How to Grow Authority on LinkedIn through Expertise is such a powerful way to build people’s trust in you and to be more visible and to become a respected authority person in your industry, because when people see you as an expert, they listen to you carefully and save your posts, and come to you for advice.
In today’s article, I will share with you some proven strategies, practical steps, authority-building content styles, and some mistakes that people make when they are not able to build authority on LinkedIn. You have to avoid them. I will share all of them with you. Even if you are starting from zero, you can build your authority on LinkedIn in the next few years. After reading this article of mine.
What Does Authority on LinkedIn Really Mean?
Being an authority person on LinkedIn does not mean that you have thousands of followers and that you get millions of likes on every post you make. Being an authority person means that you have 10 followers, but they all trust you more than you trust yourself. When people read your content, they try to believe in you because of your experience. But if you fluff the same content and do not say anything meaningful or value-providing in the content, then people will not automatically trust you.
Even if they like the post on time and you get followers again and again, but these followers are of no use because the authority percentage will be built only when you have as many followers on LinkedIn as you have, whether it is 10 or 15, but they will all have a lot of trust in you. There is a simple formula: Authority is equal to expertise plus visibility. Plus reputation: If you follow this combination and this formula, your name will start to be known as a respected person in your industry.
Why Expertise is the Strongest Growth Driver on LinkedIn
Expertise builds you a loyal audience, which too quickly in a short time, and that too without any hacks or trends. You don’t even need to post every hour, so you don’t need to follow viral formats. You just have to start teaching people.
That means, whatever knowledge you have, whatever expertise you have, you have to start sharing it with people. This is a very underrated and good way to grow on LinkedIn. Mini-professionals also make the mistake of not showing off their expertise in their content. They think that if we share our knowledge with someone, someone else will take advantage of it and get ahead of us. But that’s not the case because if you share knowledge, a loyal audience will keep connecting with you.
Step-by-Step Guide: How to Grow Authority on LinkedIn Through Expertise
Now, I will share some steps you can follow to grow your authority on LinkedIn through your expertise.
Step 1 — Identify Your Core Expertise and Niche
You can’t show your expertise in everything at once. This means that if you want to build authority on LinkedIn and grow, you can’t say at the same time that I know web development, I know web designing, I know website speed optimization, and I know website auditing. I know everything about technical SEO, off-page, and on-page. Rather, it will never build your authority because people will consider you a spammer.
But suppose you narrow down your niche and start showing your expertise in relation to a specific topic. In that case, everyone who sees your content will understand that you are a professional and you are an authority. You know something or the other in your industry. For example, if you look at it in relation to your website, then all you can do is narrow it down. Just start talking about on-page SEO and start guiding people; this will help you reach the right audience quickly.
Step 2 — Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Expert Positioning
Your LinkedIn profile is like a professional landing page. Whenever someone visits your profile, they should quickly know who you are and how much of an authority you are in your industry. How will they know? They will know this by writing an expert-focused headline, doing good keyword research, putting good keywords in your About section, writing everything clearly in your experience, and adding skills. If you do everything well, then, in a few seconds, they will know who you are and how much knowledge you have about your industry.
Step 3 — Share Valuable Content That Shows You Know Your Field
As I mentioned earlier, if you want to build your authority on LinkedIn and show yourself as an expected person, then it is very important for you to narrow down your niche and especially in content, it is very important that if you cover everything on a specific topic and teach people everything about a specific topic, people will trust you a lot and whatever followers you get through your content like this, those followers will be good ones and they will trust you more. They will consider you an authority person and will follow you accordingly.
You just have to create content like the Four Steps Method, Lesson Learned from Real Project Solution to Common Industry Problem, and Skill Breakdown. If you start teaching these things, your content will be valuable, and it will be related to a specific topic, then there are very high chances that your authority will start increasing after just two to four posts.
Step 4 — Use Storytelling to Make Your Expertise Relatable
Short stories are also very good in terms of their expertise in showcasing their authority on LinkedIn because people like them a lot and can connect easily with stories. But stories are also those in which a special storytelling method has been used. You can share your experiences in stories in a way that you share your client’s stories of failures and how you solved a challenge. In this way, whenever you create a post, it should be in the form of a story. Simply convert your post to a story format, which will build people’s trust a lot, and they will consider you an expert because you are an expert in your industry.
Step 5 — Stay Consistent With a Posting Structure
Authority is always built when you post consistently and publish your posts with a well-optimized structure. The algorithm on LinkedIn always favors posts and people who post consistently. For this, all you have to do is publish your posts consistently, and at the beginning,
you have to make a schedule so that the burden does not increase on you, and you keep posting valuable content. For example, if you want to post once a week, there is no problem with that. You can post once a week, but your post should be very good and valuable. At the same time, you should post such a post every week so that the LinkedIn algorithm can push your post to more people.
Step 6 — Engage More Than You Post
If you post even once a week, there is no harm in it, but you should always engage with other people’s posts 10 times more than your own posts, which will increase your chances of becoming an authority group, and your authority will grow quickly on LinkedIn.
Only then will you be called a well-respected person, and people will not be able to ignore you. That is only because you will engage. You will show your authority through people’s posts with good comments. Because whenever you comment under a good post, thousands of people see your comment. Then it depends on you how well and authoritatively you can write your comment and how accessible you can write it so that after reading your comment, those thousands of people start respecting you as an expert, as an authoritative person.
Step 7 — Show Proof, Evidence, and Results
While your posts are very valuable in proving your authority, your posts should also include results, evidence, and some proof of your work so that people can also know what kind of challenging work you do, what kind of difficult work you do, and what kind of results you have achieved. This can also help your authority grow very quickly because when people see more of your results, see your work, they will start trusting you a lot. Now you can share such types of proof as before-and-after examples, client results, analytics, screenshots, and real numbers or real outcomes that you have achieved after your hard work.
Step 8 — Publish Articles and Newsletters
A great article always puts this in people’s minds that you are a very knowledgeable person and you have a lot of knowledge about your niche and your industry. So if you want to write a long article, then you have to keep these points in mind. People will easily trust you and consider you a very knowledgeable person. Whatever content you have to write in your industry,
the article should be a breakdown of your industry, frameworks, step-by-step teaching article. If you use these things and go into depth and explain everything, then people will like to read your big post too. Every single time, a big post on LinkedIn does not provide that much value to the writer, but a big post that starts with a hook and keeps them curious till the end provides very good results to the writer.
Step 9 — Collaborate With Other Experts
Collaboration, and that too with an expert in your industry, is such a quick method to grow your authority and quickly show yourself as a very authoritative person on LinkedIn that there is no better collaboration than this. You can do this by taking interviews. For example, record an interview of one to one and a half hours with an expert in your industry, and then start posting, part by part, the portions of it that are valuable to people. This will give you two or three benefits.
Number one, the benefit is that you will get freedom from planning and designing daily or weekly content, and all this hassle. Number two, your content will be valuable. Number three, the person you interview, the expert, who likes this expert, will automatically like to watch the clips of this interview and will obviously comment below it. So your authority on LinkedIn will increase in this way. But it will be boosted a lot. People will quickly say how valuable this person is and how knowledgeable this person is. But that will happen only when you prepare good questions for the interview.
Step 10 — Monitor Growth and Improve Your Strategy
There is also a secret to the success of every authoritative person that they keep analyzing their posts and profiles weekly or daily to improve their strategies and try to find the flaws in them, due to which their authority is not being boosted. When they find these flaws and eliminate them and automatically, their authority starts getting boosted automatically.
All you have to do is make a schedule, weekly or daily. You have to make a schedule of half to one and a half hours in which you do nothing else but analyze your past posts that you have published before and your profile and improve the mistakes you have made in it and make your strategies better for the next post so that your next post is better than your previous post and you are better at creating more authority.
Mistakes That Stop You From Growing Authority
So I am going to share with you some of the mistakes that can stop your authority from growing on LinkedIn, and many people, especially many professionals, cannot grow their authority on LinkedIn and cannot be boosted just because of these few mistakes, and those mistakes are:
- They post without value addition.
- There is absolutely no clarity of niche, and it is a very common mistake that they follow every trending topic and create and publish a post on it, which does not clarify their niche.
- They start selling at the beginning of their post, that is, they start trying to sell something from the start of the post.
These are the mistakes that people make, which, instead of increasing their authority, start to decline. So on LinkedIn, you have to make sure that if you want to become an authority figure, you have to always keep these mistakes in mind and avoid them.
Final Takeaway — Expertise is Your Real Superpower
If you really want to boost your authority on LinkedIn and grow as an authority person on LinkedIn, then you should never pay attention to the number of followers you are getting. You should just share really valuable things with people, share valuable knowledge. And if you get two to three followers in return, those two to three followers are better for you than those 10,000 followers, because your profile looks good with one follower, but these followers do not benefit you. You should just start sharing your knowledge with people through a good post and never go into multiple things, but rather work in one niche and be specific. Then your chances of success are high.
And if you want to know about the LinkedIn algorithm and how you can write good content and make your post go viral with the help of the LinkedIn algorithm, then you have to visit this article to know the secrets of the algorithm.