How to Enter a Niche as an Expert

If you are going to become famous online, you will have to enter the online community that is associated with whatever niche you want to become well known in.  Instead of just blundering in and either upsetting the very people you ultimately want to be your JV partners or customers, or worse still, passing by completely unnoticed, I have written about the steps you should take to successfully muscle in on even an overcrowded niche.

Listen Before You Speak

The mistake a lot of people make is by trying out endless marketing tactics on their audience without attempting to get inside their heads and understanding them.

The way you get inside the heads of people in your marketplace is by listening and here are four reasons why you must listen:

• It will help you develop inside knowledge of your marketplace and enable you to create the helpful content they need and products they will fall overthemselves to buy.
• You can identify their problems. It is easier to make a sale if you can help somebody overcome a negative aspect in their life or remove problems and frustrations. Approaching from this angle is better than trying to sell somebody a benefit.
• If you know your market well you can differentiate yourself from your competitors.
• Real marketing should not be viewed as a campaign beginning at A and ending at B. It should be viewed as a long term commitment to helping your marketplace to become more successful and have their best interests at heart.

There are lots of places online you should be listening for your prospects beliefs about products already available on the market, their feelings about the major issues in their business and their desires on what they want to change in their lives that your product can help them achieve:

• Other “experts” blogs in your marketplace are useful not only to hear their point of view but also to see what topics are resonating the most among their readers. One way to determine this is to see which posts receive the most comments. My own experience with this is evident in my post about annoying people on Twitter by tweeting affiliate links too frequently. It wasn’t the subject of “Twitter” that got under the skin of my readers, but how to go about marketing there the right way.
• To hear more opinions from bloggers you may not be aware of, you can sign up for feeds and alerts from the likes of Google Blogsearch and Technorati.
• Try to reverse engineer successful sales letters of products in your niche. Go through each paragraph and uncover the emotional messages invented by the copywriter. If the sales pitch is good, the copywriter will have researched the market and uncovered both the benefits and pain removers of the product they are writing sales copy about.
• Forums are always useful for discussions on numerous topics in your niche. Every niche will have at least one very busy forum. Just type “keyword forum” into Google to find them.
• I discussed Amazon Research in a previous post about using the user comments and critiques to find out what books in your niche are useful and what still leave questions unanswered.
• Social bookmarking websites such as Delicious. Type in a keyword and see what items have the most bookmarks. These are the topics which are resonating most in your marketplace.

Joining the Community

Once you have pinpointed your target audience and the desires you will tap into, it is time to join the community and make yourself known.

However, it is vital you understand the subtle differences between the community and the marketplace.

For example, there will be people who enter the marketplace with products who have no interest in the community at large and there will be people who are passionate about the community they participate in who never buy any products associated with their particular niche.

The community has a major influence on how you will perform in the marketplace in terms of how it sees you as an expert. Products will make you an expert in the marketplace while contribution and content will make you an expert in the community.

Ideally, you want to become an expert in both.

First of all, you join the overall community. You write about other experts in your community on your own blog, much like I have done on DavidWalker.tv, mentioning and linking out to the likes of Rich Schefren and Alex Jeffreys. Whenever an expert mentions you, then make sure you promote it by whatever means necessary, such as linking to it on your blog and social bookmarking.

Over time, you will be able to build your own community and I am in the very early stages of that myself. It is important to try and engage your community as much as possible and one way to do this is to ask questions at the end of your own blog posts. Don’t ask whether you are right or wrong, but what has worked for your readers etc.

(Photograph attributed to kimberleyfaye)

Butting Into the Conversation

Large scale awareness of your existence does not happen overnight but there are plenty of ways you can muscle your way in to the conversation and be hailed an expert in your niche. Start off by doing the following:

• Leave quality comments on other people’s blogs. Don’t just write “great post” or “I agree” because that is just going to annoy people. Add to the content by raising further points for discussion or approach what was written from another angle. High calibre comments will build awareness fast and people will visit your blog from your comment link to find out more about you.
• Stimulate conversation on your own blog by asking questions and points of view at the end of your posts.
• Be confident in your own ability. You want to be seen as an expert in your niche so do not ask for external validation or specific answers to questions. I wrote in a previous post about being resourceful vs searching for resources.
• Intelligent conversations can be spread across numerous blogs. By keeping  abreast of current discussions through feeds and alerts you can contribute your own opinion in a blog post of your own and link out to other posts on the same subject matter. This may in turn stimulate links back to your own blog as other people get in on the discussion.
• If somebody criticizes you, don’t be too defensive because that can be seen as a sign of weakness. Similarly, do not delete critical blog comments because that stimulates conversation and other people may comment to defend you.

(adapted from a photograph by strollerdos)

Provide Value and Treat Your Community Like Gold

When you immerse yourself in the community then your personal brand begins to shine through. You do not need me to tell you your personal brand should be focused on providing expertise, value and quality for your community.

The importance of being passionate about what you are doing becomes apparent here. When you share your ideas, write from the heart and show people what you are passionate about.

Share important information with your community and don’t be the sort of person who tries to hide “valuable” information unless people pay for it. While it is important not to reveal everything for free because otherwise you would go bankrupt, you want to give as much value as possible.

If you don’t share killer information with your community, the chances are someone else will and you don’t want somebody else stealing your thunder.

Remember to thank people often for their time and attention, such as following up to comments people leave on your blog. I try to do this as much as possible and it should encourage people to return time and time again if they can see you appreciate their contribution.

In short, just be yourself and embrace the community you are entering.

If you treat your community like gold then you will in turn be rewarded as such.