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One of the best ways to improve your value and earn money 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. When you’re considered an expert, it’s much easier to earn money in your online business. Don’t worry if you’re not there yet; you can get there. We all start from scratch when we’re born and with the tools available to you, it’s not out of your reach.
Here are a few ways to get started…
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Write White Papers
A white paper (if you’re not sure what a white paper is, or if you should be using them, check out this article) is a good intro to organizing information to educate your audience about their problems and your solutions.
8. 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.
9. Write eBooks
As you gather more material, you’ll eventually have enough to put together an eBook without too much work.
10. Publish on Kindle
You can publish your book and give the Kindle version away for free. It’s a great way to get new customers.
11. 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 BookBaby and Amazon.
12. 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. Reach out to people in your niche who have podcasts and share your knowledge with their audiences.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. Get on a Speaker’s List or Two
Contact different groups and offer speaking services to them. Create a “one sheet” with the information about the types of talks you give.
16. 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.
Learning how to earn money online as 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.
