely abuse it. But when authority comes from the right place, it’s the source of amazing power to do good things.
It doesn’t come from publishing an endless drip of content. And it definitely doesn’t come from some kind of “natural leadership ability.”
Healthy authority comes from being genuinely useful to your audience.
When you start looking at authority this way, you can create some interesting shifts.
For example, when someone comes to you who needs your useful abilities, you see how unhelpful it is to insist you “aren’t an expert.”
They don’t care about your struggle with the word expert. They care about solving their problem.
But there’s one more thing.
This kind of authority doesn’t only come from having expertise that is useful. It also comes from communicating that clearly.
- If you talk about a hundred different ideas, your authority will get blurry and hard to see.
- If you’re communicating a benefit people don’t much care about, your authority will be irrelevant.
- And if you develop authority with your audience but never give them a chance to go further (with a product, a course, a bigger project, or whatever your goals are), your authority is limited.
Begin with an attitude of service. Get specific. Speak up when you actually know your stuff. And keep listening, to make sure you’ve found the area of focus that your audience cares about.
Your audience is your True North
Sometimes, when the environment is confusing, it’s really helpful to have a compass.
In business (not just digital business), the audience is our True North.
When you have a decision to make, protecting your audience will point you in the right direction.
This isn’t goody two-shoes stuff. Screwing over your audience for a short-term financial win (even a big one) will destroy your audience’s trust in you. And that won’t just cost you good will, it will cost you money.
That means you don’t promote junk (your own or someone else’s). You don’t pretend to know things you don’t. And you don’t “fake it until you make it.”
It’s completely fine to launch a product or service that’s still rough around the edges. Just let people know that. “Rough” can be fantastic. “Useless” isn’t.
If there’s a secret ingredient, it’s GAS
Usually, ethical business teachers tell you that there isn’t any “secret ingredient” that makes a business work.
But there is. I call it GAS. You can read about it here.
Whether your business is big, small, microscopic, or just getting born, the road to authority and audience trust is essentially the same.
You show up (with GAS in the tank). You serve to the best of your ability. And you speak clearly about what you’re good at.
Need some help with the website part?
A great website doesn’t create authority all by itself, but it’s a fantastic way to tackle the “speak clearly about what you’re good at” part.
That’s why I created a “make your website an amazing client-attracting mothership of goodness” workshop. It’s hosted on the Maven platform, and it’s cohort-based, which means we worth together with a small group to actually do the work and get it published.
(And have fun while we’re at it.)
If it sounds like your jam, here’s where you can find out more about it: Sonia’s Content Flagship course on Maven
Stay fierce!
Sonia
