Positioning yourself as an expert and a trusted advisor in your niche market is a worthwhile goal. I started doing this when I came online in 2006, and here are some ways you can do the same thing.

Sharing relevant and timely content with your community is an excellent way to begin. This way you have introduced yourself to them as a resource, rather than a vendor. This content can be free sites and materials that are readily available online, even though it may take some digging to find it. It can also be PLR (private label rights) content from sources that provide high quality on a consistent basis.

Once you begin positioning yourself as an expert, advisor, and counselor of your clients in your area of expertise, you will know the specific the outcome your products and services, as well as affiliate offers produce for their lives. Let people know who these products are for…and who they’re not for. Maintaining an authentic voice becomes a magnet in your market. You’ll attract the right customers and clients while repelling those who shouldn’t do business with you anyway.

In my online business I focus on new entrepreneurs who are serious about building a solid, long-term income online.  If someone comes to me who is only looking for a ‘get rich quick’ scheme they see very quickly that I am not the right fit for them. I prefer people who value the relationships we are building to grow our businesses surely and steadily.

The pieces of the puzzle are simple enough; choose a niche that makes sense for you, your background, your experiences, and your interests. Set up a site where you can let people know who you are, what you do, and how you can help them to achieve their goals. Offer them a report or audio recording to get to know you a little better. Stay connected and build the relationship with them through email messages, social media, and regular teleseminars and webinars.

You won’t earn any money until someone actually purchases something, so you also need to know how to find and tap into bulls-eye buyers.  Having a ton of freebie seekers on your list won’t do you any good.  Sure, maybe you get people to open your emails and click on your links, but if you’re not attracting buyers with money to spend to your list, then you’re out of luck.

How do you accomplish this?

What about staying on track and getting things done? As an entrepreneur working online today, it’s not a lack of opportunity that holds you back.  Instead, there are so many opportunities that you can’t figure out where to focus your attention because of all the available options. This causes BSO syndrome (Bright Shiny Object).  You bounce from idea to idea and traffic source to traffic source and product to product.

The solution is creating a clear entrepreneurial vision.

When you’re focused on where you’re going, it becomes much easier to just say NO to everything that takes you off that path.

Next month – April – I begin my fourth annual Productivity Challenge. I’m not going to link to previous ones here; instead I want you to think about what you would like to achieve during the next thirty days. Where will you be then? What will you have had to do in order to get there? What questions do you have about the upcoming Productivity Challenge? What could I do to make this the most transformational month you’ve ever had in your business?

Before I ever used PowerPoint for business, I taught it to fifth and sixth graders as a part of the curriculum while I was working as a classroom teacher. The kids discovered all kinds of things about it by experimenting, and then shared their findings with everyone else. Now PowerPoint is an integral part of my online business and adds to my income on a regular basis. You can do this as well.

So if you’ve created your first PowerPoint presentation – congratulations for taking the next step in marketing your business to your clients. You will find your options open up with multimedia presentations by showcasing your product or service. With PowerPoint you can add sound bites, videos, photographs, charts, graphs, and much more. It truly is a dynamic platform.

Why do you want to add these bells and whistles? First, using PowerPoint makes your presentation more interesting and more interactive with your audience. Whether you’re presenting to a room full of live people or presenting virtually in a webinar room, showing examples of your work, statistics, graphs, or simply sharing your desktop will keep your audience paying attention.

Second, there are many different ways of learning, including auditory and visual. By simply speaking you will capture the attention of those auditory learners but by adding the visual PowerPoint slides, you will also capture your visual learners.

Lastly, think about the topic of your presentation. If you are presenting a tutorial or how-to presentation, using slides to showcase the steps of how to do something is much more concise and helpful than verbally trying to describe each step.

Put yourself in the audience for just a moment. If you are teaching a course about how to install and use WordPress, for example, would you rather listen to the directions or see the steps? When it comes to computers and technology, adding PowerPoint slides to your presentation is highly recommended so your audience members can compare their own computer screens to what you’re showing on the slides.

The beauty of PowerPoint is that it’s dynamic but very user-friendly. All the icons are rather self-explanatory and if you do hit something by mistake, there’s an Undo arrow at the very top left corner of the window. Another tip is to save your work frequently. A good habit is to click the Save button after you finish each slide, which decreases your chances of losing the work if your computer crashes or hitting a wrong button and losing everything!

Don’t forget to have a strong ‘Call to Action’ at the end of your PowerPoint. Business can be enhanced when you let people know what you have to offer while they are actively engaged in learning from you.

The very best training on using PowerPoint for Business is available from Nicole Dean and Melissa Ingold as a part of their online training and tutorials.

Authority marketing, according to direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy, is the act of “deliberately, systematically, methodically establishing yourself as a celebrity rapidly and dramatically, at least to your clientele and target market. Without this you’re asleep at the wheel, ignoring what is fueling the entire economy around you, and neglecting development of a measurably valuable asset.”

When I wrote a column several months ago about becoming a local celebrity, this was the idea behind it.

In its purest form, authority marketing helps you as an entrepreneur or small business owner to leverage your knowledge to gain authority status in your industry. This authority status then allows you to dramatically amplify your message and also to convert this new audience into higher paying customers. In other words, it’s the process for positioning yourself as an authority, or even a celebrity, in your marketplace.

This can best be done by consistently providing useful information to your market. I refer to this as ‘being a resource before you’re a vendor’. The information you provide solves problems, offers solutions, and addresses urgent needs. Creating content in a variety of formats makes this a doable strategy for everyone wishing to grow a business, online or offline. You will have positioned yourself as an educator and an advocate for your niche market, instead of just another person selling widgets.

Strategies which are most effective at improving your expert positioning include highlighting your media appearances and your published books, and anything else which shows that you are uniquely more qualified and credible than your competitors. Increasing what is known as the ‘know, like, and trust’ factor is crucial to success. In your favor is the fact that most of your competitors have not been doing this, giving you the ultimate edge in the marketplace.

For instance, once you position yourself as an authority, you’ll no longer have to chase sales leads and prospects for your business. In fact, you’ll find that they will seek out your company and your offers. Once people find you they stop looking for anyone else. Traditional networking is no longer a necessity and doing business takes on a whole new meaning.

You will also increase your income with this strategy. Entrepreneurs and small business owners that are seen as authorities have a higher value position, and are therefore expected to charge higher rates. You will quickly find that people will happily pay more for services from someone who they perceive to be the top expert in a field.

Having clients that trust and respect you is yet another benefit of positioning yourself as an authority. Instead of questioning you every step of the way, they will be more likely to follow and take action on the advice you share with them. That’s an excellent feeling to experience.

Books, podcasts, radio appearances, local appearances, and blog posts become the best sources for information in your market, saving you countless dollars and endless hours for other types of marketing. I’ve written about all of these topics in recent issues of this publication. You will also gain influence in your marketplace and opportunities for speaking, joint venture partnerships with other authorities, and more will readily present themselves to you. These, in turn, increase authority further and open other doors.

Authority marketing is one of the most powerful strategies to differentiate yourself from all of your competitors. If you aren’t actively working on creating your business around becoming a local celebrity and being perceived as the ‘go-to’ authority in your field, you are missing a huge opportunity. What are your thoughts on this?

Are you familiar with the concept of learning modalities? These are the sensory channels or pathways through which individuals give, receive, and store information. Perception, memory, and sensation comprise the concept of modality. The modalities or senses include visual, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic, smell, and taste. There are three primary learning modalities, including visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic.

We will focus here on the auditory learning modality and how it relates to your online business. Did you know that a large portion of the population, at least thirty percent, retains information better when they hear it than when they read it? Auditory learners must hear what they are learning to really understand it.  They enjoy listening, but cannot wait to have a chance to talk themselves. These students respond well to lecture and discussion. If you are creating information products or writing books, these are the people who will want to have an audio or mp3 version of what you have created.

This is one of the many reasons that it pays to offer audio as an option for your site visitors.  Here are some additional ones:

• Audio can inject personality into your website in a way that text and graphics can’t.  There’s just something special and unique about hearing someone’s voice that makes site visitors feel welcome.
• Audio is convenient. Those who want or need to multitask can listen to audio while doing something else. They do not have to be right in front of the computer screen to use it.  You can also make audio available for download to an iPhone, iPod or MP3 player, so your visitors can take it with them wherever they go.
• Using audio will most definitely separate you from the competition.  Many sites and products do not utilize audio, and if yours does, those who enjoy it will be likely to come back to you instead of seeking out your competition.

Ways to Use Audio

There are plenty of different ways that you can incorporate audio into your online business.  Here are a few to consider:

• Record a podcast. This is similar to blogging, only it is done in audio form.  Users can subscribe to your podcast so that it is automatically downloaded to their feed readers or iPods.
• Host a streaming talk radio show. This is a great way to get targeted visitors to your website, and it allows you to interact with your audience by accepting calls or answering emails while you’re on the air.
• Offer recordings of online conferences or presentations for download. This gives visitors an incentive to come to your site as well, and it may entice them to participate in future conferences.
• Record a message for site visitors. Tell them a little about yourself, suggest areas of the site to visit first, or just welcome them. This adds a unique personal touch.

Making Audio Accessible

There are a number of file formats that you can use when saving audio, but it is important to use popular ones so that your users will be able to listen to them. The most popular format for most types of recorded audio is MP3. It offers great file compression while preserving the quality of the audio. Virtually every computer has an application that can play MP3 files. The Windows operating system comes with Windows Media Player, which will play these and several other types of audio files.

Another benefit of the MP3 is its versatility. It can be easily converted for burning on a CD with most CD burning programs. Users can also put them on their iPhones or just about any other type of portable music player.

Auditory Information Products

When you are creating your first, or next information product, be sure to include it as an auditory file, in addition to any written content or videos you may also be including.

Laurisa White Reyes is a children’s book author and editor-in-chief of Middle Shelf magazine. She is also a mother of five, ages six to twenty, and active in her community. We met when her teenaged son was looking for book donations for his Eagle Scout project, and we soon realized we had much in common around reading, writing, and publishing books. I asked her to be a guest on my podcast so that we could get to know her better and to learn more about writing and publishing fiction through traditional publishing houses.

She shared with me that she had wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember. Laurisa wrote a poem at age five that launched her as a writer, at least in the eyes of her family. After college, she spent thirteen years writing for various magazines and newspapers, working as a book editor, and teaching creative writing. But what Laurisa really wanted to do was write novels. So about six years ago she turned her attention to fiction. She reads to her five children at night before bed. One night her oldest son, the one who just became an Eagle Scout, asked her to make up a story instead. That story eventually became a fantasy entitled The Rock of Ivanore. She spent a year writing it, two years submitting it to publishers, and three years getting it from contract to publication. She says that it’s been a long process, but well worth the wait. Laurisa also has a second book out, The Last Enchanter, and both of these titles are a part of a series she calls The Celestine Chronicles.

We discussed the writing process, especially for those of us with busy schedules. Finding the time to write regularly is her biggest challenge right now. We also talked about the process of going through an agent and a traditional publisher. It’s a very different world from what entrepreneurs are able to do with self-publishing.

I know you will enjoy this interview with children’s book author Laurisa White Reyes. Her books are available on Amazon, if you have an interest in this fascinating genre.

Online Marketing Tips Podcast

Are you new to the world of being an online entrepreneur? Starting an Internet business is the way to time freedom and financial freedom and great success in your life, and you need help to get there quickly. That’s why I started this online marketing tips podcast for my community way back in 2012.

This podcast and these online marketing tips are intended to teach you how you can take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my very Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. Each session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come!

New Rules for Online Marketing

During this training I share my thoughts on what is working today on the Internet. We must constantly learn and stay abreast of the latest changes, and that is why I wanted to devote this training to what I refer to as the ‘New Rules for Online Marketing’. Whether you are brand new to this world of online entrepreneurship or have been working online for a period of time, you will benefit by listening to this call and taking some notes on what you can implement right away in your business.

Also, you can now pick up my popular training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been updated for 2014 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.

Enjoy this New Rules for Online Marketing training. Be sure to leave your comments below so that I may get to know you better and to serve you as you continue your journey as an online entrepreneur.

When I decided to come online in 2006 it was so that I could leave my job as a classroom teacher and real estate broker/appraiser and work exclusively from home. I had no clue what I could do to serve others and build a business around, but I was willing to work hard and learn as much as I possibly could. I did just that, and with some guidance from trusted mentors the rest is history.

Becoming an Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur

It wasn’t until I had been online for about a year that I began meeting people who had been successful in their previous lives and wanted to bring their ideas, knowledge, and expertise online to serve people around the world that would be interested in and resonate with what they had to offer. One of the first things I observed them doing was writing books on their topic. Many of them had already authored one or more books, so this was a natural progression.

This was a completely new way of thinking for me, and it wasn’t until 2010 that I wrote and published my first book. That book, Huge Profits with a Tiny List, changed my life in so many ways. I was now perceived as an authority and an expert in my niche, and my income skyrocketed as I was asked to speak at marketing and other events, was sought out to offer high level coaching programs, and was encouraged to create products and courses around the topics I had written about.

This was such a successful strategy that I began to write more books on more specific areas I was an expert in, such as article marketing, membership sites, and affiliate marketing. I am currently working on my tenth book, due out in just a couple of months. But here is where it gets really interesting.

If you are creating content on your topic with the goal of selling it as eBooks, books on Kindle, and paperbacks, consider publishing it yourself. I started my own small publishing company, Hunter’s Moon Publishing, to do this more easily, and you can then purchase a block of ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) so that each book or audio book is connected directly to you and your company. Making this leap from content creator to author and publisher gives you a unique perspective on your topic and brings thought leaders to your doorstep.

Within each of my books I begin to teach a course on my topic. You may have heard that you don’t make much money from simply writing books; it’s in teaching what you’ve written about that the true income potential is revealed. There is some truth to this, so I have always taught my books as a course that is turned into a product. This is the basis for my online entrepreneurship and you can easily adopt this strategy.

So now you see the connection and natural progress of going from author to publisher to entrepreneur. The final piece of this is creation information products that are directly related to your books. For example, my first book is based on the idea that you can still get to six figures and above long before your list grows to ten thousand names. Creating an information product on really simple list building strategies just makes sense. Are you following my thinking on this?

Take a look at what you’re currently doing online. Write and publish a book on it and then create a series of related info products. Oh, the places you’ll go with this online marketing strategy.

Getting started with a blog for your business is a worthwhile use of your time and effort. Choosing a blogging platform is the first step in getting started. I highly recommend that you go with a ‘hosted’ site, rather than one that is on a free platform. The one used by the majority of people working online is WordPress.org.

The hosted option eliminates the hassle of finding a host for your blog as the company takes care of that for you.  This option would cost you a monthly or annual fee.  I’ve used both Blue Host and Host Gator to host my WordPress sites, but have now switched over to Liquid Web for all of my blog hosting because of recent changes in service and performance with those larger companies.

What you want to completely avoid is a free blogging platform, such as WordPress.com, Tumblr.com, or Blogger.com. I compare this to setting up a lemonade stand on the corner as opposed to leasing a space in the mall. You’re setting up a blog for your business, not for a hobby that may go by the wayside in the future.

WordPress.org is the other blog platform you should know, which is a standalone option.  If you are already hosting some of your websites with a web host, WordPress.org is ideal for you.  Not only is WordPress.org free for unlimited use, but it is the best-supported blog platform there is.  For ultimate control of your blog, this is as good as it gets.  It is the blog platform of choice of today’s savviest bloggers.

Visit the sites I’ve mentioned above and if you’re going for the hosted option, simply sign-up for an account and you’ll be ready to start blogging immediately. It’s truly a simple process to set up WordPress through your hosting account, and they will be happy to help you to do it quickly and easily.

Choosing a Name for Your Blog

If you already own a website, you understand the significance of choosing a good domain name.  A good domain name not only enhances the branding of your business and makes it easy for your readers to share with others.

If your blog is going to play a significant role in your business, then spend some time choosing the right domain name for it.  People tend to remember memorable domain names that end with a dot com to spread it around easier. I recommend using GoDaddy as the registrar for all of your domains. I currently own almost six hundred domains and appreciate how they are handled through this company.

Choosing a Template / Theme for Your Blog

With the free platforms like Blogger.com and WordPress.com, the need to hire a Web designer is eliminated.  These options already have blog templates (often called “themes”) ready for use.  Just pick a design that works well with the theme of your business and get ready to start blogging. The downside to this is that there is only so much you can do to alter its look and feel.  What you see is what you get.

With WordPress.org however, you’re free to hire a Web Designer to design the style of your blog from the ground up.  There are no limitations to what you can do with your design.  There are WordPress.org templates that are also freely given away by the WordPress community with no strings attached.  You have full rights to grab any of these templates and alter them to suit the theme of your business blog.  If you need a recommendation for someone to help you set up a WordPress blog that’s exactly what you are thinking of, contact me and I’ll give you some names of the people that have helped me with my sites.

You can search on Google “Wordpress themes” and you’ll get a variety of sites to choose from.  One of the more popular ones is found at http://themes.wordpress.net.  

You may have seen the movie Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner builds a baseball field in the middle of the countryside and people come from far and near to visit. This concept of ‘if you build it they will come’ is a romantic one, but does not apply to your business. Probably the trickiest part for any online entrepreneur is getting targeted traffic to their sites.  This is more science than art and has spawned an industry all of its own.  Search engine optimization or SEO as it’s more affectionately referred to, is a major player in how you get targeted traffic to your sites or in this case, your blogs.

Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Blog

There are other promotional and marketing strategies that you can employ to get traffic, but it all starts with optimizing your blogs for SEO.  If you want your blog to be found, you have to optimize it for the search engines. Google and the other search engines will crawl you site to see what it’s about, and then send traffic (people) who are searching for those specific topics. It must be general enough to garner attention, yet specific enough to weed out those you are actually searching for very different information.

The level of optimization you can perform on your blog depends once again on whether you’re using a free platform or a hosted one.

A blogging platform like WordPress.org is the best way to go for SEO purposes.  There are no limits as to how you can customize your WordPress.org (hosted) blog.  But because most beginners tend to use the free blog platforms, we’ll explore SEO tactics that everyone can benefit from.

Split Your Blog’s Search Engine Optimization into Offsite And Onsite SEO

Offsite SEO can be summed up as just this – inbound links.  This means blogs other than your own, are linking to your blog and a wide variety of your content.  Inbound links are quite possibly the most important SEO tactic that could get your blogs highly ranked in the search engines.

So how do you get others to link to you?  Here are some ways to get you started:

Write Quality Content – Nothing gets you links faster than writing content that affects your readers.  If a little bit of controversy helps, throw that in.  As word gets around about your posts, bloggers will inevitably link to you.

Post Comments On Blogs You Read – Don’t hesitate to post worthwhile comments on other blogs, be it your competitors or not, but realize blog comments themselves don’t have impact on your SEO results. You may get a follow-up with a link pointing to your blog.  And if that happens to be from a competitor with a huge audience, you’ll be looking at some major traffic influx to your blog.

Submit Your Blog To Directories – You can submit your blogs to blog directories to generate more inbound links.  Apart from buying links, this is something many bloggers do to get more traffic.  Technorati.com and DayPop.com are amongst two of the more popular blog directories right now, but you can perform a Web search to find more.

Onsite SEO requires customization within your blog itself.  Here’s how to get started:

Optimize Your Content With Targeted Keywords  – This topic really requires intense study, as it is one of the more important subjects when discussing SEO.  But in a nutshell, your blog posts should contain the keywords or keyword phrases that your potential customers or readers would most likely type into the search engines to find what they are looking for.

This requires advanced research of keywords on your part so that you can place these targeted keywords within your blog content.  The result would be a highly optimized blog for the very information your potential customers are looking for.

Have each of your posts focused on one specific topic so that you can moderate the keywords going into your content.  Over-stuffing keywords can make for terrible reading which defeats the purpose of finding and keeping your customers.

Make your posts as original as possible and update your blog frequently, at least three times a week.

Place Your Keywords Here Too – Within the URL of the page, page and post titles, heading tags such as H1, image alt tags and meta tags.  Bold your keywords where you can too.

Create A Good Linking Structure Within Your Blog – Create links that link from a certain post in your blog to another relevant post which you had written previously.  This interlinking makes it very easy for search engines to re-index your blog, allowing for more of your pages to be indexed.  Categorize your information and place them on your blog’s sidebar.  Create a sitemap once your blog starts growing larger in size.

But one thing to remember is not to over-optimize your blog. Write naturally and don’t overdo it with keywords. Use descriptive wording and use synonyms rather than repeating the same keyword phrases over and over. Following these strategies will increase the amount of targeted traffic you receive to your blog, and will ultimately increase your bottom line as well.