One of the biggest challenges you must overcome as a blogger or webmaster is to prove to your audience that you are an expert in your niche. It is important to pass the message to your readers that you know what you are talking about so they can trust you. Trust will convert readers to loyal readers, followers, or customers.
The most obvious way is to start a website or blog in a niche where you are an expert. For example:
- If you are an accountant, you can start a blog providing financial advice.
- If you are a nutritionist, you can start a blog about nutrition and dieting.
- If you are a fitness freak, you can write about fitness.
- If you have a hobby, you can write about it.
Find your true passion
A successful website or blog depends on the quality of the content. I’ve said before that content is still king, and you can succeed with or without SEO. You need to be passionate about the particular niche to create good content. Passion is over and above expertise, distinguishing a good website from an exceptional one.
What happens when you are not a ‘true’ expert in a niche but still want to run a website on that subject? There are different options available, and I will be discussing them below.
Hire an expert
This may sound weird, but one of the opportunities the Internet creates is the ability to hire an expert to help you bridge the gap between good content and exceptional content. Whenever I discuss this method with fellow bloggers or clients, I get many questions and concerns about how such a process can work.
You will have to play the role of the entrepreneur and approach your website or blog the same way you would approach a real business. In the real world, when a company needs skills in a particular area, it hires an expert or outsources to another company. This is exactly how it works in the offline world, too.
Where can you hire experts?
Many websites bring contractors and workers together. Websites like upwork.com, freelancer.com, and peopleperhour.com are great places to start looking for your experts.
How it works?
The process is the following:
You prepare the job description, explaining the job in as many details as possible, and ask the interested parties to apply for it. You can add some restrictions on who can apply, such as applying only if you can prove your qualifications or previous experience. At this stage, don’t mention anything about salary.
You register for an account and post the job opening on one (or more) of the sites listed above.
You will start receiving applications for the job in a few hours. Depending on the type of expert you are looking for, you may get hundreds of applications, so you need to be prepared to manage and filter them to find the right candidates.
It is certain that many applicants are not suitable for the job at all, and they apply without reading the requirements, so you need to be careful to reject those applicants from the beginning.
The next step is to create a short list of 3-4 applicants and start talking to them, asking questions, and, in short, doing the ‘interview’ process as you would in the real world.
At this stage, you must consider their qualifications, previous work experience, portfolio, availability, etc.
Next, before choosing who to hire, I conduct a short pilot with the applicants who made it to the shortlist. In other words, I give them more details about the job (including payment details) and invite them to participate in a short paid pilot. In the pilot, I simply give them one or two titles and ask them to write the articles. The applicant with the best work is hired for a one-month trial period.
You may choose to follow the same process as above or devise a completely different one. What is important is to understand that you don’t have to do anything alone when running a website or blog, and you can always hire a real expert to fill in the gaps.
Become an expert
If you don’t want to hire an expert either because you can’t afford to and don’t want to take the risk or because your niche is very specific and there are no experts available or they cost too much, then there is no other option than becoming one!
How can you become an expert in a niche?
I will cover in more detail how you can become an expert in a niche in another post, but in short, you need to:
- Find what research has to say. Good places to start are scholar.google.com, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed, or any other websites or journals that deal with your niche
- Find out who the ‘experts’ are in your niche. Search Google for your niche, find out who the leaders/influencers are, and follow them on all social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
- Do your keyword research and find out what to write about. You should also learn how to select your blog titles cleverly to increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines.
- Practice makes perfect - This is true in the online World as well. The more you write, the more content you publish online, and the more interaction you have online, the better you can become. So, start producing content about your niche, and always remember that quality is much more important than quantity.
- If writing is not your best friend, there are alternatives. If you think you have the knowledge for a topic but your writing is not good and can’t improve it, you can hire a copywriter to fix your mistakes or look for alternatives to writing, like producing a video, a slideshow, a podcast, or an infographic!
- Refresh your SEO skills – Remember basic SEO principles when writing content. Your focus should be on content, but SEO can give your good content a real boost and value.
Who is an expert?
I’ve been talking so far about becoming an expert but have not answered the question, who is an expert? If you think about it for a while, an expert is someone:
- Who knows a subject well
- That people can trust and consider an expert
What does this tell us in the online world? First, you need to show off your expertise in your writing, and second, you need to show off your trust in your social media profile. In other words, an expert is more likely to have followers on various social media channels, indicating that people trust him.
Think about it this way: would you trust someone with a few followers as an expert in a niche or someone with thousands of followers?
In summary
If you have expertise in a niche, you must prove it by producing great, relevant content and working on your social media profiles.
If you lack expertise, you can either hire an expert to fill in the void or try to become an expert yourself by building new skills.
Either way, your goal is to establish a tunnel of trust between your website and your users.
