Increase Your Authority in Any Industry with a Digital Magazine

Magazine Publisher: The Fast Way to Increase Your Authority & Credibility

It's all About Perception

We touched on authority in my last how to boost readership article.

Here, we'll dive into authority.

To start, we're going to make up two example media entities:

• Show Jumping Blog
• Show Jumping Magazine

Okay, right out of the gate you probably perceive a difference in authority:

"Hi, I'm Eathan. I blog at ShowJumpingBlog.com."

"Hi, I'm Eathan. I publish Show Jumping Magazine."

And, here's the thing: even if you haven't heard of Show Jumping Magazine it still creates the same mental image as Newsweek, Vogue, or Car & Driver, i.e. it's a magazine.

We all know what it is and have a perception of what it means to publish a magazine.

Now, I'm not trying to denigrate blogs, bloggers, or blogging in any way, but there is a difference in perception.

I remember telling someone I had just met that I had an ecommerce business, and they asked me, "Oh, like selling on eBay?"

"No, I have a warehouse and a forklift. It's a real business," said three-inch-tall me. There was a perception that if I wasn't Jeff Bezos, I must've been small potatoes.

Tell someone you publish a magazine and they'll never say, "Oh like Geocities?"

And that's a challenge with almost any Internet business.

Your website shares the same Internet as Time.com, Newsweek.com, and NationalGeographic.com, but like it or not, it also shares the same Internet as:

sexy_mugshots_of_mississippi.blogspot.com

and

cat_pictures.wordpress.com

On the flip side, magazines—and by extension magazine publishers—are considered subject matter experts, as real players in their industries, as power brokers.

That's the kind of authority you're looking at here, because authority and credibility are key to opening doors, making deals, appealing to advertisers.