How to be Known as an Expert in Your Field

One of the benefits of good social media marketing is becoming known as an expert in your field. I say “field” because sometimes “industry” is too broad. For instance, my industry is “marketing and advertising”, but my “field” is digital marketing in specific. That’s my specialty and that’s what I want to be known for.

So, how do you get known as an expert in your field?

The first thing you need to do is clearly define and understand who your target audience is. Once you get to know your target, you need to determine what their burning questions are. And sometimes, the questions are the most basic you could ever think of like, “What is a blog?” or “What is SEO?” or “What is Social Media?”

To you, the expert, they may seem stupid, but to the clueless person, they want to know. They’re asking Google. They’re asking Quora. What’s Quora? It’s a Q&A site.

Quora

I hadn’t been on Quora for a while, so I went in there, updated my profile, updated the topics, and lo and behold, I started getting emails with questions. They send me at least 5 a day. I was getting generic social media questions on average usage rather than marketing, so I changed my topics to “Marketing on Twitter” and “Marketing on Facebook”, etc. The more specific the topic, the better.

My real purpose for using Quora, besides, being known as the “social media lady”, is to promote my YouTube channel. The trick to Quora is to briefly answer the question, then add a link to one of your articles or videos so they can go more in-depth.

Other features on Quora is “upvoting” and sharing answers. You get more reach. Besides that, try to be the first to answer the question. Don’t wait too long to answer a good question. If someone else beats you to the right answer, don’t bother. Unless, of course, you have a better answer.

LinkedIn is the next place you need to be on…

Your personal profile should be up-to-date as should be a recent, professional-looking headshot. Moreover, use all the space on your summary to highlight your expertise.

LinkedIn also has its own blog that anyone can contribute to. It’s not the best blogging platform, but it works. Make sure that you always add a CTA at the end with a link back to your website. Also, link certain keywords back to your blog on those topics.

One of my time-saving tricks is to re-purpose my blogs from my site to LinkedIn. Just add a line at the bottom that this article originally appeared on… with a link to the original article. That tells Google to give the original post more authority in searches.

So how do you justify the time involved?

Think of it as sweat equity and part of your marketing. You may not see results right away, but you’ll be surprised one day when you’re asked to speak at a group or get hired for a job because someone was impressed by your answers and what came up when they Googled you.

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