Internet marketing can be a solitary affair. But, to be successful, you really need to work with other people in the marketing space.
If you know one thing about the internet is it is a global community full of many millions of people. It’s normally quite impossible to just exist there completely on your own. No matter what you do you’ll be interacting with people even if it’s just by posting on a forum. Generally you want to make as much use of other people as you can. This will help push your expert status.
I can think of several good ways to piggyback off other people and I’ve chosen three of them to elaborate on further in this blog post. First of all, you can be interviewed and show your expert status by answering questions. Secondly, you can provide information for people that are ready to place on their blog with your name associated with it. And thirdly, you can also ask people you’ve helped in the past to provide you with testimonials. This helps to show that you are indeed an expert and to give you that all-important social proof.
To start with, you need to think about how you can be interviewed to showcase your expertise. And by interviews, I’m not talking about a job interview. I’m talking about the kind of interview where you get asked questions, the results are either broadcast live for a number of followers over the Internet or they’re recorded. They may even be typed up afterwards and published in a written format. Sites need quality content and expert interviews are a great way for them to be supplied with this. You get seen as an expert as you’re the one being interviewed. You get the credibility by working with other people. I recommend that you get interviewed as often as you can. It’s only a very small time commitment to take part in an interview and if you mention your site, or get your interviewer to link back to it, you can get visitors from a single interview for years to come.
The second thing that you want to do to try and piggyback off other people’s sites is to provide guest blog posts for other people. It’s a similar principle as far as providing content goes. This is also great for helping relationship building. It’s getting your name on another person’s site. You also have a contact, which can be so valuable when looking to launch a product through joint venture or through other mechanisms. Often the guest blog post doesn’t take a long time to write. You can often write about the same area more than once to go on different blogs. That’s fine, so long as you change your posts around a bit and don’t cover exactly the same points in exactly the same order. The posts do have to be unique in that respect. You want to be providing as many guest blog posts as you can. Make sure you get a link back to your own profiles and sites as part of your agreement here.
If you’re a successful marketer and you’re working well with other people, that also means you’ll be helping them all the time. This might mean directly helping them by providing them with a blog post or allowing yourself to be interviewed as we’ve already covered. You can ask for support in return for that help in the form of a testimonial. This is where someone else says that you’re the real deal.
You can also ask for testimonials in other ways. A much more common way is when you’re providing products to your customers, offering them coaching, teaching them through a video series or using whatever your modus operandi may be. When you provide the high quality information, ask people directly if they’re willing to provide you with a testimonial to talk about the valuable service you provided. Many people will be willing to do this. People like to help others who have helped them and you’ve helped them by providing this great quality of information. Just go ahead and ask for the testimonial. When you get this testimonial back, display it proudly on your site. This carries even more weight if you can get agreement to add the picture of the person who supplied you with the testimonial as well.
I hope this blog post has showed you some useful ways to piggyback off other people who you develop a relationship with. This all helps to position your expertise in the market and to show the value that you can bring.
Look at the ways to position yourself out there. I recommend being an interviewee for products, podcasts and radio shows as a starting point. You should also contribute guest blog posts. Use all of these techniques to collect testimonials and develop social proof. You’ll make additional contacts and sales by piggybacking off other people in this way and this will be to your advantage during your internet marketing journey.