In the online world, positioning is everything. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge or experience you have, if you can’t show other people that you’re an expert in your niche. If you have a good amount of offline credibility and you’re looking to build your online credibility and positioning to match, here’s a few tips:
Produce quality content that shows your expertise. Does your website have a blog? It should, and you should be updating it regularly with quality content that shows what you’re talking about. Don’t just copy information you’ve found elsewhere, add to it to produce articles that will become references for people looking to solve a problem.
Produce quality content for other venues. This helps to get the word out about you. Make a list of the top four or five resources in your niche – whether those are magazines, newspapers or news sites, expert’s blogs, or other websites – and then figure out how you can get in to those venues. Most blogs today accept guest posts – email the blog owner with a polite inquiry as to whether they’re currently accepting guest posts, and be sure to have two or three post ideas included in your email that you can expand upon if they ask for more information. Guest posting is a great way to build relationships with experts that can lead to collaboration (see below), because experts are regularly emailed and asked for favors. But with guest posting, if you email them with a great idea and actually follow through with amazing content, you’re doing them a huge favor. You can also email or call magazines or newspapers to pitch them an article. Once you’ve appeared in these venues, be sure to mention it on your online presence. Consider adding an “As Seen On…” section to your sidebar that lists the places you’ve been published, online and off.
Collaborate with other experts. This will transfer some of their online positioning, expertise, and authority over to you. You should probably start small and build up – instead of approaching an expert that you have never contacted before, and asking if they want to co-create a course or a product with you, email them and ask if they’d be willing to be interviewed for your website. Make sure your questions are great, as this is part of what will help show your expertise. You might consider doing an interview series with experts, as this will continue to build your positioning, and also be a good source of traffic since people will mention where and when they’ve been interviewed. You can also interview experts and include the interviews in products as informational sources. After you’ve built up a relationship with one or two people, then is the time to approach them about doing a joint venture project.