How to Establish Yourself as an Expert to Grow Your Network and Client Base

Everyone is an expert in something, whether it’s basket weaving, social media marketing, or book editing. Consider this: being known as an expert in your field or area of interest affords you (and your business) all kinds of good stuff: credibility, a wider network, new clients or readers, and chance to cut through the noise. For all types of authors, an expert status can lend itself to getting the word out about a book and grabbing the attention of new readers. Here are three easy steps to get you started:

1.     Figure out what you know.

In which fields do you have credentials, a strong knowledge base, or passion? What do people ask you about? What do you just love doing?  Answer this question and—voilà—you have your specialty. Next: specify, specify, specify. Don’t be just a branding expert; be an expert on personal branding for LinkedIn. A health guru could work toward becoming a clean-eating coach, and a leadership consultant could specialize in educational or nonprofit leadership. By narrowing your area of focus, you stand out among your competitors and peers and attract the attention of the right people.

2.     Do your homework and build your message.

Once you’ve identified your area of expertise, it’s time to do some research. Figure out what leaders in your field are saying about the topic at hand. To continue one of the examples above, how do other experts approach the topic of clean eating? Scour books, industry journals, and the Internet to see what’s already been said so you can position yourself in a unique way. Your message is your value proposition, and it should continue the conversation in your voice, with several clear points. For the health guru, that could look something like this:

“Providing busy families with a clean-eating plan that sticks” or

“Teaching parents how to eliminate processed foods from the kitchen.”

3.     Deliver your message.

So now that you know what you’re talking about and have surveyed the landscape, how do you get the message across to your people? There are several ways:

• Write helpful articles and post them to article aggregators and industry publications, or start a blog or newsletter and post your content there. You can also check out other blogs or websites in your field to see if you can write guest posts for them.

• Look for local groups, organizations, conferences, and seminars where you might be able to teach or speak. You could host your own seminars, webinars, or Internet radio shows to educate people on your topic of expertise.

• We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—write a book! When you hand someone your book, or they see it on bookstore shelves, it’s instant credibility for you. Just make sure you do your research before you get started, as we’ve discussed many times. The book industry can be tricky, especially for newcomers.

These tips are meant to point you in the right direction, but becoming an expert is not something that happens overnight. It take quite a bit of time and hard work to amass the content you need to disseminate your message, so taking it slow and moving one step at a time is key. For more resources, check out Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog or one of these titles: Trust Agents by Chris Brogan, Good in a Room by Stephanie Palmer, or The Brand You 50 by Tom Peters.

BBBB Readers Cast Your Vote for Us!

With the seemingly limitless options in publishing today, getting some good advice or an expert opinion is more important to your success than ever. Whether it’s peer reviews of your writing, marketing tips or information about how to publish your book—there is a wide variety of excellent online resources for writers, authors, and small publishers.

Writer’s Digest provides a great service by compiling and releasing an annual list of the 101 best websites for writers--you can see last year’s list here. At the Big Bad Book Blog, our aim is to provide authors with educational resources that make sorting out the publishing world a little easier, so if you have enjoyed our site this year, we would love it if you would vote for us!

To vote for us to be included on the list:

• Just send an e-mail to: writersdig@fwpubs.com with “101 Best Websites” in the subject line

• In the body of the e-mail list our blog, www.bigbadbookblog.com and feel free to include any information about why you’re voting for us, although this is not required

• Deadline is January 1, 2011

Thank you and we appreciate your support!

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Continuing where Part II left off:

1.    Build Your Brand - Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.
2.    Make Connections - Marketing is all about making connections. It's not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.
3.    Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Relationships

How many of your good friends would say no if you asked them to read your writing? Probably not many. Even if you write science fiction novels and your friend isn't a science fiction fan, they'll still probably read it. To be a successful marketer you must not only make connections but you must also make friends. Although you might make a "miracle connection" with a magazine publisher or a book-reviewer, connections with these people mean nothing until they come to trust you and see you as a friend.

Not only must you must turn strangers into friends but you have to make sure your friends stay your friends. Many millions of marketing dollars are not spent on promoting new brands, but keeping people loyal to old brands. The reason for this is because it costs less to keep a customer than to make a new one. If you have loyal and devoted readers, it's very important that they stay devoted. Your loyal readers are the most important marketing tool you have as they're the most likely to talk about and recommend your work. It's important to keep these readers happy because you want to keep them talking and keep them recommending. In the end, word-of-mouth advertising will always reign supreme.

For the purposes of marketing your writing, there are three levels of relationship. They are the unfamiliar, the acquainted, and the fans. It's our job to turn the unfamiliar into the acquainted and the acquainted into our fans.

From the Unfamiliar to the Acquainted

No matter how good your writing might be, it's very unlikely that you'll get it published in the New Yorker when people are unfamiliar with your work. Even if you have somehow managed to get the email address of one of the editors, if your name is unknown to him or her your message will likely go straight to the trash unopened.

The key to getting out of the stranger zone is to break people's preoccupation. When people are unfamiliar with you, they're always thinking about something or someone else. When people go into bookstores to browse, they'll often be looking for books from their favorite authors or about some particular subject that interests them. None of them will be looking for your book unless they've heard about you from somewhere. Sometimes if you have an attractive cover or an intriguing title you might break someone's preoccupation and make them want to leaf through the book and read the blurb on the back. Even if the book seemed interesting there's a high chance that the reader won't buy it, as he or she is not familiar enough with you or your brand. What the reader has done however, is to become acquainted with you.

Now that they're acquainted with you, they're much more likely to click on a website link with your name on it, or even read one of your short stories or essays. The more they expose themselves to your brand, and the more that your brand resonates with them as a reader, it's only a matter of time before they put your writing on their "to read list." The more the reader sees, hears or reads about you the higher your book goes toward the top of that list.

Breaking the unfamiliarity barrier in publishing is also important. In order for more and more publishers to become acquainted with your work you have to get published more. This sounds like a Catch-22 but it really isn't. What you must do is endeavor to get published in less popular magazines and work your way up. If you publish 10 articles or stories in second tier magazines, you're much more likely to be noticed by a first tier magazine like the New Yorker.

Another way to break people's preoccupation and establish acquaintance is to give out free stuff. "Free" is one of the most magical words in the English language. Just by saying the words "It's free," you're bound to make people turn their heads and listen to what you have to say. One of the big benefits I get from writing free high-value articles is increased web traffic. The higher my traffic, the more people know me and my brand. The more people know me, the easier it becomes for me to sell and market my writing.

Creating free content on the web is certainly not the only way to give out free stuff. You could send free copies of your books to editors who might review it in their magazine. You could write guest articles on popular blogs without charge. If you write a science fiction book, you could hand out free copies of it at a comic book convention. Giving away free stuff in a targeted manner can be very effective in raising awareness of you and your writing.

From the Acquainted to the Fan

In the end your job is to get your writing to the top of people's reading lists and keep it at the top. You must expand your fanbase. Fans are the people who can't wait until your next book comes out. When you have a fan you don't have to sell your writing any more--people simply buy. Fans have come to know and love your writing and won't hesitate to read whatever you're coming out with next.

In order to turn those who are acquainted with your work into fans it's essential that you follow these two rules:

1. Sharpen your best tools - One of the most valuable questions you can ever ask is: "How did you hear about me?" If someone out of the blue sends you an email from Nowhereville USA saying how much they liked your work, ask them how they found out about you. Whatever the source was, be sure to leverage it. If it happened to have been through a radio interview you better make sure you do more radio interviews. If it was through your website you better do what you can to improve and add more content to your site. Send small gifts (a free copy of your novel perhaps) to both the person who wrote you the letter and whoever referred your work to the person that wrote the letter. If you do this, you can be sure these people will be talking about you for a long time.
2. Repeat exposure - Whoever said familiarity breeds contempt didn't know what they were talking about. In reality, familiarity breeds trust and goodwill. Because of this it's better to write five guest blog articles on one site than one article each on five different sites. If one of your marketing channels have proven to work, don't let up just because you're seeing results. Become a fixture. The more your name appears in the same places, the more curious people will be about it. Eventually, this curiosity will translate into a wider readership. Be sure to saturate your niches with more and more of your work. The niche might be super-small, but if you gain the respect and trust from the people in that niche, your reputation is bound to spill over into larger interest groups.

Keep the Fans Happy

It doesn't matter if your fanbase is a hundred people or a million people. Your fans are the greatest word-of-mouth asset that you have, and you have to keep them reading.

In essence, you want to be as nice as you possibly can to your best readers. You want to create a dialogue with them. To keep in touch with them. You must leverage the goodwill that your readers have for you and turn it into more goodwill. Stay in touch with your readers. Write them, email them. Let them participate in free seminars or webinars. Give them a chance to ask questions about you and your work. Ask them about what they like most in your writing. When they tell you whatever that is, make sure you have more of it in what you write next.

Your most loyal readers have have given you their trust, and it's important that you return their trust with behavior that makes yourself worthy of it. Do what you can to give back. If someone subscribes to your e-zine, reciprocate by sending them a short story that won't be published for a week. If someone buys your book, include a password protected weblink to the first top secret chapter of your next book. Not only are you giving them free stuff, which increases goodwill, but you're also giving readers a sense that they're "a part of your posse," and that you trust them as a friend.

More, More and More

Although marketing your writing is essential if you want to have a wide readership, the best marketing in the world won't help if you have a poor product. It's important that you spend the bulk of your time producing quality writing.

Quantity, however, is also important. The more products any business introduces into the market, the bigger chance that one of them is going to be a hit. Although it certainly helps to write what you think will sell, the nature of people's tastes and preferences are so unpredictable that we often won't have any idea which one of our stories will take off. It's very common among writers to be surprised about the success of one of their stories or essays that they felt was a weaker example of their work.

More writing means more chances for exposure, more chances that people will like what you're writing about and more chances that you'll have a hit. Simply having more: more quality, more often, can be the best marketing strategy.

Kenji Crosland is a creative writing major who, scared of becoming a starving artist, became a corporate headhunter in Tokyo. Since then he's regained his sanity, quit his job, and now blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also developing a web application that just might change the internet. Follow him on Twitter: @KenjiCrosland.

Part I of III: Build Your Brand

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Marketing your writing is essential if you want your work to be read by a wide audience.

For many, marketing is an alien word that may conjure up images of people in suits sitting at round tables analyzing market trends, consulting with focus groups, and pouring millions of dollars into nationwide ad campaigns. It's big company stuff that individuals don't have the time, money, or skills to get involved in.

Because of this image, many writers have considered the job of marketing their writing as something that publishing houses or literary agents should do for them. The reality is, however, that although the big publishing houses may do a great job in promoting the next bestseller, they'll seldom take the risk to market the work of an unknown author. If you want to take advantage of the marketing might of the publishing houses, you must first learn how to market your writing on your own, to get your writing read by enough people that you get on a publisher's radar, and make it worth their while to consider promoting what you've written.

The goals of marketing your writing are simple: you want to raise awareness of your writing, get more people to read it, and to keep them reading. If you're persistent and committed to your marketing effort, it's only a matter of time before that book offer arrives in your mailbox.

Self-marketing, unlike what a large corporation would have to go through, is much simpler than focus groups and market trend research, and can be broken down into these three steps:

1.         Build Your Brand - Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.

2.         Make Connections - Marketing is all about making connections. It's not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.

3.         Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Your Brand

Just as Apple has Steve Jobs, and Virgin has Richard Branson. Your writing must have you.

Although you may have not consciously worked to build it, you already have a personal brand. A personal brand is all the thoughts and feelings that are associated with you and your work. A strong brand will capture people's imagination and will make people remember you, your name, and your writing. A weak brand, however, can make it very difficult to promote yourself, no matter how much time and energy you spend on marketing efforts.

Stephen King has an incredibly strong personal brand. His name has become almost synonymous with horror, and just by picking up one of his books, without even reading word one, you can feel the uncanny weight of all his monstrous creations. Even if the book you read wasn't one of his best, your reading experience would still be enhanced by its association with the Stephen King brand, with all the other books of his that you've enjoyed.

Michael Jordan has a strong personal brand, a brand which speaks athletic prowess and determination. When great athletes like him wear Nike merchandise, the power of the swoosh becomes amplified by association with their athletic talent. Because they wear Nike, you're likely to associate their athletic skill with Nike merchandise, and you'll probably even feel like a better athlete when you wear Nike because, on a real subconscious level, the athletic skill of these athletes have been transferred directly to you.

As you can see, a strong brand can have a powerful effect on how we view a product, movie, or book. If you can work to build your brand, to strengthen it and harness its power, it can be a tremendous asset to your marketing effort. So how can you work to start building an incredible brand? How can you make your readers tremble in anticipation even before opening your book?

As a writer, your personal brand has three elements:

1.         Your Story

2.         Your Mission

3.         Your Writing

If you work to develop these elements of your brand, you'll find that the other two steps of marketing: making connections and building relationships, can be much easier, and sometimes will even take care of themselves.

Your Story

When you build your personal brand, make sure that people know where you came from and why you decided to be a writer. The important thing is not to make yourself look good, but make your self look human and good. Stephen King worked in an industrial laundry while writing his first novels. Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store discussing movies with people in the film business before a producer convinced him to write his first screenplay. Tony Robbins worked as a janitor before becoming the incredibly successful self-help guru he is now. These fascinating stories are not only memorable, but naturally color the way we view the work of these people.

A good personal story is not always about sharing your triumphs. It's also about admitting your pain, your faults, and your past mistakes. Steve Pavlina, for example, arguably the most popular blogger on the internet for the topic of personal-development, revealed a past where his out of control kleptomania landed him in a jail cell when he was 19-years-old. We sympathize with the pain of his past as well as admire the steps he took to improve himself and achieve an amazing level of success. These strong emotions of sympathy and admiration will naturally affect the way we read and value what he's written.

Your story must be fascinating, but it also must be truthful. It's not merely listing your age, sex, occupation, and the town you grew up in, and it's not just a chance to boast of your accomplishments. What it is is sharing with other people a story that reveals your humanity. You want to paint a picture of yourself that would make your reader want to have a beer with you.

So what's your story? What has led you to decide to pick up the pen and write? Declare it with bravery and honesty, and you'll be amazed at the kind of reception you'll get.

Your Mission

There was a student who sat next to me in a political science class nearly ten years ago who seemed to know more about political science than anyone else in the class. When I asked him why he was so interested in political science he looked at me straight in the eye and said, "I want to become the President of the United States."

From the look on his face I knew he wasn't joking, and even though we probably only had a five minute chat, to this day I still remember that student's name.

If that student said something less ambitious and generic, like: "I'm thinking about getting into politics," I probably would have forgotten about him as soon as the class was over. It was the boldness of his stated mission and the energy and certainty with which he said it, that had its effect on me. His mission and the way he said it conveyed a sense of power, self-confidence, and determination. It made me believe that even though he may not become president, he would certainly go far in a political career.

Whether it's writing, politics or ostrich farming, determining your mission and letting everyone know about it is essential to building a powerful personal brand. Your mission should convey your ambition, as well as be original enough to distinguish yourself from others.

The purpose of having an ambitious mission is simple. People remember people who have high and lofty goals and can give evidence that they're taking real actions to achieve them. It doesn't matter how far away you are from achieving the goals, but you must convey a sense that you're committed to achieving them no matter what. When people see this kind of dedication, especially for a goal that seems particularly difficult, they'll naturally want to do their small part to help you out, to make the achievement of your goals a little easier.

Originality is just as important as ambition. What is it that differentiates you from everyone else out there? If you write comedies, you should do more than tell people that you want write a bestselling funny book. You should give them specifics. Tell them that you want to write about duck boogers in a way that no writer has before. Not only will you catch them off guard, but you have given them a short advertisement for your upcoming duck booger book. If you write science fiction, tell them you're currently working on designing alien spaceships. If you write horror novels, tell them that you're working to scare the pants off the English speaking world. The point is to be remembered, and you have to be original if you want to be remembered.

Your mission is an important part of your personal brand. It not only distinguishes you from the rest of the crowd, but it can also help you be recognized by those who matter. The mission for your writing can change from time to time, but it should resonate with your overarching life goals. If, for example, your overall life mission is to help people overcome depression, you could do this by writing inspirational novels, or by writing a self-help book. Indeed, you could write both the novel and the self-help book, and as long as they both serve the same mission, the power of your personal brand can only increase.

Your Writing

Your writing is without a doubt the biggest part of your personal brand. It's the chief representative of your values as a writer. It's important that you write in a way that's consistent with your story and your mission. When you do so, you integrate all three elements of your personal brand.

In order to use your writing to strengthen your brand, you must of course produce good writing. Good writing itself, however, is often not good enough. In order to really take advantage of the marketing power of your writing you must not only be true to your story and your mission, but you must clearly convey your ideas, themes, and subject matter in a way that'll make people want to talk about it and quote it.

It's important for your writing to be timeless, to cover universal subjects that'll never grow old, but it should also contain some element of the timely. Timelessness in writing is good because you can be sure that your writing will have some staying power. It's the reason why people still read classic novels that are a hundred years old. Timeliness, on the other hand, is the stuff of the bestseller. It's relevant to what people are talking and thinking about right now. If there's relevance, then you can be sure that people will be talking about your book. This is the reason why books about investing money are released during a period of economic growth and books about saving money are released during a recession. If you endeavor to capture both the timely and timeless, it won't be long before you have a winner on your hands.

Even timely topics and ideas, however, can sometimes fail to catch on. One way to prevent this is by implementing Idea Chain Management. Idea Chain Management is essentially the packaging of ideas for easier distribution. It's the distillation of a complex idea into a three-word-or-less phrase or buzzword that's still true to the original idea. Although non-fiction works have taken the credit for many buzzwords, fiction too has supplied us with a good share of words and phrases that we use in everyday conversation. The words "Big Brother," for example, have become synonymous with an overbearing government infringing on people's privacy. This term will forever be associated with George Orwell's 1984. You can be assured that the more people that hear or read the word "Big Brother," whether on the news or on the blogs, the more people will buy his book.

In order to make your writing an effective marketing tool it can be helpful to implement the above tricks. The most important thing, however, is that you be true to your story and your mission. Make sure you do so whenever you put your name to your writing.

Kenji Crosland is a creative writing major who, scared of becoming a starving artist, became a corporate headhunter in Tokyo. Since then he's regained his sanity, quit his job, and now blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also developing a web application that just might change the internet. Follow him on Twitter: @KenjiCrosland.