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When you first start out wanting to work from home and start your own business, it can be frightening and even seem impossible. It’s the old conundrum about how you can get experience without having experience.
Should you “fake it til you make it?” Sometimes that can help boost your confidence, but when you start an online business, you can make your own experience and prove your expertise with just a little work. Here’s how.
1. Blog Regularly Toward Your Audience
Start a blog on your website and blog directly to your audience with many forms of content, discussing many issues that the audience has. It’s a great way to get traffic, but it’s also a great way to demonstrate expertise.
2. Write a White Paper about a Problem
A white paper is a long report that addresses a problem and then offers solutions to the problem. If you write a paper or two about individual problems your audience has, you’ll be able to show your expertise even though you’re just starting out.
3. Publish a Book about Your Expertise
Writing a book and authorship is always a great way to show your expertise. Direct the book to your target audience and answer questions they may have. Address one problem and solve it and then you’ll get more respect that you do know what you’re talking about. Not to mention, you’ll learn more about that problem (and more ways to solve it) while you’re researching what to write about.
4. Make Checklists to Help Your Target Audience
If you know the types of things that your audience has questions about, you can create helpful checklists, cheat sheets, or tip sheets that are available for view and/or download on your website or blog. Every blog should have a FREEBIE that they giveaway in exchange for an email address. Get mine below this post!
5. Share Answers Freely on Social Networks
Social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even forums and message boards are great places to answer other people’s questions in a way that highlights your expertise.
6. Become a Contributing Writer
Blogs, websites, newspapers, and magazines all want more content and will take well-written, expertly delivered articles. Some of these will even pay you for the content. Write originally for each and rely on your bio to send traffic your way.
7. Get on a Speaking Circuit
Create a couple of presentations that you could easily turn into public speaking fodder. Practice by putting that information on video on your blog, YouTube, and other places that take video. Make one sheet, which is one downloadable 8×11 sheet that tells about what you’ll speak about and your prices.
8. Create a Dedicated YouTube Channel
Many people have become famous because of YouTube, and you can too. Use YouTube as a way to demonstrate your expertise on the topics of interest to your audience.
9. Host a Free Webinar
Technology enables you to do a lot to spread the word about your knowledge and expertise. You can do how to videos, tip videos, and more to show the world and most importantly, your audience, what you know.
These ways to show your expertise when first starting out don’t require you to have a huge client roster, or even a following yet. Doing them will help you gain a following, improve search engine optimization (SEO) and help you build the work-at-home business of your dreams.
