One of the best ways to improve your value is to become an expert. Positioning yourself as an expert requires knowledge, skill and perseverance. If you don’t have those things right now, you can develop them as you move to position yourself as an expert. So, don’t worry if you’re not there yet; you can get there.
- Determine Who Your Audience Is – Knowing who you want to work with and help is very important, because you will be able to create better services, products, information and education for them if you know who they are.
- Decide upon a Niche – Once you know your audience you can narrow down your focus to one problem your audience has. That is your niche. If you can solve a major problem that your audience has, you’re golden.
- Develop Your Brand – Once you figure out who your audience is, and what your niche is, you can start developing a brand. Is the brand going to be you, or is the brand going to be the solution? One will always require your presence, and another might be salable. It’s up to you.
- Get a Professional Website Created – You can’t present yourself as an expert with an amateurish website. It needs to be professional, and unless your expertise is web design it’s not likely you can do this for yourself. The words on the site, the design of the site, the images on the site, all need to be created by individual experts.
- Set Up Your Social Media Profiles – As you brand yourself, you’ll need to set up each of your social media profiles so that your brand works throughout the internet. While each social media site has its own personality, yours should show through.
- Start Blogging and Getting Your Ideas Out There – Even as your website is being perfected, you can blog to show your expertise. Write your blogs directly to your audience to educate them about their problems so that you can start offering your solutions.
- Write White Papers – A white paper is a good intro to organizing information to educate your audience about their problems and your solutions.
- Make Videos – Creating “how to” and informational videos and posting them on YouTube is a great way to position yourself as more of an expert.
- Write eBooks – As you gather more material, you’ll eventually have enough to put together an eBook without too much work.
- Publish on Kindle – You can publish your book and sell it via Kindle free. It’s a great way to get new customers.
- Consider Publishing a Paper Book – Once you’ve successfully published a Kindle book, you might want to take it a step further as you get a large following and publish a paper book. You can do this with print on demand via CreateSpace.com and Amazon.
- Go to Live and Online Events – Networking at live and online events will help you get used to the idea of being at these events so that eventually you can present at them. It will also help you build relationships.
- Present at Live and Online Events – With your books you have a platform for your message, and you can now take that and speak at live events, both online and offline.
- Get Active on Social Media – Don’t just set up social media profiles and be invisible. You want to participate, share your knowledge and connect with others so you can build relationships.
- Get on a Speakers List or Two – Contact different groups and offer speaking services to them.
- Keep Going – Don’t stop; keep going. Each thing that you do will build on the next thing, and before you know it you’re positioned as an expert and the sky is the limit.
Becoming an expert is a process. At first you will feel as if you’ll never make it, but everything you do builds on the next thing and eventually it will snowball to true success. Once it happens, part of you will feel as if it happened overnight, but in truth everything you did above built on the next thing and finally people started seeing you as an expert.