To be successful at anything, you need to acquire certain skills.
All athletes share certain traits. All brain surgeons share certain traits. All successful online business share certain traits.
Nobody wins a raffle ticket to become a successful online business owner, over time they acquire a number of core skills that allows them to surpass everyone else at the bottom.
What are they?
1. The right mindset
“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill.
Every great entrepreneur encompasses a positive mindset. Not only do they learn from their failures but they are in a constant state of progression. If you give up each time you put a foot wrong, you won’t be able to run a successful authority website.
You may even need to surround yourself with like-minded people who will push and motivate you. The world’s most read business book, Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill emphasizes that a mastermind group is what separates successful and unsuccessful business people.
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I’ve seen too many business-minded people attempt to go it alone only for their friends and family to tell them “it will never work” and they should give up, and guess what… when the going gets tough, they give up!
2. Delegation of tasks
There’s more moving parts to running an authority website than you can shake a stick at. Email marketing, SEO, paid search, website design, offline marketing, the list is endless.
You can be the jack of all trades, or the master of delegation. The latter will get you further.
You need to have employees or online freelancers who can do specific tasks for you. For example, you will not grow your online website if you spend half your week trying to install a subscriber opt-in.
You grow by finding new customers and creating new products.
Delegate smaller tasks so you can focus on the areas you’re strongest at.
3. Understanding the power of content
Every successful website needs content.
If prospects read your content and gain value or knowledge, they quickly align you as an authority figure, bookmark your site and perhaps opt-in to your newsletter. If they visit your website and there’s very little content, a poor impression is left and they will not come back.
Content isn’t just blogs, it’s videos, images, reports, case studies etc. Consider content the bridge that links your website to customers.
Without content, you don’t have an online business.
4. Knowing how to promote content
Creating content is just half the battle. I always say if you don’t know how to promote content, you should stop creating it until you do.
All too often I see business owners creating blog posts that reach less than a thousand people and they move on to the next one. When I tell them that article was beneficial to 500,000 people and they should promote it further, they have no idea how:
To get the maximum amount of value from each piece of content you create, you must put it on front of as many people as possible.
Let’s assume your website brings in 1,000 visitors per month (most bring in less than that). Of the 1,000 visitors, how many are going to share your website with a friend?
1%? Maybe, if you’re lucky.
So every blog post generates 10 new readers, at this rate you won’t be getting anywhere. However, if you got that blog out to 500,000 people, that’s 5,000 new readers to your website if 1% of all readers shared it to a friend.
So then, how does a website promote content? You have two options:
SEO – is a method of optimising content for search engines. This method is free but does not guarantee traffic or the quality of traffic.
Paid search – involves creating advertisements on social media, search engines, websites and even offline media. Unlike SEO, paid search costs money but provides targeted traffic and that is instant.
Without using both methods in any combination, you will not be able to run a successful authority website. Don’t make the mistake of creating too much content because you will fail if you don’t know how to effectively promote it.
5. Engage your audience
Every successful online website has an audience, not just any audience, but an engaged audience that trusts you.
If they trust you, they will engage with your content, reply to your emails and buy your products.
You will need to engage your audience with amazing content and brand yourself or your business as an authority.
Why do you think brands like Nike and Adidas spend millions sponsoring world famous athletes? Because they know their audience trusts these superstars and will react to ads they feature in.
To run any successful authority website business, you must have what I call the Attractive Character. This is someone your audience likes, for Apple it was former CEO Steve Jobs, For Gillette it was Tiger Woods, who’s yours?
You can be the Attractive Character, it can be your brand (think Uber and Airbnb) or it can be an external party.
6. Converting your audience
Arguably the most important part of running a successful authority website is being able to convert your audience into happy paying customers.
This is typically done by converting cold traffic into subscribers (to your email list), then using a number of proven marketing methods to convert them into customers, and repeat buyers.
This is all done through creating a sales funnel which can be followed, measured and tweaked as time goes on.
Every successful authority website has a sales funnel.
Summary
If you follow these 6 tips you will be able to build you very own authority website.
While they sound easy and simple to follow, they will take time to learn and master.
You now have the foundations to build your own successful authority website, which areas do you think you’ll need the most help in? Leave a comment below listing your biggest strength and weakness.
