Becoming an authority in the equine niche you serve can go a long way towards growing your business. When you have confidence in and know what you’re talking about, people will come to you with their questions. This is a much better scenario than you chasing people with your promotional social media and advertisements. Being an authority in your field is the basis from which most equestrian businesses are born.
Step 1
Actually be an expert. If you don’t have a great deal of experience and friends and family who come to you regularly for horse advice, please stop reading. Already being an expert in real life will prevent you from embarrassing yourself and becoming just another cliche internet trainer.
A word of warning though- if you’ve stopped learning because you think you know it all, you probably know very little. The best, most respected trainers are constantly learning from people who know more than them. If you’re not willing to continue learning and growing when you’ve reached a certain level of knowledge, you may never be truly viewed as a horse expert.
Step 2
Pull from your experiences and knowledge. Write some great content that showcases something you’ve learned that a beginning rider or horse owner may wonder about. You could write a blog post, create a video, record a podcast or write an Instagram post detailing an experience you’ve had, what you learned from it and what others can take away from it.
Pick your type of content based on how you best communicate. If you’re talkative, created podcasts or videos. If you communicate best through writing, create a blog post or communicate through social media. You can do all of these, or just one, depending on what you’re good at and how much time you can set aside for content creation.
Since you give awesome info to people about their horse questions, consider holding Facebook or Instagram live Q &A’’s. You could even do YouTube Q&A’s in conjunction with a podcast.
You can use this content to promote a boarding, lessons, training, appraisal, breeding, sales, clinician or equine massage business. (and many more types of business)
When in doubt…
When someone asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to, make sure you have a supportive community around you of trusted experts in various fields. This way, you can refer the enquirer to someone you trust who can answer their question correctly. You could also quote these friends on social media, ask them to write a guest blog, to be on your podcast or star in a video. This way, people get the best answer to their question and if your friend has a business too, you’re helping them promote it.
If your knowledge seems a bit outdated on a subject, research it with trustworthy, up to date sources. want to write about something your knowledge is lacking in, research some reliable sources. Be sure to fact check everything to the best of your ability. Posting false or faulty information can immediately demote you from your position of equine expertise.
A DIfferent Kind of Authority
Posting a great deal of content on your website that is factual and relatable not only boosts your authority in people’s minds but also helps your “authority” with Google’s search engine. When you have “authority” with Google, they are more likely to rank your website or post on the first page after a search query.
The process of making a page look delectable to search engines is called SEO: Search Engine Optimization. If you have trustworthy, engaging and SEO’d content, your much more likely to rank above your competitors who are talking about the same thing. The process of SEO is a little different for each content platform.
If you have any questions about how SEO works for your platform of choice or would like some help developing awesome content, feel free to contact me for a 30-minute conversation about your business needs. In any case, go out there, answer people’s questions, and create amazing, authoritative content!
