6 ways to turn your website into a niche knowledge hub

Giving away knowledge is the most effective way to build a solid brand presence. But is it just about writing and publishing blog posts?

It might have been sufficient to start a niche blog to build authority ten years ago. These days, you’ll need to go the extra mile.

Here are 6 ways to turn your website into a niche knowledge hub to build a stronger, more recognizable brand and a more reliable web presence.

1. Educate yourself: Monitor industry trends

A company that monitors and utilizes latest industry trends is an innovative company. Besides, knowing what’s hot in the industry gives you a lot of new marketing ideas and keeps your business always moving forward.

Twitter and Facebook are most efficient ways to monitor micro-trends (i.e. those that are happening at any given moment). They are also incredibly time-saving because you don’t need spend hours reading articles on what’s going on. You can just hover over the trending word to see the immediate context:

When it comes to yearly industry trends, those that happen gradually, month by month, the ways to monitor them can vary.

• Monitor your keyword in Buzzsumo or at least Google Alerts
• Put together a thorough reading or RSS list to subscribe to trusted niche news outlets.

2. Monitor competitors

What are your competitors doing to innovate? Which latest technology trends have they been embracing? Which new marketing tactics have they been playing with?

Monitoring your competitors is a must for an innovative company that strives to educate its employees and community. There’s always ways to learn from others, especially when it comes to mistakes to avoid and new tactics to adopt.

SE Ranking offers one of the most robust competitor monitoring solutions allowing you to monitor their page changes, search engine rankings, backlinks and even social media mentions. It’s a convenient platform holding a lot of tools under one roof and hence making competitor monitoring much more productive:

3. Hold webinars with influencers

Webinars have a ton of benefits, from the ability to create new video content (that can be further repackaged into podcasts) to community building and lead generation.

Webinars are also helpful for influencer marketing and positioning your company as a niche knowledge hub. When seeing familiar names on your site, visitors will automatically assume your brand is trusted and will be more inclined to buy from you or opt in to your email list.

ClickMeeting is a feature-rich affordable solution to easily host webinars that include lead generation forms, timelines, convenient backend, reliable video recording technology, customizable thank-you pages and more.

It’s a smart idea to combine this tactic with trend monitoring process to hold webinars on some recent events and tendencies.

4. Put together a whitepaper

A whitepaper is an official company’s report on their area of expertise. Apart from sounding really fancy, a whitepaper is a great downloadable material that tells your users that your company is willing to give back and contribute to the community knowledge base.

It takes some considerable time and effort to put together a solid whitepaper, so look into some repackaging opportunities to include some in-depth articles you have previously published on your site. For some examples, head over to Internet Marketing Ninjas Resources page to see a few whitepapers we did (they are free to download).

5. Hold a yearly industry survey

Investing in an industry survey has a huge PR benefit: Surveys are great outreach material as many journalists and bloggers are happy to cover your findings on their sites.

On top of that, you can use surveys to build relationships with niche influencers inviting them to take the survey and contribute their thoughts. This is what Moz has been doing for years, quite successfully.

The easiest way to put together a high-quality industry survey is:

1. Reach out to influencers (using Boomerang app or a similar one to scale follow-ups)
2. Invest into Google Surveys. Choose your target audience, type your questions, and watch the results come within hours. Your questions are published across a network of news and reference sites, as well as within Google mobile app. People answer your questions in exchange for access to premium content, and credits to Google Play.

Google Surveys are the fastest, highest-quality way to collect answers and put together all kinds of reports to pitch bloggers and publish on your site.

6. Create a course

If you’ve been taking the above steps, you are likely to have a lot of expert content piling up and scattered around the web. Putting together a course to consolidate all those multi-format materials is the smartest thing you can do.

Upload your webinars as video lessons, attach whitepapers and reports as bonus downloads, include your observations about the niche trends, and you have a solid online course to further engage your audience and add value to the industry.

Kajabi is the most advanced way to build an online course I’ve seen so far. It has plenty of building and marketing tools inside and you can use your own domain to host the course too.

Becoming a well-known brand is a long-term project. But the outcome is well worth it.

The above ideas will help you build a stronger, more recognizable brand while also letting you create linkable assets and solid trusted content for your site too.

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