12 Ways To Stand Out As An Expert Online

A question that many people ask me is: ‘do I need to build an audience BEFORE I create an online course so that I have someone to launch to? 

OR…

do I create the course and then build the audience second?’ 

The answer is: you need to be doing BOTH all at the same time, forever.

In this episode of The Course Creators Podcast, I am going to take you through 12 tips to help you stand out as an expert online.

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Transcript

Now, when you don’t have massive marketing budgets, when you don’t have big marketing teams, you have to find ways that have the biggest impact and reach possible. So what I did is I used a whole bunch of strategies, and I’m only going to share some of the online ones today. 

My word, my statement for when I’m trying to grow something is to be prolific and omnipresent. If people can’t see you, if they can’t hear you, you simply do not exist to them. You have to put yourself out there and it’s scary as doing it, but we have to. We have to make it really, really easy for people to find us and we have to put ourselves in front of them. Content marketing is one of the best ways that we can do this, especially without a budget. What I’m going to do now is go into 12 steps that I follow to make myself be as prolific and omnipresent as I possibly can online, so that I can share my expertise with the biggest market possible, and in a way that makes the system of doing that as easy for me as possible. 

Okay, I need to go out to the world. I need to create content, I need to put my thoughts and my ideas and my techniques and my strategies out to the world. 

1. Make a video

So I like to start this whole entire process with videos, because videos is the most highest converting type of content that you can do right now. It has the maximum reach when you go live. Facebook at the moment is trying to encourage live streaming and so it is giving lots of reach and exposure to those people who do it, rewards! Now, after you’ve done the live stream, you can download your live streams. Save it and you press upload to YouTube and your social media channels. Now straight away, that’s multiple pieces of content. 

2. Get the transcription

Step number two is to then get the video transcribed. There’s a number of different transcribing tools and pieces of software out there that you can use, and I use Rev.com. It also provides you with the subtitles that then go back onto your video. So now your video has subtitles, awesome! 

3. Blog post

I turn that transcription into a blog post, simple as that. So now from a simple video I did, I’ve got multiple videos everywhere. I now have subtitles on those videos and step number three, I’ve got the transcript and turn that transcript into a blog post. Now the second you press publish on a blog post, again, you now have something else that has search optimization. You have something that can be found in people’s Google search results. You have something else that can be shared. People consume content in different ways. Some people like to watch, some people like to listen.

4. Send the blog post to your email list

Step number four is I then take that blog post and I quite simply copy it, paste it, and share it to my email list. Those of you who don’t have an email list yet, by becoming prolific and omnipresent, sharing expertise and the education online, is exactly how we grow one. When you’ve got a list of people in your email list, that is who you sell to. That is the community of people who obviously like your stuff and are going to be more inclined to buy from you down the line. So it’s really important that you start today in growing your email list and the best way to do that is with content. 

Now, when they’re on that email list, don’t just sell to them. You need to be giving them educational, helpful, informative content, because that’s what maintains your status as an expert. That’s why we then share the content to the email list. 

5. Text social media posts

Tip number five is to then go through that blog post that you’ve created from the transcript of the video, and extract snippets of text to use a social media posts. Perhaps in that blog post, you’ve got some nice little one liners or a couple of sentences, or maybe even a little paragraph that’s really nice and consumable to use as a social media post. Now, again, people love to consume content in different ways. I might be looking at your social media channel and not open a link to a blog article. 

You can go straight into Facebook or you can schedule posts. I like to use a social media auto posting tool called Buffer. Buffer is a tool that allows you to load up, preload up a load of social media posts. So I will just do this in one big bulk load. I write the blog post, grab some snippets, copy and paste it into Buffer and boom, all that stuff goes in the queue. 

 6. Infographics and images

Tip number six, we then want to create infographics and images. Now remember, people learn in different ways. So the next one we want to tackle is that visual learner. Go back to some of the blog post, take some little tips, and create pretty little social media image cards that are then shared out on social media. 

I like to use a tool called Canva to do this. It’s really easy, there’s loads of social media templates that you can use in there to create these pretty little tip cards. Now, I want it to be a little bit more than just motivational, I really like my tip cards to literally be a tip. Mine say along the top ‘course creation tip’, and then there’s one sentence in the middle where it’s got the tip and then at the bottom, put your URL. Put your URL on that tip card, so that if people do share it, everyone knows who the original poster or creator of that was, and everyone knows who to go and look for if they want more expertise like that. 

 7. Use the audio

So again, we’re talking about different learning styles, different ways to get in front of people, different ways to be omnipresent. People like to listen! Basically all you do is you go to your original video that you created and you can use simple software to convert MP4 to MP3. MP4 is a video file, MP3 is an audio file. So just literally Google convert an MP4 to MP3, and these online platforms completely free of charge, will take your video and give you just the MP3 audio file. 

Now it is really simple to set up a podcast. I will leave that education to the podcast professionals, but you can use various tools like libsyn.com or podcast.co. On these platforms you can upload the MP3 file, create yourself a nice pretty podcast cover, press distribute, and it will send these podcasts out to Spotify, to iTunes, and so on. So it is a lot easier today than it used to be and it’s a lot easier than people think. 

 8. Publish a native article on LinkedIn

Tip number eight is to take that original blog post that you created from the transcript, from your video, and then go into LinkedIn and publish it as a native article inside LinkedIn. LinkedIn is also searchable, it has a massive ecosystem of its own, and it’s yet another way to be basically published and to be searchable inside a particular ecosystem. LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social media platforms at the moment. It has very big reach when you have native articles inside the system over sharing links. And that’s why it’s a really good idea to create them inside because then within LinkedIn, the article gets more views. 

 9. Borrow other people’s audiences

You might only have a really limited audience. Perhaps you’ve only got a small email list, perhaps you have no email list, perhaps you’ve only got a small social media following. One of the things we want to be doing to become prolific and become omnipresent, so that we can be seen as the expert in the field is to get in front of as many people as possible. What that can mean is simply borrowing other people’s audiences. 

We can contact other bloggers, who have already built huge audiences, who have a whole readership and following, who are our target audience and produce content for them. There are thousands and thousands of bloggers who accept guest posts. They will accept your blog article and they will post your blog article on their site and share it with their followers. And they will even put a link back to your website. Great for credibility and not to mention, you now are in a position to collect the leads and the followers from that person’s platform. 

I create this big Google Sheet, I collect all of the target magazines and blogs that accept guest articles. And so every time I do a video and I transcribe it and then I turn it into a blog post, I email it out to all of those people to see if I have the opportunity for it to be published on that site as well.  It’s a fantastic way for you to massively grow your following, grow your list and of course, again, continue to use it as an expert online. 

10. Become a published author

Okay, number 10 is now after a period of time, you will hopefully have published a number of videos. You should have been following the same process, and you will have lots of blog posts. From those lots of blog posts, all we’re going to do is copy and paste them all into one big document, give it an edit, give it a tidy up, save it as a PDF file. Go to amazonkdp.com, upload it, press publish, and you’re a published author. 

That sounds very simple, and of course there’s a slightly simplified version of the process of publishing. But I can assure you, it is nowhere near as hard as people think to publish a book and to get that published on Amazon. And the second you press publish on Amazon, boom, you’re a published author. Now there is nothing that quite says expert more than being a published author. 

11. Presentations and summits

Now, number 11 is to then do keynote presentations, and do these big live online summits that are happening right now. If you’ve got some content out there, people are going to see that you are serious about your topic. That you have a viewpoint, that you have strategies, that you have educational content to share. This is when people are going to start reaching out to you and saying “hey, I know that you’re an expert in this thing ’cause I keep seeing you everywhere. Will you come onto my show? Will you come to my conference and speak for us?” 

Hell yes you do, absolutely you do. But this stage only happens after you’ve created all of this other stuff, after you’ve been showing up. 

12. Go on other people’s podcasts

Now, step number 12 is, I’ve talked about this a number of times, but a step on its own right is to go onto people’s podcasts or create one of your own. Now, as I’ve mentioned, it’s really, really straightforward to create your own podcast. But if you’re not up for that, get on other people’s podcasts. There are millions of podcasts that are looking for people to interview every single day. Again, simply just go onto Google, type in ‘the top 100 podcasts’ in whatever your topic is, and reach out to the podcast host.

Make sure you give a title for the podcast, three things that you will share that will be highly educational and engaging for the audience and here’s how to contact me. You don’t ever, ever, ever sit back and wait to be interviewed on these things. If you want to be successful, you have to go out and get it yourself.