Especially on the Internet people need to trust you, respect your opinion or your judgment before they show some eagerness to do business with you. This is primarily because they might be sitting halfway across the globe with no idea whether you are real or phony. They cannot even look at your face or the place you do business from.

In order to become familiar to them you need to do something that draws them to you on a regular basis and the best way of doing that is publishing authoritative or interesting content. Two things need to happen here:

• Your content needs to be regular
• Your content has to be of great quality — it must deliver some value

So that people trust you and become familiar with your presence, your thoughts and opinions you need them to come to your website or your blog repeatedly. Now, they are not going to visit your blog or website just because you want them to. You have to give them a reason. You need to constantly publish content that delivers value. You need to provide what they are looking for. You have to figure out what your target audience wants and then publish content accordingly.

This is where content strategy plays an important role. It helps you identify your target audience and then formulate and publish content accordingly.

How does this help you increase your influence?

By regularly publishing content on the related topic you become an authority figure. Without charging you are providing content that is valuable. You are solving people’s problems without charging them. It doesn’t mean you are targeting freeloaders it’s just that in order to build an audience you need to create a presence and nobody is going to pay you for creating a presence for yourself. You need to do this on your own without expecting people to pay you. You can also take such an example from television broadcasting. Have you observed how a new TV channel does not show advertisements? It’s not that they are following a no-advertisements policy. In order to get advertisements first they have to build an audience and they can only build an audience if they broadcast quality programs over a long period of time.

When you publish content on a specific topic for a long duration you develop a consistent audience. They visit your website or blog regularly, they bookmark it, they subscribe to your RSS feeds and e-mail updates and they eagerly click on the links belonging to you whenever they come across them on social media and networking websites. When this begins to happen you have increased your influence. Once you have increased your influence people are ready to do business with you.