3 Ways To Position Yourself As An Expert in Your Field
When you are just starting out in your consulting business, it can feel like you have a million and one things to do, and a big task is showing your audience that you do in fact, know what you’re talking about! In this blog, I want to give you my top three tips that you can use to position yourself as an expert.
Intentional Visibility- When I say visibility, I mean how you are strategically placing yourself or putting yourself out there for more folks to know who you are and what you do. Social media is one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways to do that, but there are plenty of other opportunities. There's Youtube, podcasts, webinars, blogging, and even getting published.
So there's tons of different strategies that you could use to increase your visibility, and you really want to think intentionally around those. Over the next 30 days, set some goals and create a strategy to increase your intentional visibility and ensure you are highlighting your experience around your area of expertise.
How You’re Sharing Your Expertise- What are some strategies and small solutions that you can share with your audience that showcase your experience in your particular area of expertise?
For example, one of the ways I show my expertise is through free content. Now, I say this with a caveat because we don't give away the meat and potatoes of our work and expertise for free, but we can provide accessible value to our audience with particular free content.
The type of free content you want to provide is low-lift (on your part) and knowledge building. You’re not giving your audience the entire lesson, merely an overview of the main points in the lesson. This could look like a few things:
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Checklist
IG lives
Facebook lives
Sharing tips, articles, and posts via social media
These certainly aren’t the only ways to share your expertise in an accessible way, but this is just a list to get you thinking about content you can provide to your audience to show them your expertise!
Share Your Results- This is where, as educators, we might feel a little bit of that reluctance to share our successes because we've been socialized to uphold humility. But let’s be honest, not everyone can afford to be humble. There are some identities and marginalized communities where the unintended consequence of humility is playing small and being left out of decision-making rooms. The humility conversation that’s a whole other conversation, but in naming this third strategy of boldly sharing your results I wanted to touch on it. In terms of actually sharing your results, you want to name all of the great things you've done in your area of expertise.
If you’re a teacher, your results could be stellar data points in terms of the impact you've created in your classroom. It could be articles you have written or interviews you've had. The key here is to boldly and confidently step into what you have achieved and share that with your audience.
I would encourage everyone to take this as a self-reflection opportunity to think about who you label as an expert and then trace back what exactly led you to that conclusion. What is their visibility? Did you have interactions with them that led you to this assumption or this conclusion that they're an expert? This is a great opportunity to review what other experts have done to gain your trust in them, and glean strategies that you can replicate in your own business.
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