Branding Yourself as an Online Expert

Being an expert at what you do is important, but possibly of even more value to your career is knowing how to brand yourself as such. After all, you have to get the job before you can excel at it. This becomes even more vital when your area of expertise is an online field, and most especially when you run an online business.

With the internet and ecommerce expanding at an almost exponential rate, it’s difficult to stay abreast of the most modern advances and truly live up to the claim that you know it all. But if you truly want to make your business work and continue to excel in your chosen field, you need to be able to prove to others that you can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. So how can you brand yourself as an expert ?

1) Be an expert
– If you don’t know whether or not you’re an expert, you probably aren’t. You must have extended schooling and/or relevant experience in your field and a wide base of knowledge and resources from which to draw in order to claim elite status in your profession.

2) Be an entrepreneur
– You have to market yourself and your services like an entrepreneur. Having the chops to get the job done is only half the battle. You also need a viable business plan to launch your career. You have a lot of competition and even if you’re smarter, faster, and better than the rest, you need to make sure potential customers can find you and utilize your services. You have to be your own advocate.

3) Network
– Making sure that people in your professional community know who you are and the quality of your work is essential to branding yourself as an expert. If no one knows you, then you might as well be no one. Here is where networking plays an important role to brand yourself as an expert.

4) Get backing
– You need endorsement to verify your status. Anyone can say they’re an expert, but when someone else goes on the record with that same statement, it lends you a certain amount of credibility. If you claim to be an authority and you’re not, it’s only a matter of time before your deceit is unveiled, and it will absolutely have a negative impact on your business, so find another way to brand yourself while you work towards expert ranking.

5 ) Define your area of expertise
– This is absolutely necessary to branding. You need to be able to offer quantifiable results, and that starts with setting parameters for what you can deliver. Only promise what you can reasonably produce and you will never have to turn down (or disappoint) prospective clients. If there are a lot of experts in your field, you should consider narrowing your scope a bit. Chances are you specialize in a particular area of interest anyway, so shoot for targeted marketing to improve your odds of roping in business.

Getting an online business off the ground can be tough, but the ability to market yourself as an expert is an opportunity you should not pass up. Do whatever is necessary to gain this privileged status and then use it to your advantage. If done correctly, it can help you build up a clientele faster and open avenues for advancement that you never imagined.

This is a guest post by Sarah Harris, marketing manager at Adiamor Engagement Rings. Adiamor offers engagement ring settings, loose diamonds, and other fine diamond jewelry at affordable prices. Image Credit: Phauly