When I first started playing music, way back in that carefree decade known as the 90’s, the most important thing to me was how to find an outlet for the songs I was creating. I wasn’t really worried about image, or brand, of my product. This growth period lasted several years, and I found out the hard way exactly how important branding was. I had to work hard to undo the mistakes I had made.

When you are in niche blogging, and especially in the make money online niche, there might not be a more important aspect of your marketing than branding. More specifically, branding yourself as an authority. How come so many people neglect this part? Because it is one of the most difficult things to achieve.

Becoming an authority on a subject isn’t easy. Many people claim to be an authority when in fact they are nothing of the sort. They are just relaying information. Becoming an authority takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and most importantly, trust from your reader that you are giving them solid information.

People are more concerned with bang for their buck, checking their stats and figuring out how to make an additional couple dollars. If those people focused their efforts on branding, and becoming an authority, they would be earning what they want in a shorter time. If they would apply themselves to the craft of communicating rather than creating some e-book with recycled information, they would achieve greater success.

Here are my top tips to help your brand yourself as an authority.

1. Know your stuff. This seems like common sense but there are many people who claim to be an authority that have no real knowledge in the niche they are talking about. Nowhere on the web is this more obvious than in the make money online niche. Every corner of the web has some guy who claims to be the next big thing. They talk about how they will make millions from their website in the next year. They may tell you that they are going from 0 dollars to a million in a year. They may claim that they will be the next big ProBlogger within 12 months. The problem, is their website is loaded down with nothing but last years advice. And after 2 months of seeing no money, they are done. There are reasons why people read the large blogs. It is not only because they make money online, it is also because their opinion is worth hearing. Is your opinion worth hearing?
2. Take time to build your readership before monetizing. Have you ever read some of the top bloggers personal story? Almost uniformly (with a few exceptions) the blogger will make some comment in their biography along the lines of ‘When I started blogging I didn’t even know you could make money at it, I just did it for fun because I had something to share.’ Too many of the newer niche bloggers completely ignore that fact. They want to immediately call themselves experts at how they will help you make money. This, of course, before they have made money themselves. I used to have this website heavily monetized until I realized that I have yet to prove myself as an authority. So I took all of my ads down. I have focused all my monetizing efforts on the websites I am profiting from and started focusing myself to really give heartfelt advice via this website. A true authority shares their opinion and when it becomes relevant, they they can monetize and profit from their worthwhile knowledge. We’d all like to feel our opinion is relevant, but only after hard work and time is that the case. In the long run, you will make much more money if you take time to build then monetize, rather than monetize from the start while you build.
3. Make sure your image is solid. This is very important in branding yourself and establishing yourself as an authority. I cannot count how many times I have surfed to a blog that is sloppy looking from top to bottom. Yet, they claim they can help me make money? How can they when it is very obvious they aren’t making any money themselves? If a website is overrun with advertisements, have horrible color schemes, bad grammar, or weak articles, I will steer clear and never give it a second thought. In addition, a good domain name is also crucial in establishing authority. I don’t care how great your knowledge is, it will be very hard to establish yourself if your domain is www.ezmonies4you2day.tv.
4. Don’t be boastful and show results. I posted an entire article on this part alone. It is so important to have relevant information to back up your claims. You don’t have to reveal your websites or exact tactics (I have only revealed a few of the websites I run on this website, in fact) but you need to be able to ’show your work’ as my 6th grade math teacher used to say. Bragging is the fasted way to be branded a joke, not an authority. Maybe boasting worked for John Chow, but John Chow has been in this niche a heck of a lot longer than you, rest assured.
5. Be gracious and humble. You can never under-estimate how important humility and kindness are. Just because you feel you are an expert, it takes a real human to understand they are one fish of many in a vast lake. You need to feel honored people come to your website to read your advice. You cannot expect them to. Take time to make your readers feel special.

Why do I feel I am an authority to help you brand yourself as an authority? You have to trust me. In fact, all of those tips come directly from mistakes I made in trying to establish myself in the make money online niche. It isn’t because I haven’t made money online. I have made money online. But just because I know how to do it, or have done it, doesn’t mean I can explain it well or be and authority on making money.

I am an authority, however, on making mistakes. Each mistake I have made, however, has gotten me one step closer to reaching the goals I have set out for myself.

I usually check out about 10 to 20 new blogs a day. Partially because of my ’scoring system’ to comment and establish relationships, but also because I am as curious as the next to see someone elses take on blogging. I am always keeping an ear to the ground to spot the newest trends in earning income, and to see how I can apply them to the other blogs which are more monetized than this one. We are all trying to make money online.

One trend that is driving me absolutely nuts is people boasting and making claims there is no way they can back up. Today, I stumbled upon a very nice and informative blog. It has a slick layout, some good content, but in the header and logo it says it is ‘THE Money Making Site on The Web’. As in this blog author is claiming he is the authority.

Simple research tells me that this website is not doing that great traffic wise. Comments are slow, Alexa rank is middled, and I cannot find all that many links going back. In fact, of the 197 links, almost all of them were comments he posted himself on other blogs.

This type of boastful activity makes me not want to read this blog consistantly. I get the feeling that this person is just grabbing information from a high profile blog, and regurgitating it almost word for word. Maybe when a new blogger happens upon his site, they will feel he has some sort of authority, but quickly that illusion is shattered.

There is nothing really new in the make money online field. Everyone is pretty much just saying the same thing, maybe with a personal touch. Boastful claims just make you look cocky.

That is why I visit websites like the http://www.bloggingexperiment.com. They are getting results, but they are not boastful, nor do they ever claim they are THE authority in anything.