Today we’re digging deeper on what it means to be an authority in your community and how that helps build your community and your personal brand.
The best part about building your personal brand is that you get to help other people. You gather those people around your message, and those people then gather around your content, since you have a message that brings them to you.
Your message is either going to repel people or bring them to you. As you bring people to you, they’re going to start to wonder what it is that you are saying and what it is that they can get from this relationship.
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The common thread
As you bring people into your community, two things happen:
- They get a chance to interact with you more directly.
- They get to deep dive into what you’re all about and binge your content.
Once people are in your community, there are more direct conversations: You talk to them, they talk to you, and they get to talk to other people in your community that might have like-minded issues, problems, experiences, whatever it might be.
It’s an environment for like-minded people to interact. You can develop a meaningful experience with them, and that community can live anywhere. It can be in person. It could be online.
The point is that you are the one who is bringing them together. They’re gathering around some topic that connects them, and you are the one that is delivering your message. And that message is the common thread that connects the people.
TAKE AUTHORITY
You being an authority within this community is as important as you being the person that brought them together. They look to you as a leader in the space, as someone who’s going to direct them on how to act in the community. They look to you on what to come back for, what to expect, and what you’re going to deliver each week.
That’s your role and responsibility as the community leader. It’s an important piece of you having a community within your personal brand business. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
There are three pieces that are most important when taking on the role as the authority within your business.
- Research your core topic to be ahead of the curve.
- Curate the best of.
- Provide quick wins.
Each of these will help you take on your authority role within your community. Let’s dive in.
RELATED: If you need more direction on how to build your personal brand, check out this podcast episode, The Personal Branding Framework, where you learn what the core ingredients of personal branding are and exactly where to start.
RESEARCH YOUR CORE TOPIC
You should consistently be doing more research into your core topic. It’s your job to stay ahead of your audience in terms of the things that you are known for.
If they pass you, that’s fine, but you always want to have something that they can learn from you. That way you can continue to add value to them over time. If someone sits with you for a month and you run out of things they can learn from you, you’re doing your job as the authority.
They’re going to look for someone else to continue to push the envelope and to help them grow. So your job is to continue to grow your expertise through research.
Basically, this is you asking questions:
- What’s going on in my industry?
- Where are people struggling the most?
- What are the topics that are going to be useful for my audience?
You’re doing that work. The reason you have this community is to talk to them. You ask them, what are you struggling with? What are you challenged with?
And as they grow and evolve, you’ll discover things that people have in common. You’ll have people who are ahead of others who have new topics that they struggle with. As you solve some issues and help people along, they’re going to have new struggles that they want to break through on.
STAY A STEP AHEAD
You can consistently be there to grow with your community members. Your job is to stay ahead of the curve and to bring to light new ideas and topics they have not encountered yet.
So stay on top of what’s new, what’s topical, best practices, and reinforce important things that your community members need to keep doing or might forget to do.
Continue to be a passionate, enthusiastic person that understands your topic better than other people.
You’re not going to be the deepest expert on something to begin with. The goal is to just stay ahead of the people learning from you. You do this for a long enough time, and you’re going to be way ahead of people who come into your community a year from now versus a week from now.
That’s your job. That’s the biggest part of this. Be someone that people can learn from.
If they have nothing to learn from you, they have no reason to be in your community.
CURATE THE BEST OF
The second piece is to curate the best of. As you’re doing this authority work, a lot of your job is to bring to the table either the resources or tools that people use.
Your job is to curate that best of list so people can get to those resources more quickly.
They can say, “Thanks for doing the work. Let me look at your list of what you have tried, and I’ll just use what you use.”
If you can save people time and the brain energy to have to figure it out for themselves, you’re doing your job as a leader in your market, as the authority in your space.
Don’t underestimate how powerful that can be.
For example, say someone in your community wants to figure out which email marketing provider to use.There might be 50 of them out there. She goes to their websites and they all sound the same.
How should she pick. She doesn’t want to pick just on price, and she doesn’t know which one’s going to be best for her business. Not knowing is daunting.
You need to be able to say, “I know you. I know my audience for people like you. This is exactly the tool that should be useful.”
You can at least narrow it down to one or two or three that she can choose from and why. This is hugely beneficial.
SHARE KNOWLEDGE
What’s great is that you’ve probably already done this work for yourself. Or it’s work you’ve learned from other people, because you’re putting yourself in positions to learn from other people as well.
And you can absolutely pass on knowledge from the people you’ve learned from and trust. It doesn’t just have to be things you do yourself. Your job is to take the best of everything you learn from and give it to the people who are finding you.
If you can do that, you are helping them jump the line and not take the time you took to figure it all out.
Develop Affiliates
Another win-win option for you as a community leader is to develop an affiliate relationship with the people providing the tools and services you use the most.
This is for those couple of top useful tools for a certain problem people have, tools that you’ve reviewed in depth and are confident they are the best. Because it’s what you use, and it’s something you love and trust, you can actually build an affiliate relationship with that provider and make this beneficial for you too.
If everyone wins, it’s okay. You win for doing the work, and your community members win by skipping the hours it might have taken them to learn, which is money in their pocket as well.
Create Lead Magnets
While you’re curating your best of list, you can also start to compile it into resources that will serve as lead magnets. These are things you can build that will help your business and help other people.
One could be your process for turning a podcast into repurposable content. Actually create your personal process and write it down. Put it in a nice-looking format. Now you can share that with other people and help them.
Taking the time to write down your process for other people actually helps you, too. You might find better ways to do something that you hadn’t thought of, or you’ll have at least a place to look.
This also means you don’t have to remember it every time or risk missing a step. It’s helpful for everyone.
CREATE TEMPLATES
On top of that, you might also have templates you want to build, but you haven’t taken the time to do it yourself. Instead, you’ve been hand-creating things over and over and over again. You have it in your head, but you never wrote it out.
Creating these templates for your business helps you, and offering those templates to your community helps them. You also gain the scrutiny of other people, which will make you do it better.
They’re going to thank you for that. They’re going to see that as valuable. These are things you can give away for free. You can use them as lead magnets to grow your list, or you can use them as add-ons to add value to the things you’re selling.
However you want to use it, these are the things that are going to differentiate you. These are the reasons people are going to want to be in your community.
This is why they will come back to your community and look to you as an authority within your community. You bring them the things that make their lives and jobs easier, and you move them along quicker in the process. That’s huge.
PROVIDE QUICK WINS
That brings me to the third idea, which is quick wins. Anytime you can actually help someone make a difference in their business or in the way they approach their business, that is a game-changing step in your relationship.
You are now not just creating interesting and informational content. You’re actually changing the course of their business, which can become a testimonial for you and a referral for new business.
It can become added sales from this person who now wants to work with you in the future, who shares your content with other people. And the best part is you’ve helped someone.
Giving people those quick wins is important.
It’s fine to just entertain and be informative. But if you can actually create a quick win with someone, you’ve now created a loyal customer.
Gaining Loyalty
What differentiates the winners from the losers in terms of your brands?
One state I discovered a while back is that something like upwards of 70 percent of brands, if they disappeared tomorrow, people wouldn’t care.
Let that sink in.
Over 70 percent of brands, if they disappeared tomorrow, people would not care because they have something else they could use. They can switch brands. It all seems the same to them.
Those brands have no loyalty. So if you dive deeper, you ask, what makes someone loyal? That’s what I’m looking for. People that want to be a part of my community and are loyal. The only measurable factor that creates loyalty in a customer is a shared meaningful experience.
What does that mean?
It means you have somehow created some kind of transformation for them. You’ve created something they will remember, something that caused an emotion and helped them move along in their journey.
A quick win can do that. A quick win is someone saying:
- I wish I had known this a long time ago.
- This just saved me a lot of time.
- Thank you. You didn’t have to do this.
- You put in your effort and didn’t ask anything for it.
- I appreciate this quick win in my business.
That is huge.
And as a lot of you know, we need to celebrate the wins along the way. It’s a lot of work being an entrepreneur and building things on your own. So the more quick wins you can give your audience and the people in your community, the better.
Providing Value
People will see you, the authority in this space, helping them. They’re going to tell others. That is what creates loyalty. That is what creates a passion and an emotion toward you as a leader in the space.
You are providing value.
Value is these quick wins. It is you figuring out from your audience specifically what they need that’s going to help them in their business, that’s going to get them the quick win. Not just a generic, Joe Schmoe quick win, but the actual person in your business: Jennifer, Steven, Bob, Joe.
That one person, if you think about them, what is going to help them today? If it can help them, it might be able to help ten other people, a hundred other people as well that are already in your community.
Working with them, listening to them and talking to them because they’re in your community shows that you have heart and you care about their business succeeding.
Second, it shows that you are listening, and that you have the knowledge and the wherewithal to actually help them.
Deliver these quick wins, and you will find that your people who are just casually observing you are going to start to become people who actually care about you and what you are doing. They will become fans instead, possibly customers out of this.
PULL IT ALL TOGETHER
So research your core topic, create best-of lists and provide quick wins.
That is how you become an authority within your community.
That’s how you leverage authority in your community to nurture it, to make it stronger, to make it better. And then you become a magnet for other people who want to join your community as well.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
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- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
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