Want Real Authority? Own Your Content, Don’t Rent

We all know the “pros” to owning a home (or anything, for that matter) vs. renting. One of the big ones is control. You can paint the walls whatever color you want, have 10 dogs and put pink flamingos in your front yard if you want (unless you’re in one of those strict home associations, but that’s another story).

The same applies to your content. Social media is a great platform for authority building, but it’s essentially rented space. It limits what you can do, having to work within the confines of the particular network. While they may not have a problem with pink flamingos, they all have their own set of rules, and even an inadvertent violation can have disastrous consequences.

What’s the workaround? Own the content channel!

Do you know what a self-owned social media platform is called? A blog.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Yup, if you host your own site or blog, you own it and the authority your content produces.[/inlinetweet] However, anything you do or say on social media belongs to the site publishing it. They can remove it, edit it or even shut down your account if they want. When they shut you down, your authority goes down with it.

There are no such constraints on your own blog. You can do and say what you want, follow your own rules and, ultimately, can decide what to or not to post. (Of course, if you want rankings on Google you have to follow their rules.)

When you own the content channel, there are limitless opportunities to create valuable, engaging and otherwise authority-building content. Use your blog to publish or promote tutorials, workshops, webinars, videos, ebooks, whitepapers, tools, etc. You should be investing time into at least one, if not several (or all) of them.

When resources are limited, writing tutorials or educational posts is the easiest place to start building your authority, but don’t limit yourself to that for too long. The smart marketer will build content in one channel and then figure out how to turn that same content into something useful on another. This blog post is a great example. It started out as part of a workshop presentation. That workshop has now been translated into several blog posts, utilizing the imagery from the slide deck, and those posts have been chopped up into smaller, single-point posts such as this.

Each of these provides a new avenue for authority building. I may not own all the channels this string of content was published on, but almost all of it has ended up on my own owned platform!

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The more content you produce the more authority you build.[/inlinetweet] That authority allows for quality interaction with your audience that builds your reputation. Grow your reputation, grow your authority. Social media platforms are a great assist in this process, but you only own the authority built from the content you own. As much effort as it takes to create, focus on publishing on your own owned network. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]You keep the authority you build. Period.[/inlinetweet]