This is a guest post by Stanley Lee.
Why do you want to market yourself as an expert?
What do you fear the most on your specialization journey?
If you want to earn more respect without getting severely penalized for expertise not working out, read on.
The End of Specialization
Malcolm Gladwell gets misquoted a lot. When he mentioned 10,000 hour rule, he was referring to the outliers. The phenoms, not experts.
While there are no shortcuts, you always have the option to follow a system that allows you to fail cheap.
I want to show you this process. Before then, I would like you to do something for me.
“It takes 10,000 hours worth of effort to become a phenom at a trade.” Tweet Now
The Anatomy of the Fail-Cheap System
Step 1: Gather Inventory of Your Expertise
You may gain some ideas from the following suggestions:
- What publications do you read regularly?
- What do you do on a Saturday morning?
- What do colleagues typically approach you for help with?
Feel free to add more rituals to your system of finding your expertise.
Step 2: Find Demographic Market
Brainstorm thoroughly on who you may benefit. Complaints in comments of existing blogs and conversation may give you some clues. If you’re really stuck, try asking other experts in the same field.
Pioneer and expert are two different types of professionals. If you’re not a pioneer in the subject, there are definitely other experts whom you can gather demographic information from.
Step 3: Verify Your Marketability
This is one of the steps where you have to hustle hard. Perfect timing to ask as many questions of your prospects as possible. The questions you ask will highly depend on the expertise you’re testing.
Their answers will verify whether you can offer benefits to them by leveraging your expertise. Make sure you test out one expertise offering at a time before you decide to move on to another.
If none of your existing expertise is of any use to the market, try some rapid skill acquisition in an underserved market.
Step 4: Compile Your Solutions Package
Once you hit the jackpot in terms of interest, compile the solutions addressing the relevant responses to your questions. Using the same responses from your prospects, you can then…
Step 5: Share Using Appropriate Channels
The most likely avenue would be low-hanging fruit type of publications that your prospects read. You won’t have to deal with the minutiae on the social media platforms, and evergreen benefits from publishing on the popular blogs will remain.
While you share your solutions, you may want to put together a decent landing page so that you can…
Step 6: Collect and Leverage Feedback
This is when you will be rewarded your hustle. If you have executed all the steps properly, you will have more feedback than you can possibly handle.
Since value is created by having the right expertise, connections, and timing altogether, you could be accumulating value creation ability each time you iterate this process.
Finally
If you followed these steps, going broke or wasting input on out-of-demand expertise should not be a possibility. Josh Kaufman, Dale Stephens and Scott Young are sound proofs of becoming experts at whatever they are learning in a short amount of time.
The time to leverage the expert economy is now.
I want to hear from you on how this strategy is working out.
|
Share this post
|
Get free email updates
|
Great post! Stanley. The style of your post makes me want to read it. I almost never read an entire post but I did read this one. Thanks again for keeping it simple & providing value.
Thanks Patrick. My next guest post will be more specific though.
Stanley, I really like how you mentioned in step 2 – Find Demographic Market. When we try to market to everyone instead of a specific demographic we risk hurting our growth.
Thanks Wendy. Marketing to everyone makes the selling and promoting more expensive, hence it’s actually more prohibitive.
Wow, great post, Stanley!
Very thorough and well-researched! Hope you’ll stop by my site and submit a post soon…
Take care!
Nick
Nick: Thanks. Check your email.
Thanks for reminding to keep my focus on my target market.
What my expertise is in can be applied in so many places and it is tempting to spread myself out. But I know this doesn’t work. It dilutes my energy too much.
Thanks,
Jacque
http://www.yourdivinedivorce.com
Hey Jacque,
Sorry for the late response. Thanks for the comment. How can I help you?
Stanley
Great post Stanley!
The concept of “perceived expertise” is paramount here…it’s so liberating to realize that you don’t have to be an absolute expert on a particular topic to be of help to many others (and consequently, create your own brand and thrive on it).
Elitism is for proud and insecure people that have become totally identified as the “know-it-all” guy in their field, and this can become a curse if you take yourself too seriously.
The bottom line is: if you’re being of service, you must be on the right track!
Francesco
Hey Francesco,
Thanks for the comment. Your comment is right on.
Stanley