How to Build an Authority Blog

Beginner bloggers face the daunting task of growing their readership, getting people to subscribe and building their authority.

Below are some of my best tips on how to build an authority blog. Some of them may sound obvious, but most blogs don’t follow at least one or more of them.

Quite often, you will find that you can project authority by emulating the way authority blogs look and some of the strategies that they use.

Also, some of these characteristics are self and mutually reinforcing, for example, a large number of comments usually triggers more comments and more subscribers.

With that said, here are some tips on how to get started building an authority blog:

1. Post at least once a week.
2. Have a pleasant blog design.
3. Don’t overdo it with blatant ads.
4. Make it easy to tell what your blog is about.
5. Make it easy to find out who is writing the blog.
6. Make it easy to subscribe to your blog.
7. Make it easy to find past posts through categories, related posts, archives, tags, text search.
8. Posts on authority blogs have plenty of comments.
9. Authority blogs have large subscriber numbers.
10. Authority blogs have a professional-looking unique design.
11. Authority sites favor understated forms of advertising.
12. Don’t host your blog on a subdomain on sites like WordPress.com. Instead, register your own domain and host your own WordPress blog installation on your own web hosting account.
13. Write high-quality, well-researched content that people are searching for.
14. Write descriptive headlines if you want to maximize your click-through rates in the search engines results pages.
15. Write more emotionally captivating headlines if your aim is to propagate your posts on social media.
16. Use research tools, social media and authority websites to find out what ideas are spreading and write about them.
17. Highlight your best content in an easily visible “Top Posts” section, so that your users can get more familiar with your site and your brand.
18. Tag each post only under one category (the most relevant) to avoid confusing search engines and generating duplicate content.
19. Optimize your blog posts for the search engines.
20. Link to other blogs, so other bloggers can find you and eventually link back to you.
21. List your blogs in a few popular, high authority directories.
22. Do some “push” marketing at the beginning, buying ads on Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram etc.
23. Don’t monetize too soon: bloggers that slap ads above the fold too soon will hardly get any links from high authority sites.
24. Use the above the fold section of your blog to highlight your most important calls to action.
25. Use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to build and grow your network.
26. Follow these basic trust-building guidelines.
27. Post all of your latest posts on social media.
28. Dress up your posts with high-quality images to increase sharing on social media.
29. Add share buttons to your blog posts to make them easier to share.
30. Guest post on other authority blogs to reach a wider audience and leverage their traffic and authority.
31. Allow other authority bloggers to publish high-quality content on your blog.
32. Outsource blog writing to a trustworthy agency or freelancer.

What other tips do you suggest? Leave them in the comments below.