“For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.” -Arthur C. Clarke
Becoming a specialist has become a necessity to make sure your voice is heard in a crowd of amateurs, but to be an expert one needs to establish authority, credibility, and actual applied knowledge to lead.
An expert can be different from perfect but being consulted for things in your niche is a pretty good goal to have.
So here are tried and tested ways to become an expert in your niche:
1. Create Your Personal Brand:
The first practical step towards being a top known expert is to create content around stuff you want to be known about,
Personal branding is more than getting brand deals or being an influencer, it’s your reputation online,
Talking about your niche and providing value is a great place, to begin with when you want to want to make yourself relevant for the long term.
You can start this today by signing up on social media platforms or start a blog about your niche and start creating content that is useful.
2. Use Parkinson’s Law:
If you ever came across time-management tools then you may have heard of this law.
But if you don’t, Parkinson’s law states:
“The work expands to fill the time available for its completion”
Simply put you can either complete a project in 3 months or 3 weeks by eliminating things that don’t matter.
Top entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos use the same principle to eliminate distractions and work with super focus.
You can use the same law to learn the skills or give yourself a deadline to establish yourself as a leader in your industry.
But just keep in mind it won’t work if you are using it for setting unrealistic timelines.
3. Tim Ferris’s Technique:
If the name sounds familiar it’s because you might know him from “the 4-hour workweek” a book that focuses on being a digital nomad and eliminating nonsense tasks.
In the same book, however, there is a section “The Expert builder” that maps out “How to become a top expert in 4 Weeks”.
Here are the summarized points to try this out:
- Join 1-3 related trade organizations with official-sounding names, this can also be done to increase your credibility in the field.
- Read the 3 top-selling books about your niche:
- Google or go to amazon’s bestsellers section of books and pick out 3 top-selling books and read them.
- After reading summarize each of them on one page. This helps you to clear your concepts and eliminate things that are not useful to you.
- Give one free seminar at a well-known university or college near you, and after that aim to do the same for two well know companies (IBM, AT&T, etc), you can tell those companies that you have given seminars on X universities to increase your credibility and let them know that you won’t be selling anything but just increasing knowledge of their organization.
- Offer to write 1-2 great articles for trade magazines, pick the ones you know people would love to read to know about their niche.
P.S. The above techniques can also be combined with few creative ideas of your own.
4. Consider Guest Posting:
As mentioned in this post, talking about your niche/industry with like-minded people is one of the great ways to make yourself known and establish some credibility among your audience.
Make a list of top leading blogs in your niche, and ask them to guest write an article for them for free.
This may not seem like a good idea at first, but think of all the benefits it provides:
- By writing guest content you are putting yourself in front of a large group of audiences that those blogs or publications have and accessing them for free.
- If you have a blog/website you are getting backlinks that are good for your SEO.
- You are building relationships with influencers in your niche which is valuable in the long term.
- This increases your credibility and establishes you as a thought leader of your niche.
But make sure before doing this that they have a valuable audience (no point in getting fake traffic), and they properly mention you in their content as there is a difference between ghostwriters and Guest writers.
5. Build A Community:
Having a group of people that can say about you in your absence is a true treasure and cannot be ignored.
Create virtual events and invite people to talk about your niche and engage live with your audience by answering their questions etc.
Aside from exchanging values and building professional relationships, this step can also build your audience and let your voice reach out to a wide group of people.
You can also use other options like joining or creating a Facebook Group, having a weekly FB live where you teach things to beginners in your niche, etc.
Or Sign up on meetup sites like Eventbrite or meetup etc that create virtual meetups from experts which are even free to attend.
Keep Learning:
Lastly, if the pandemic has taught us one thing that would be how quickly things can get unpredictable and old ways could die in a snap!
Tactics can change, techniques can become outdated so to ensure that you are on the right path you need to have patience and humility to learn more.
Being a specialist takes time, and in a world of millions of people wanting to thrive, you need to apply creative things to lead.
Hope this provides value to you.
Thank you for reading! Would love to know how you are trying to become a pro in your niche.
