Whenever I begin to help a new student or client with blogging, I ask them to answer three really important questions:

1. What is the intent of your blog?
2. Who is your audience for your blog?
3. What is your authority in your blogging topic?

The authority question is almost always the hardest for people to answer. In other words, why would other people want to read what you have to say. I recognize that it can be an intimidating question to answer but it is a crucial one. Let’s get the intimidation part out of the way first.

Authority doesn’t necessarily mean a bunch of alphabet behind your name and titles. It does mean getting clear about your strengths  and your goals.  Here are some examples of authority:

• Experience in developing over 20 commercial web sites for a blog on web design
• Retired attorney for blog on estate planning
• Stay at home father of two for daddy blogging
• Breast cancer survivor and nurse for blog on healthy living
• Fantastic sense of humor for a blog on finding the humor in our lives
• Mushroom forager for 5 years and amateur chef for a blog on edible mushrooms
• 15 years of indulging in your love of hand crafts, a keen eye and a creative mind for a blog on crafting
• Passion for the environment, problem solving aptitude and creativity for a blog on recycling goods into crafts

As you can see from the examples above, authority can take many forms. Appropriate and effective authority will vary according to your blog intent and audience.

Once you have outlined your intent, audience and authority, how do evaluate the effectiveness of your authority? That was an interesting question posed by a young 17 year old guest blogger Lianne in her post Does your blog speak authoritatively? for Cats Who Blog. She answers with the following, for traditional blogs and for the micro-blog Twitter:

• Repeat Traffic
• Feed Subscriber count
• Social Media Followers
• Twitter Mention

Traffic and subscriber counts are traditional means of monitoring blog progress and impact but with the increasing importance of social media, those two factors are no longer sufficient to measure  your authority. Translate the word authority into trust.

How much do your readers trust you enough:

• to keep coming back?
• to follow you around so they don’t miss what you have to say?
• trust you enough to share what you say with others?

Cats Who Blog is a relatively new web site, an offshoot of Cats Who Code, one of my favored web development tip and tutorial web sites. I am verifying their authority because I subscribe to their feed, follow on Twitter and used one of their blog posts to anchor my own (called pingback). All of those things validate Jean-Baptiste Jung’s authority in creating those two blogs.

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In the spirit of full disclosure, I am writing this post to enter a contest sponsored by Cats Who Blog. I think contests can be an effective means of blog promotion and I applaud Cats Who Code for showing other bloggers the benefits of running a contest and offering Templatic premium themes as the prizes.