Some days you sit down to market your business and the confidence just isn’t there. But you still need to show up, connect with potential clients, and sell — and waiting until you feel ready isn’t a strategy. The good news is you can borrow authority and sound like an expert to make sales without pretending to be something you’re not. These five practical strategies work even on your worst days.
Borrowing Authority When You Don’t Feel Authoritative
Who else is tired of hearing that we are in a trust recession? I want to talk about how to borrow authority when you feel like you have none, because I think authority is a big piece of what’s going to make someone buy from you in 2026.
Sometimes you just don’t feel authoritative. This happens to almost everyone who creates content. We know we have experience, but sometimes when you sit down to write a blog, record a podcast, send an email, or whatever, suddenly you’re thinking: who the heck am I to talk about this? Has everyone said this better? Do I actually know enough?
There’s always that competitor you think of — the one people are always tagging on Threads, the one who seems like the best. That doesn’t mean you have no authority.
This isn’t necessarily for the brand new baby business owner — although love you, keep going, you’ll do great. This is for people who know they have experience but sometimes find it hard to convey that experience. And I’m speaking to marketers too, because I can do this all day for my clients, but for myself, sometimes I’m just in a funk.
Sometimes you just haven’t had that huge client win where they hired you and then had their best month ever the very next month. Maybe you’ve been consuming a bit too much from people who are 30 steps ahead of you, or comparing yourself to someone with a bajillion followers, or you’ve taken a break. This happens to me, and then I just feel out of practice with something like podcasting.
Whatever the reason, you woke up today needing to market your business, communicate your authority, do some selling — but you just don’t feel particularly authoritative today. I have five ideas for you that work for me.
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This Isn’t About Pretending or Inflating To Sound Like an Expert
I want to be very clear that I don’t think the solution is pretending. We had a rise where everyone had imposter syndrome — and I’m using air quotes here — when a lot of us just did not know what we were doing.
I’m talking about circa 2020, when we were all sold the dream really hard: that we could start businesses with no experience and immediately sell our “expertise,” even though we’d been doing the thing or learned the thing yesterday. This isn’t about calling yourself the world’s leading expert, inflating your results, or doing shady things to make yourself sound more successful than you are.
I don’t think you need to manufacture authority to show up like one. Instead, there are strategic ways you can borrow authority from things that are already credible while you continue to build your own.
1. Reference People Your Audience Already Trusts
The first strategy is borrowed authority, and this is probably the easiest version of it. You can say, “I was listening to this podcast,” or “I was reading this book,” or “So-and-so said something I cannot stop thinking about.” Bonus points if your audience already knows and trusts that person.
If you’re recording a podcast and you reference a podcast your audience also listens to, there’s a subconscious connection there. It’s called the halo effect — a psychological concept where a positive impression of someone influences how we judge other qualities associated with them. Basically, if you mention somebody that your listener already admires, some of that impression transfers to you.
That doesn’t mean mentioning Alex Hormozi automatically makes people think you’re Alex Hormozi, or whoever the bro marketer everyone knows this week is. But putting yourself in a position where it’s clear you listen to the same people — and not just listen, but reference them — does make you appear more authoritative and more likable.
One important addition: don’t just drop a quote and leave it there. Add your opinion. To really borrow someone’s authority, add to the conversation. That doesn’t mean correcting them — you don’t want to say, “I read so-and-so’s post and I think they missed X.” Instead, say, “I heard so-and-so say X, and it made me think of this time in my own business when I did Y.” That’s how you borrow authority to start a conversation, and it can be really effective.
2. Using Statistics and Original Data
The second strategy is finding a study or statistic that backs up your claim. AI has never made this easier. As someone who’s been doing this as a blog writer since basically the dawn of time, I do want to say: please trace the stat back to the original source.
I could go on a whole tangent here because I hate when people cite statistics incorrectly. I will always drill down to the original source, and I want to say eight out of ten times, it’s misquoted. It’s taken out of context, or some percentage has been twisted. Most people won’t go down the rabbit hole to find the original source — but some people will.
So please double-check. Have ChatGPT give you a list of statistics that back up your claim, sure, but do that extra step and investigate them.
Increasingly, I’d also encourage you to create your own data. One thing AI bots love right now is when people have their own statistics. Since everyone is pulling stats from AI, AI is actively looking for fresher, first-person data — not the same numbered stat we’re all citing from the same websites. What both AI and Google want is fresh, firsthand perspective and expertise that was earned, not just learned.
That’s why you’re seeing so many people run surveys now. The prioritization of SEO, AEO, GEO — all of it — this is a big part of that push. They want original data. It’s not accessible to everyone, and those of us with smaller audiences may not have the participation needed to run a meaningful survey. But when it is possible, it’s a genuinely great way to borrow authority.
3. Bringing Timely Examples Into Your Content
The third strategy is bringing timely examples into your content. Authority isn’t only about knowing facts — it’s about being able to look at what’s happening right now and interpret it. This is something I see seasoned business owners do particularly well.
If there’s a launch everyone’s talking about, jump in. We saw so many commentaries on the Jesse Dean launch. Something top of mind for me recently is the Callaway Golf and Good Good situation. What I saw people do well wasn’t just pointing out that it was a terrible marketing campaign — it was adding a different perspective, like a list of eight things they could have done instead. That shows what the job done well actually looks like.
Timely content also gets more reach. When you think about your marketing funnel, timely content is great for awareness. And if you’re bringing your own perspective, it can work really well for conversion content too.
The key, again, comes back to not just regurgitating what happened. You don’t want to simply inform people that a timely thing occurred. You need to add your expertise — but the timely hook gives you an easier jumping-off point to do that.
4. Inventorying the Authority You Already Have
Number four — and this is harder to do when you’re in a funk, but not impossible — you need to inventory the authority that you already have. There are different levels to this, so here are some questions you can ask.
An obvious authority marker is something like having 1,200 blog posts on page one on Google. That’s a very clear, cut-and-dry example.
But sometimes things get muddier. Maybe you were part of a client’s launch but can’t take credit for the whole thing. Maybe you designed the website but someone else did the copy — so if they doubled their money, is that really you?
These situations are messier than the all-or-nothing marketers would have you believe. You know the ones — always going viral because they’re being contrarian, making you feel like there’s only one right way to market your business. Those clean, one-bite hooks would be nice, but if you don’t have them, here’s what to do instead.
There are three lists you can pull from.
What Have You Done?
Any businesses you’ve run, revenue you’ve generated, projects you’ve completed, what you did in your nine-to-five, how many years you’ve spent doing the work, things you’ve tried. I talk about my past business, Love at First Travel destination weddings, a lot — that’s where I got my start, and it’s proof of concept because of how successful it still is, even though I’ve completely removed myself from it.
What Have You Helped Clients Do?
The second column, which I think represents a higher level of authority, is what have you helped clients do? I can say all day that I built a destination wedding business that gets leads every single week — and that’s impressive. But if you’re thinking about hiring me for blogging, what you actually want to know is what my client results look like.
Pull client results. Pull things you’ve solved repeatedly. And it can be small — I helped them publish their first blog post — or it can be bigger, like I got them to page one and they never had to post on Instagram again.
What Have You Seen?
This is an underrated way to borrow authority. I get to work with incredibly successful business owners, see behind the scenes of what they’re actually doing, and learn from them — and I can borrow that authority.
If you’re a HoneyBook pro who’s been inside hundreds of HoneyBook accounts, that’s authority. If you’ve reviewed the Google search presence of hundreds of businesses, that’s authority. If you’re a wedding photographer who’s shot 200 weddings, that counts too.
5. Results Authority Versus Reps Authority
That brings me to number five for how to sound like an expert, and it’s a distinction worth dwelling on. Online authority tends to focus heavily on results. If you’re an Instagram strategist who gained 10, 000 followers, that’s authority. But sometimes we don’t have that — and what we have instead is reps. I’ve published 100 videos. I’ve written 500 blog posts.
My team and I write over a hundred blog posts every single month. That’s a rep, not a single flashy result. And reps matter too, especially when you’re in a funk.
You can have reps without having the sexiest result on the internet. In my own business, yes, results matter — my clients want to rank on Google and make money, not just finish a blog post. But when we’re looking at our own marketing, those results aren’t always easy to present in a clean, tidy format with a bow.
That’s when you lean on reps. How long have you been doing this? How often? How many times? How consistent have you been? You see this when someone says, “This is my ninth time launching this mastermind,” or when a website banner reads “804 clients served” and keeps getting updated.
Reps matter because they create pattern recognition, judgment, and taste. They give you context and nuance. I always say the people who are all-or-nothing just haven’t been in business long enough yet. Someone who has done something 200 times has learned things that the person who got one spectacular result one time simply hasn’t. Don’t discount the authority that naturally comes from having done something over and over and over again.
Recapping the Five Ways to Build Authority
To recap, these five strategies can bleed into one another. First, reference people your audience already trusts, and they will associate the positive feelings toward that person with you. Second, bring receipts whenever you can — research, data, or statistics. You can grab a statistic from ChatGPT, just make sure to verify it. Collecting your own data, or even bringing your own examples, is always even better.
Third, bring timely examples into your content and add your own perspective on what’s happening. Fourth, take inventory of the authority you already have — I guarantee you have more than you think. In the wedding industry, for example, if you’ve planned more than one wedding, you already have more experience than your client. If you’ve planned three weddings, you’ve significantly tripled that experience.
We need to inventory what we’ve already done, what we’ve helped clients do, and what we’ve seen behind the scenes. Some results are stronger than others, but they all matter in terms of how we can show up with more authority online.
Fifth — and this is extremely effective — focus on the number of reps you put in. Just getting the reps in is something I’m really focused on, especially because this year I’m trying new things.
Getting Reps In as a Beginner Again
I launched a membership this year, my first time doing something in the education space in a long, long time. I’ve since pivoted that into an app, which I’m completely obsessed with and in love with. If you need help with your content system or writing SEO-friendly blog posts, I’ll link all the details in the show notes.
This has been such a year of trying new things and being a beginner again. It’s easy to get stuck in the mental funk of, “I don’t know how to do this — this is embarrassing. I’ve been in business so long and I’m making rookie mistakes, fumbling through, and things aren’t coming as easily as I thought they would.” Anytime I get bogged down in that, I remind myself: I am just getting my reps in.
This is the first app I’ve ever built. I’ve written hundreds of blogs, and that is exactly why the blogging tool I built is better than you and ChatGPT combined. That matters.
Borrowing Credibility While Building Your Own
These five tips can genuinely help you, but I also want to encourage you that the goal isn’t to spend the next ten years saying, “According to this person” or “According to this study.” You’ll do that sometimes — naturally, and maybe strategically in the beginning — but you’re really just borrowing credibility while simultaneously developing your own body of work.
Every time you share your opinion or publish something, you have a little more evidence behind what you’re saying. I can rarely get through an episode now without saying, “I talked about this before in episode such-and-such.” I’ve created so much content at this point that it’s hard to build something new without referencing something my past self has already said.
I have 231 blog posts. Considering this is around episode 138, those episodes all have their own blog posts — which means I have almost a hundred additional blog posts beyond that. It certainly didn’t start that way, though.
Starting Small and Going Far With What You Have To Sound Like An Expert
In the beginning, sometimes you just have to take one client story as far as it can possibly go and re-share it again and again. You have to be the most researched, most well-scripted person in the room, because you’re figuring it out and borrowing authority wherever you can.
My hope is that even if you’ve been doing this for ten years and already know your stuff, but you’re having a little trouble stepping into “I am an expert at this” — this gives you a way to claim that authority even when you’re in a funk. And none of this is about pretending to have expertise you don’t have. Try one of these things this week.
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