Tracy Hazzard breaks down human credibility, which comes from peer recognition in your community, versus domain authority, which is what search engines and algorithms see. You need both: human credibility makes you a thought leader, domain authority gets your content in front of people. She shares how she moved product-design expertise into 3D-printing to build authority faster.
I want to talk quick about authority. Now. There are two kinds of authority. There's authority, which is in your niche in your industry. I'm going to call it credibility versus authority. It's credibility and authority within your area of expertise. Think about it like that. Now that's in your community, in your.
You know, in your expertise area, in your niche as they call it, right? That applies to that. So that's other people think of you as a thought leader, think of you as a credible expert might be another way to put it. And that's how you get authority. And the longer you're in an area, in a niche, you build authority. And when some of you are starting out, you don't have a lot of credibility yet, right? You might be taking your expertise from being in the military and taking that and turning that into how to be a leader of some kind. And so that is a transfer of authority from one area to another. But you still have to build up credibility within that marketplace or within that niche area. And that's going to take some time. So sometimes our credibility has to be rebuilt, but we can rebuild it quickly because we're transferring authority and credibility from another area into that. That works really well. When Tom and I started our very first podcast in 3D printing, we were already product design experts. We had been designing for over 20 years at that time and we had done over 250 products. So when people saw that, they saw us as a product design expert who was then talking about how to design using 3D printing. So the expertise was very easy to accelerate and transfer and grow in that area. But the 3D print industry knew nothing about us. So credibility and authority building go hand in hand. But, but there's one other thing I want to make you aware of. There's something called domain authority, and domain authority is a purely website or bot traffic thing, if you want to think of it like that. It's completely how you show up on search engines. And how credible and authoritative does that bot, that non human, that algorithm? What do they think of you? And this is critically important for us to recognize. We have to do both. We have to have human credibility and bot credibility authority within our niche and our expertise area and domain authority within the website ecosystem, the Google ecosystem, if you want to really think of it that way, because that's really where it belongs. But if you're talking about the podcasting ecosystem, it has its own bot and that's controlled by the search engine that is Apple and Spotify and every podcast directory out there. And if we do not play nice with the search engine optimized game, if we don't play nice and understand the algorithm, understand what goes into domain authority, we will never be served up as an expert in our area of expertise. We won't be considered expert via the Internet. So we have to do both. It's so critically important that we learn to do both. Because what a shame if your wonderful message, your expertise, cannot get to the world because the bot gatekeepers say you don't exist. So let's pay that domain authority first and then let's build in that great expertise, credibility and authority within your, your area of expertise, your niche, and build those up at same time.
