A huge part of building your personal brand is creating expert status. The big mistake that most people make is they make a very wrong assumption: that people know you’re an expert. Even if your clients and prospects know you’re an expert, they don’t know how much of an expert you really are. That’s what this post is all about. The video below will reveal the secret to displaying your expertise to rise above the sea of others in your market and dominate your competition.
In our last Brand or Die blog, we
talked about how you’ve got to get out of the business you’re in and you’ve got
to get into the business of being an expert.
So, if you are printing company you’re
only ever going to make a limited amount of money printing paper. But, if you can become an expert on how
to print the paper, or more importantly how to create mailing campaigns that
help people maximize their return on investment, you’re always going to get
paid more money. So you have to
become an expert.
Which leads us to what we’re going to
talk about today, the secret that everyone misses. We all think that our clients and prospects can see inside
of our heads, and they know exactly what we’re thinking. Obviously, that’s not
true. So, here’s what we’ve got to
do, we’ve got to display our expertise. How can you do that?
Let me give you some examples.
Get into social media. To get started, you can utilize what I
call “the Napoleon Hill factor”.
Many of you have read the great and popular book “Think and Grow Rich”
by Napoleon Hill. By reading that book alone, I know he has other works, but by
reading that book alone we don’t really know if Napoleon Hill is good at
anything other than interviewing other experts and finding out what they’re
good at and sharing their secrets.
NOTE: they aren’t Napoleon Hill’s secrets, they are the secrets of
others!
So you can do the same thing. Through social media you can start out
by simply passing along great information from other people. You can quickly and easily become a “curator”
of the best content that you can find and pass it along. That’s one of the fastest and easiest
ways to start displaying your expertise and start building a following.
Start a blog. The next
thing you need to do is start blogging.
Blogs are awesome. There’s practically a blog for every subject you
could ever think of, and people went nuts for a while thinking every blog would
be profitable, which we now can see is not true. But again, it’s another way for you to lay out your
expertise so that anyone who wants to follow along can see that you really know
what you’re talking about. If by
nothing else other than the fact that they can see “wow this guy’s got a
hundred blogs” or 20 blogs or 30 blogs on the same subject. The other thing is that putting out
those blogs will be great for search engine optimization, SEO, if you use the
keywords that your customers are searching for, you’ll figure out some “long
tail” search terms that you weren’t expecting or didn’t think of. For example, one of the sentences that
you write in your blog, not expecting it to be the superstar sentence, can end
up delivering traffic to you. And there’s another secret, but it relates to
articles too, so let’s talk about articles.