People Who Want To Build An Authority Site Start With Building Authority… This Is A Mistake
People who want to build an authority website tend to start with the exact thing they shouldn’t; building authority.
In many cases, this means that they’ll start with stuff like social media, blogging or (shudder) building a brand.
This is a terrible idea, and I’ll explain why later. For now though, understand this: direct marketing will save you.
Direct Marketing Principles Will Save You
By direct marketing principles, I mean this basic formula:
- Find An Audience With a Problem
- Find The Solution To That Problem
- Sell That Solution To The Audience
If you start with this process, then you will make money, solve problems, help people and make an actual difference.
It’s important to note that everything you read about online as far as building an authority site goes is starting at the last point: selling the solution. Except in most cases, people start an authority site looking to sell a solution to a problem they haven’t discovered yet.
Social media, email marketing, lead generation and funnels are all part of the last point. If you haven’t done the first two, then you are wasting your time.
“But Jamie I’m Scared To Sell” or “I Want To Help People, Not Be A Filthy, Capitalist Pig!”
Here’s a little secret as regards problem solving and charging for it.
This is important because it ties into what I’ll tell you below about why building a brand without a product is a useless activity and it ties in with what I’ve already written above.
The secret is a simple formula.
If the problem you solve has a negative value greater than the cost of your solution, then your audience will never be miserable.
If the solution you give is cheaper than the cost to fix the problem by other means – or better yet the only way to fix the problem – then you will always have happy customers.
Should your solution be clearly superior to everything out there and a really easy and cost-effective way to solve a real problem, then you won’t even have to do much of the evil capitalist pig sales stuff.
That’s the secret formula to having a many customers as you could possibly want within your niche.
“If It Is That Easy… Then Why Do People Complain?”
We’re about to come full circle here. You might read the above and think, “Yeah, but what if my solution costs $100 and people don’t want to pay that much? Even great products have haters and complainers!”
They do. You will too if you follow the above advice. Here’s why it doesn’t matter.
Just the other day, my friend Kyle got a comment on his site about his email marketing for his course, Pro Niche Site. (My review here.)
This comment basically said, “Stop sending these emails where you try to convert sales. I hate copywriting techniques and wish you wouldn’t do it.”
Now, sometimes emails can get a little irritating. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Gee… I wish someone would pop into my inbox and sell me something today.”
That said, when an email comes into your inbox and you think, “Woah… I actually need that. What a great deal!” you don’t experience those emotions.
It happened to me just yesterday. I got an email from an online course provider about a bundle of courses with Raspberry Pi projects that gave a stupid discount. (It was something ridiculous like eight courses for $30 or something.)
The moral there: If the offer is great and the person wants it, they’ll buy.
Back to Kyle’s commenter. This guy had applied for Kyle’s free opt-ins multiple times so that he could get all of the stuff that he gives away free. Yet the guy hadn’t bought anything.
Still though… he made the demand that Kyle should stop selling him stuff because he wasn’t going to buy it.
This Guy Is Not A Customer
I’m not going to pile on the guy about not buying stuff. There are tons of websites I visit and haven’t spent a penny on. I think it’s a little off that he tried to direct Kyle’s sales plan, but whatever. Let’s move on.
(Side note: If I read your website and enjoy the content and you have a cheap product available, I’ll buy it to say “Thanks for the content,” even if I’m not interested in the product itself. A lot of companies miss a whole buying bracket because they don’t do this. I’m not alone – loads of people are happy to support content producers in small amounts.)
My point in bringing it up is this: That guy is, whether in the right or wrong about Kyle’s evil emails, not a customer.
He doesn’t buy the stuff, doesn’t contribute to the bottom line and if we’re being picky, he’s a net-loss to the site, all things told.
When you build an authority website without a product/solution in mind, you’re going to attract a whole lot of non-customers.
If you’re at the start of your internet journey, you might think, “I don’t care. I’m doing it to help people and build a community.”
That’s a noble goal (and one I loosely share,) but it’s really easy to get caught up in stuff that doesn’t make you money and when you become an actual authority, you’ll have more questions than you can provide answers for without getting paid in some fashion.
Plus, like I mentioned above… there’s no easier way to build a community than to provide a paid-for solution that gives more value to a person than they spend on you.
They’ll value you as a company and you’ll value them as a customer. No capitalist pigging required.