Lay the foundation
To fully implement the power of social media, you must become an authority in your specialized area of expertise. (It may be easier then you think. Keep reading.) However, before you do, you must lay the foundation for your website. It is very likely that you will make no money at all in the first month or two.
Find a topic you are passionate about and have a great deal of knowledge about. Try to create one web page per day. (That too is easier than you may think.) After you have 20 or 30 pages, you may feel like you have a professional-looking website.
Then you can start a blog.
Everything revolves around your blog
Central to your social media marketing will be your blog. All of your other social media will link to that. So, create a blog related to the rest of your website.
Your blog’s topic
When choosing the topic for your blog, there are four things you must keep in mind:
- Are you deeply interested in it?
- Do people spend money in this niche?
- Are there products to promote in this niche?
- Is there enough potential that you with stick with it? (Do you think you will be able to add a page a day 3 months from now?)
Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.
Become an authority
Remember, the more pages on your blog, the more visitors you get. The more visitors you get, the more revenue you get.
To help people start linking to you from the social media, it will help tremendously if they consider you to be an authority on the subject. Do you think that you will be able to study enough and learn enough about that topic so that 3 months from now people will consider you an authority?
(That task may not be as daunting as you first presume. Right now you know much more about your topic than lots of people. You could have a significant number of visitors going to your blog for advice. Your visitors may come to your blog and consider you an authority long before you have the same feeling about yourself.)
You must read this –> Here is a blog post telling you how to become known as the go-to person on a topic.)
Job opportunities in content marketing
A LinkedIn post by Marcel Majsan gives some good tricks for becoming very good at content creation. He also give 7 reasons why content marketers will become extremely wanted on the job market. He says
First thing you need to know when writing for web is that people don’t actually read your content. They scan it.
So I’ll make this simple for you, my (lazy) readers. I’ll start with a catchy headline, followed by the list, continue with bulletins and finish with CTA. Read more.
Blog monetization
The Economic Times website says
How user-friendly is your website?
Example of an authority blog
Look at this blog page. There are a few sentences that the author got by doing a Google search for pet news. The news story had a picture that is repeated here. To avoid copyright problems, the source of the picture is referenced.
Below that there is a Related pages section. In this case the main story was about someone who bought twin Tibetan Mastiff dogs for $3.2 million.
The corresponding Twitter post used this hashtag: #TibetanMastiff. Clicking on that found the story about the end of the Tibetan Mastiff fad in China.
Identify your niche
Ask yourself to which niche you should become an authority. Can you make money on it?
An important tool in answering this question is Google Trends. Suppose you are very interested in pets. Your website is about a similar topic and you ask yourself whether you should make your blog about pets.
A Google Trends search shows that worldwide people are searching for pets 110,000 times a month. That means that too many people are searching for information about pets. Some of the websites will be from big companies with big advertising budgets. You do NOT want to compete with them.
You know lots about pet insurance so you think you may write a blog about that. There are 165,000 searches per month. Again that is too high and you will have too much competition.
How to become an instant authority
A good rule of thumb is to drill down to a sub-niche. The niche may just have too much competition.
This YouTube video explains one way to become an instant authority in your sub-niche.
Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of a free YouTube tutorial. It’s called 7 Day YouTube and will teach you how to make entertaining videos & animated GIFs.
