If you’re involved in a one man business, such as a consultant for instance, personal branding is capital. You are your own brand, and you must be your own brand manager. In this article, we’re going to give you four essential tips on how to set yourself up as an authority in your niche and none of these solutions requires hiring a brand manager, paying for expensive certifications or publishing fake press releases.
Write About Your Area of Expertise
One of the surest ways to demonstrate that you are an expert is to write about your area of expertise. Create a blog where you talk about your expertise and apply it to new issues or niche topics in your field. Publish industry white papers regarding what your company does, mentioning your contributions to the solutions mentioned in the paper. If you have already written professional articles, share the links to them on social media. You can turn this into new, unique and personalized content by discussing how you’ve applied lessons learned from that white paper over the past five years.
Promote Yourself as an Expert in Your Niche
Be interviewed at industry conferences as an expert in your field. Answer highly tracked questions on Quora to generate attention as an expert. This will help with social media sharing and improve your personal search engine optimization, since answering as an expert and getting voted up for these answers links your name to your desired associated area of expertise.
Join your industry association so that you can immediately list this membership in your biography. Apply for officer positions; you can apply for secretary or membership coordinator as these are low stress positions that require small amounts of work. If you are already a member of industry associations, offer to review papers submitted for publication and then put “reviewer for X journal” in your professional biography.
Another option is writing reviews of the top books in the field, showing that you’ve read them and understood them while giving your own unique spin on the topic. For example, a doctor reading about the application of Six Sigma to medicine could describe how the ideas in the book could be applied to the hospital where he or she works or what they’ve done already that wasn’t called “Six Sigma” at the time.
Guest Post
One of the benefits of guest posts for you is introducing yourself to the blog owner’s audience, while simultaneously leveraging someone else’s social media expertise to promote the fact that you’re going to guest post. The backlinks in the guest post improve your personal search engine optimization through mentions of your name and content, while it doesn’t require you specifically promoting or backlinking to your site. As an example, Gurbaksh Chahal founded two leading ad companies, Click Agents and Blue Lithium, before he was 26. He released a book in 2008 and set up a non-profit in 2014. Gurbaksh Chahal uses guests posts to raise awareness of causes he supports and his own writing.
Teach
One of the best ways to demonstrate your expertise is to teach the topic to others. You don’t have to book 500 seat conference rooms and hope to attract people. Start small with free presentations to the public on the subject. You will immediately be able to state that you’ve been teaching seminars on the subject since that date. Offer your expertise to small businesses and professional associations, especially for free at the beginning. Look for ways to volunteer applying your expertise and receive mention by reporters and company newsletters for doing so. Promote the events to the general public, even if after the fact, so that you receive social media mentions for the presentation and increase your standing as an expert.
By doing all of the above, you can really start to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.