How to Be a Trusted Expert in Your Niche

Use Personal Branding & Promotion to Be an Authority Online

Everybody is an expert at something. Watch the video from Jim Kukral talking about his strategy for identifying your expertise and building a business out of your personal brand. You can become a trusted expert online in virtually any niche in just a few short weeks. When you are an acknowledged authority–you know more than the people who are searching for help with the problems you can solve–you can parlay your expertise into a nice living.

Tim Ferriss is one of the latest authors and speakers to talk about how you can design your lifestyle using this approach (as well as other methods) in his book, The 4-Hour WorkWeek.

He gives some tips on how to do this and I’ve added my own from my work on The Four Pillars of Personal Promotion. I’ve been helping peopled become experts to increase their business results for many years.

Tim’s tips:

1.  Join two or three related trade organizations

2.  Read the three top-selling books in your niche

3.  Give one free seminar at a nearby well-known university on your topic

4.  Write one or two articles for a related trade magazine

5.  Join ProfNet

I like all of these tips. We’re not suggesting that you become a “fake” expert. But you can quickly demonstrate your expertise and help many people with the level of information you already have in your area of expertise. It could be something you now do only as a hobby–such as breeding Betta fish. (By the way, Adam Short, founder of Betta Fish Center website, has built quite a business from this little website with a newsletter of helpful advice about caring for your Betta fish. He claims he gets 20,000 unique visitors per month. Quantcast.com shows an estimated 8,000 per month at this writing. Still a sizeable amount of visitors and a growing email list that he markets to!)

You should strongly consider blogging and engaging in social media and social networking sites such as LinkedIn (where you can submit your personal and company profile, make online connections with other businesspeople, and answer questions in your field), Facebook (start a business fan page, the equivalent of a personal profile), Twitter (micro-blogging), and YouTube (create your business video channel) and other key outposts to publish online content that demonstrates your expertise and your helpfulness.

Have you “Googled” yourself lately? It’s an exercise that may bring you many insights. The search engines are placing more emphasis on social media posts (including blogs) because they are current and often expert information about the topic being searched. If you “Google” my name, you’ll probably see that my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook  profiles are at the top of your results. (Individual results will vary–another thing the search engines are doing now is presenting you with more and more personalized search results based on your previous search behavior).

I’ll expand on some of my other tips in a related post:  The 4 Pillars of PersonalBranding & Promotion.