Do you want to know the real key to turning your personal brand into an authority within your niche? It’s helping out others.
Giving of yourself—helping others—is a major key to elevating your personal brand. Being generous with your skills and time will catapult your success. Why?
Helping others makes you a leader—True leaders are willing to teach, help others advance, showcase their skills, and learn from others.
You activate your network—Helping others leads to opportunities. You send a message about what it means to be connected to you and your network is more likely to reciprocate.
You grow— All your interactions have the potential to deliver personal and professional growth. Being helpful proves you are a team player.
There are many, many ways you can demonstrate your expertise in your niche while being helpful. You can write great blog content or create great videos that teach people how to do specific things.
Offer your wisdom
You can share what you know in so many ways.
- Content—Publishing content is all about delivering your insights. Try to create truly useful content and deliver it free of charge—whether it be a blog, video series, podcast, eBooks, research, or anything else.
- Guest blogging—Offer publishers exclusive blog posts and articles.
- Seminars—Seize opportunities to teach in classroom settings, workshops, webinars, virtual summits, etc.
- Social media—Seek and you shall find infinite opportunities to share your expertise via social conversations, social media groups, forums, Q&A sites, live chats, and more.
- Answer the call—As I wrote in my book, when you’re rolling down The Road to Recognition you’ll get the call to contribute others’ content in a variety of ways. Do your best to respond to it.
You can sign up for social media groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ about your niche and answer people’s questions as well as share content.
You can become a member of forums about your niche and answer people’s questions. Look for any forums you can find, but especially go for official forums. For example, personal finance advisors could really shine on the CreditKarma forums.
Become a resource
You can join networks like Yahoo Answers and Quora to answer people’s question about your niche. You can even search for questions asked in the past to see if the people ever got a good answer and help them if they didn’t.
You can monitor Twitter by searching for people who have questions about your area of expertise. You can use the Twitter search box and save the search for future reference.
Answering questions doesn’t take an immense amount of time. If you get emails asking the same question over and over, create a template that you can copy and paste each time. It will save you time while helping someone. Or, better yet, create a blog post that you can direct someone to when you get the same question again.
Give more than you have too
When you are just getting started, you will want to answer as many questions as possible and create content that answers common questions in your niche. When you start doing this, people start spreading the word about you.
Take, for example, someone who wants to be an authority on Google Analytics. That person would want to start a blog about Google Analytics with helpful tips on how to do specific things. They would also want to start answering people’s questions about Google Analytics on social media, in groups, on Q&A sites, and in forums.
All of the people who come across this person’s content and answers will think this person is very knowledgeable about Google Analytics. When those people are asked, “Do you know someone who knows Google Analytics?” they will reply, “Yes, I do. Here’s their website / Twitter / etc.”
The more people you can help, the more people will associate you with your niche and start to recommend you to others that need help.
One way to build your personal brand authority and capitalize on your helpfulness is to always invite people to sign up for your email list for more information about your niche. If you’ve been helpful to the person, they will be more likely to convert from stranger to subscriber.
As your personal brand becomes more well-known, you may have to decide how to balance giving out free advice and charging for consulting services. A good rule of thumb is if you can answer the question in a few sentences, do it. If you need to talk someone through it, charge for it.
If your personal brand is focused on business, you can join sites like Clarity.fm. This site allows you to set yourself up as an expert on specific topics and helps people who are interested in paying for consulting to find you.
You can also add consulting to your website as a service that you offer. When you write blog posts, casually mention that some of your topics are inspired by questions people ask you during consulting sessions. Even if no one is paying you for consulting, they will look up to you as someone who gets paid to give advice. And that will help you create a strong personal brand in your niche!
Helping others is not just a strategy, it’s the right thing to do.