SHARING YOUR EXPERTISE

Share your expertise with the world to raise your profile and your business's brand recognition.

Few things can have greater impact on your personal brand and your organization's brand recognition than developing and sharing your expertise with the world. Whether you call it becoming a thought leader or a public expert, or as marketing guru , you should do it. Trust me that it works.

The formula is to build your expertise and get people to recognize it.

Expose yourself
Talk about your expertise, with everyone you meet. Your clients, colleagues, superiors, everyone, even in social settings.

Prepare a formal one-hour talk with a deck of slides
This forces you to organize your ideas and structure your arguments to make the most profound impact on an audience. When you have it ready, give the talk whenever and wherever you can whether at a lunch meeting in the office, conference breakout sessions, and professional organization meetings.

Write an article
It doesn't have to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal to be effective. With a little bit of effort and a few phone calls, I guarantee you can find a publication that's eager for your contribution. Write more articles. Yes, this is important enough to have its own step. Turn sharing your knowledge into a habit, and your thought leadership will command much more respect.

Write a book
Everyone, even you, can write a book. In fact, if you've written a series of articles, the book has already written itself. All you'll need to do is add a few anecdotes. If you can get a contract with a major publisher, great. If not, no worries. A good friend of mine, published his first book by simply combining his best articles, and it's been a great calling card for his growing business. As long as it's bound and it doesn't look like it came from a personal printer, you'll be fine.

By following all these steps, I guarantee you'll begin to see your personal and organizational cachet grow in the marketplace. And if you have your book in hand, you'll see the impact of it from the public. Because being a thought leader does take hard work, people have tremendous respect for those who have taken it to the final stage. And they put their money where their mouth is.

Furthermore, according to a recent study conducted by RainToday, 96% of authors report that writing a book produced positive results for their businesses.