It is completely possible to exist as an expert using Internet Marketing techniques for your niche in complete isolation to everything else that’s going on. But, that really isn’t a good idea if you’re thinking of developing a long-term sustainable business. Your customers will be searching for you online and you want them to be able to find positive things out about you when they search for you.
There are a massive numbers of websites existing in the world. That number of websites is growing all of the time. This means, you need to choose the correct sites to visit which provide you with the most value for the time you have available to use them.
There are three main types of websites I think you should be looking at if you want to push your expertise without overloading yourself with time burdens. The first type is the main community sites for the niche that you’re marketing within. The second type is any kind of site you might be expected have a profile in within your niche. The final type are social media sites.
Let’s look at each of those in more detail.
First of all, you need to identify what main community sites are available in your niche. Now in many niches there will be forums, also known as online discussion boards. But occasionally these community sites might take the form of niche social networking sites or other large scale blogs, which exist as a community hub. You need to be using these sites and you need to post into them. Make sure your name stays visible at all time on these sites by making at least one or two posts a day, ideally with some quality to them or at least some humour. When you do this, it makes people know your name and remember your expert status to go with it. These community sites will be there for years to come and the results will be archived. So make sure what you post on them is appropriate and supports your expert status.
The second type of site you need to visit are any sites that allow you to have a profile with details about yourself. Now these sites can be important because you can put a back link back to your own resources on the internet. But, these sites also just let people find out about you. After all, who doesn’t want to find more about their new expert contact? So set up all of those profiles. These might be in the forums previously mentioned or these might be on an alternate professional sites like LinkedIn. Make these profiles complete, visible and out there to support your expert status.
The final type of site are social media sites. There are many of these out there and Facebook is always going to be massive. But the one that I think you should be using is Twitter. Twitter provides a micro-blogging service and you write short tweets with a limited number in characters. That means you don’t need to spend a long time working out what these tweets should say. Even if you only post a single tweet every couple of days, then it shows you’re out there.
I prefer to use Twitter to post marketing related thoughts as the mood takes me, but you can also create your tweets in advance. You don’t have to sit there and write them all in one go. It’s often quite easy to come up with interesting tweets just with short, one sentence, information about your niche. Put these together and you have a continual stream of short content promoting you.
You can even repeat previous tweets after a certain amount of time and this will keep your Twitter profile frequently filled up with new content. That’s a common technique. You’ll be surprised how often you content is retweeted by the people who see you as an expert, pushing your name further into the social media bandwagon.
Those are three places to visit when you want to be seen as an expert on a website. These websites are very important. So you need to start by visiting the main community sites for the niche you’re an expert in. Make sure you take advantage of any sites in your niche which let you have a profile and supplement this by using general sites outside your niche where expertise can be shown. And finally, register for social media accounts. In particular, you need a Twitter account in your name and post regular tweets there even if you have to queue them up in advance. Just make sure you push your name out there by visiting these sites. You’ll continue to support your expert status to all the people that are interested.