By Brian Clark

You may have heard us say before that to attract traffic, engage readers, and convert them to buyers, you need to become an authority in your topic.

But what does that really mean?

Does it mean you puff yourself up and pretend to know more than you do?

Does it mean you put other people in your niche down?

Or does it mean you bore your audience to tears with dry, flavorless facts?

Of course not.

For awhile, the conventional wisdom was that people (particularly young people) don’t care about authority any more.

The theory was that we were so burned out by scandals from traditional authority, and that these days we were only listening to what our friends recommended. We didn’t care about experts, we didn’t recognize... More...