Demonstrate Your Expertise

The prevailing moniker in modern marketing is to provide value first and only sell later.  We live in an over-marketed world and consumers have grown suspicious of clever advertising slogans and unrealistic product claims.  It all looks like empty promises these days so businesses are forced to demonstrate their value directly before any revenue flows in.

This moniker works well with the process of becoming a recognized expert in your field.  As I have discussed in previous articles, the fastest way to become a recognized expert in your field is to acquire expertise and then give it away for free.  Of course, that can’t go on forever but the early going is accelerated dramatically if you flood your field with genuine expertise.

One of the most effective ways to build a name for yourself is to publish on popular blogs and forums.  This is precisely in line with what we’re talking about.  Posting on blogs and forums gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise directly to those who looking for it.  But there are other ways of demonstrating your expertise and this article will detail three options.

The most obvious location for demonstrating your expertise is your website.  Make sure your website is targeted to a narrow audience and then build a huge website around that narrow topic.  Not only will this give you an opportunity to showcase your expertise in your field but it will improve your website’s page ranking with the major search engines.

Before you even begin building your website, sit down and formalize your target market and your positioning statement.  Once you’ve settled on a focus you’re comfortable with, list all the sub-topics and angles you can address on your website.  Develop a huge list of content angles you can incorporate into your site.  Although the process of content development takes time, it will leave your visitors convinced you’re the authority in your field.

A second opportunity for demonstrating your expertise is to create offline literature on the topic.  Now, the first thing everybody thinks about when I talk about offline literature is writing a book.  That’s an excellent exercise but it’s also a pretty big undertaking.  Your offline literature can also include things like fact sheets or a short handbook or a flyer with 50 success tips for your field.

Offline literature is important because it establishes you as someone who is putting real resources into the public domain.  That builds credibility and exposure.  Not only that, but it gives you an opportunity to refer to yourself as an author, even if the underlying publication is only 10 or 15 pages long.  In my own field, I wrote two handbooks and was immediately referred to as an author by colleagues in my field.

A third opportunity for demonstrating your expertise is to offer workshops and seminars on the topic.  There are a variety of places you can offer such workshops without paying any money to do so.  Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs are a good example.  Municipal Adult Education Programs are another example.  And conferences and tradeshows are a third.

All of these examples are looking for speakers on an ongoing basis and only require a proposal from you to consider your workshop.  Learning how to write good workshop proposals is an art of its own but believe me; even a mediocre workshop proposal will get accepted a lot more than you might think, leaving you with speaking engagements that can position you as an expert in front of hundreds or even thousands of people.

Modern marketing and the exercise of becoming a recognized expert in your field both require that you acquire expertise and then give it away for free.  This article has outlined three excellent ways for you to dump expertise into the public domain.  And all three will contribute to a business reputation that can benefit you for years to come.