Page 138 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
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CHAPTER TEN
The Mystery of Authority
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing
it.” – George Orwell
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final of the six elements of the Content
Code, and it’s all about authority, an element cloaked in secrecy and mystery.
If I were to depict the “BADASS” model faithfully, it would actually look
like this: BADaSS. You see, compared to the gargantuan stature of our first five
subjects, this one is … well … tiny by comparison. Authority is the one element
of content ignition that is most out of your control, at least in the short-term.
Although elusive, it’s also a factor of great importance because if you can attain
the power of site authority, you also achieve a near-permanent advantage for
content ignition.
Let me explain the importance of site (or domain) authority with a sad little
tale.
One of the seeds for this book was the Content Shock blog post I mentioned
all the way back in Chapter 2. This post had all the elements of great, shareable
content, and it really ignited with my Alpha Audience … and beyond! The post
was shared thousands of time and attracted hundreds of comments. Talk about
social proof! In just a short time, dozens of other content pieces had been created
all over the web, linking back to my idea and my post.
A week after the article ran, I did a Google search for the term “Content
Shock” to see what others might have written about my commentary. To my
utter amazement, my own post—the original idea—came up THIRD in the
rankings … on a search term I had just made up a few days before!
This seems impossible, doesn’t it? The reason this alternative content leaped
over my own original post was due to something called Domain Authority (also
known as site authority or site rank). The fact that the other two sites were
bigger and more well-known in the eyes of Google than my own little website
gave them a critical, and somewhat permanent, edge in the search rankings.
