The 7 Real Reasons You Need to Be an Expert at Something

Employing authority marketing as a strategy to grow your brand and increase your reach as a business has many benefits.



Authority marketing, which could also be referred to as expert marketing, simply means that you become known as an expert within your field. Most of the time, the process involves you helping customers overcome a problem, writing a book or articles, or it could even include an appearance on podcast broadcasts.

Eventually, when you are seen as an expert, or authority, in your field, your brand will become well known and profitable. In addition to those attributes, there are seven other real reasons you need to be an expert at something, and they are listed below:

1. You Don’t Have to Chase Clients, They Will Come to You

Your customers will come to you when you become an expert in your field. Consider Dave Ramsey as an example.

He is thought of as an expert in the field of finances, yet, he doesn’t ever lobby for work and doesn’t seem to compete with anyone. He simply offers his advice and is seen as an authority; therefore, customers come to him.

They buy his books, they attend his seminars they read his website, all due to the fact that he is now considered an expert in his field.

2. Your Advice is no Longer Called Into Question by Your Customers

In general, when you know someone knows what they are talking about, you probably won’t argue with them. 

A surgeon for example know lots more than we do about the inner workings of the human body.

If they say a person needs a certain operation, within their field of expertise, most people will not argue the point with them. 

In the same way, once you are considered an expert in your field, your customers will stop questioning your judgment and advice.

3. You Gain Influence Within Your Marketplace

If you are considered an expert within your field, or marketplace, you will be able to influence others within that realm.

For example, if you own a home remodeling company and have worked your way up to being considered an expert in the field, other home remodeling professionals will likely copy, or at least admire, what you do.

This will give you influence within your marketplace and enable you to make changes and voice concerns within your industry.

4. You Can Raise Your Rates For Services Rendered

When a customer hires someone to do a service or to provide a product, they will pay more for it if that person is considered an expert in their field. Using the aforementioned point about Dave Ramsey as an example, this is easily explained.

Would you pay more for a financial book written by a known financial expert like Dave Ramsey than you would a book written by some unknown accountant? Of course you would.

In the same way, your customers will be willing to pay more for your services when they see you as an expert.

5. You Will Attract Attention Due to Your Role As Authority

Once you are considered an expert in your field, you will get the attention you deserve.

This could include invites to be on television or radio or could involve publishers asking for you to share your insights in a book.

Regardless of how it takes shape, being considered an “expert” will give you the attention and respect you deserve.

6. You Have a Clear Understanding of Your Marketing Message

Becoming good at utilizing authority marketing and becoming an expert in your field means you have a clearer understanding of your overall marketing message.

In other words, you have successfully micro specialized within your field to understand where your strengths lie, and therefore understand what your marketing message should be.

As a way to illustrate the point, consider you are an architect by trade. You have taken jobs within a wide range of fields in the past, including everything from drawing home plans to creating the blueprints for major commercial projects.

 Consequently, you have a wide range of customers to gear your marketing towards, making it a difficult task. However, if you determine to figure out where your strength as an architect lies, you can then gear your marketing strategy straight to those customers who fit that more narrow category.

For example, perhaps, you determined that commercial jobs are a better fit for you.

If that’s the case, you stop marketing to home builders and instead concentrate all your marketing efforts on government municipalities and other business owners who could use your services as a “commercial” architect. As a result, you have focused your marketing strategy and streamlined the process of acquiring clients.

 7. Other Authorities and Experts Seek You

You know you are truly an expert when other experts began seeking you out. After all, another expert should be able to recognize the value of what you know.

A good example of this process could include a fitness expert who seeks out another fitness expert to make an awesome workout series that involves both expert’s styles of exercise. Another possibility is a syndicated talk show host, who is considered an expert in their field, seeking out an expert within the same field to appear on their show.

Being generally knowledgeable about many things is fine, but you probably won’t be considered an expert in anything if you have too broad a reach.

Since the benefits of being an expert in something are so vast, it makes sense to focus on what you are good at and take the steps necessary to become an “expert” in your field.

When you do, the seven benefits listed above will all come to fruition.

The Eight Habits Of Extremely Successful Entrepreneurs

Great entrepreneurs don’t write great books. In fact, they don’t write many books at all.
Neither fact is surprising. Successful entrepreneurs are typically too busy innovating to write down much of anything. And on those rare occasions when they attempt to create a book, it’s filled with what they did, and not what led to their idea in the first place. As a rule, they are not particularly introspective.

So if we want to know what makes them successful—in order to improve our own companies whether we work for a huge one or our own start up—we need to study them.  And that is exactly what I have been doing professionally for the last 30 years.

Here’s what I have found.

1. Look at How They Think, Not at What They Do. If you just observed the actions entrepreneurs take, you would conclude there isn’t that much to be gained from studying them. Each entrepreneur’s behavior is as idiosyncratic as they are. You would have to be Larry Page and Sergey Brin to start Google; Oprah Winfrey to found Harpo Productions.

But—and it is a huge but—if you look at how they reason, you see remarkable similarities.  The process just about all of them follows in creating their companies looks like this.

They:
A. Figure out what they really want to do.
B. Take a small step toward that goal.
C. Pause after taking that small step to see what they have learned.
D. Build off that learning and take another small step.
E. Pause after taking that step.
F. Build off what they learned in step two. And then take another small step…

If we were to reduce it to a formula, it would be Act. Learn. Build Repeat.

Put simply, in the face of an unknown future, entrepreneurs act. They deal with uncertainty not by trying to analyze it, or planning for every contingency, or predicting what the outcomes will be. Instead, they act, learn from what they find, and act again.

2. They Start with a Market Need.   Ideas are easy—I bet you can come up with 10 new product or service ideas within five minutes right now, if you had to. And because new ideas are plentiful, they are not worth very much. As with anything else, if there is a glut—of ideas, in this case—the value goes down.
Besides, there is no guarantee anyone will buy the great idea you have come up with.  If you start with the idea, you need to go in search of customers. If you begin with the need, you already have a market—the people who need what you have.
If you can discover a market need you can make a fortune. But intriguingly, that is not the primary motivation of the most successful entrepreneurs, and that brings us to the next point.

3. Don’t Set Out to Be Rich. The best entrepreneurs don’t have making a fortune as their goal, as they start off. Wealth is just (an extremely pleasant) byproduct.
Why not focus on gaining wealth? Well, if your primary objective is to get rich quick, you are bound to cut corners, short-change your customers, and fail to take the time to truly understand what the market needs. And that is true whether you are trying to get your company off the ground, or are introducing a new product or service in order to make this quarter’s numbers.
Instead, they identify the market need we talked about in point 2, and get to work.

4. Marketing. (Psst. Compete Differently) The conventional wisdom—find a niche; zig when others zag—is right, but not particularly helpful. It lacks, to be kind, specificity. Far better is to describe what the best entrepreneurs do and that is “compete differently.”
How do they do it?

Here are some examples:

–Make small bets. Your resources are limited and starting anything new is risky. You don’t want to compound those risks by betting everything on one role of the dice.

–Make those small bets quickly. No, you don’t want to lose money.  But, since you are not risking much, you can afford to fail.  Get out in the marketplace fast and let potential customers tell you if you are onto something. Action trumps everything—especially planning.

–Where do you place those small bets? (I) Obviously, in areas where competitors don’t exist, or are weak. Not so obviously, in places where you feel strong. That confidence will help you overcome the inevitable hurdles you will face.

–Where do you place those small bets? (II)  No customer wants to be entirely dependent on just one supplier, no matter who it is. Ask yourself, what your competitor’s customers want. Better yet, ask those customers yourself.

–Let the market define you. People will tell you what they like, and what they don’t, about your product.  Incorporate their ideas with yours.  Making the world’s best videocassette recorder does you no good, if what people really want are DVRs.

–One step at a time. Be satisfied with making one significant improvement in a product or service. You’re bound to make mistakes just attempting one thing—many more if you try to do too much.

–Keep looking for places…where you have a genuine competitive edge. That’s where profitability and security lie. Tempting as it may be, don’t try to buy your way into markets where you offer the same product at a lower price. That’s where you’ll be vulnerable.

5. Financing. This is perhaps the biggest area people fail to understand. With all the attention paid to venture capitalists, there is a mistaken impression that the best entrepreneurs begin their companies with millions of dollars in start up financing. That simply isn’t true.

The actual number is $109,416, according to the Kauffman Foundation, and that figure includes the (relatively few) companies, such as biotech firms, that needs millions to begin.
Sure, $109,416 isn’t chicken feed, but the figure is not particularly daunting.
Why is it so relatively low? It relates back to the ways that the best entrepreneurs think about starting their companies.  Since they are taking small steps, they only need sufficient financing to accomplish the next one.

6.  Team Building. Yes, of course, the company founder needs to delegate early. You can try to micromanage but there are four large obstacles if you do:

--The business will never grow bigger than one person (you, the CEO) can handle effectively;
--Your company won’t be able to move very quickly. Since everything will have to flow through you, you will create a bottleneck;
--You won’t get the best ideas out of your people. Once they understand the company is set up so everything revolves around you, your employees are not going to take the time to develop their best ideas. “Why should I,” they’ll ask. “He is just going to do what he wants anyway.” And
--It’s exhausting.

7. They play to their strengths.  The biggest surprise, when it comes to people, is that the best entrepreneurs find a Yin to their Yang, someone who offsets their weakness and compliments their strengths. This allows them to concentrate on what they do best, leaving the things they are not good at to someone else.
Walt Disney had Roy Disney. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Orville Wright had Wilbur Wright. Wherever there is great innovation, there is a dreamer and an operator; an “idea man” and someone who turns those ideas into reality.     

8. Turning Obstacles Into Assets. I am not big on clichés like “every time God closes a door he opens a window,” or “there are no problems, only opportunities.”
But the best entrepreneurs believe and act as if everything is a gift. Well, maybe not every single thing imaginable. But assuming that everything is a gift is a good way of looking at the problems and surprises you’ll encounter in any endeavor, such as getting a new venture off the ground, obtaining buy-in from your boss, or launching a new product line in an ultra-competitive market.
Why take this seemingly Pollyannaish approach?

There are three key reasons.

First, you were going to find out eventually what people did and did not like about your idea. Better to learn it as soon as possible, before you sink more resources into the concept, venture, or product line. You always want to keep potential loses to a minimum.

Second, the feedback could take you in another direction, or serve as a barrier to your competitors. You thought you wanted to start a public relations firm but a quick survey told you potential customers thought the field was saturated. But more than a few of them said they would love someone who could help with their internal communications.

Third, you got evidence. True, it was not what you were expecting or even wanted, but that still puts you ahead of the person who is just thinking about doing something (like opening another p.r. firm.) You know something they don’t, and that is an asset. You are ahead of the game.

But what if it’s really bad news? It’s a disappointment. You were absolutely certain that your boss would approve your idea for a new software program, and she said no in a way that is still echoing down the corridor. No reasonable person can define what you’ve encountered as anything but a problem, and most people will try to solve the problem. (“Maybe she will like the idea if I go at it this way instead.”) That’s fine if you can. The problem has gone away and, again, you’ve learned something that others might not know. (The boss hates Y, but she loves Z.)

But what if you can’t solve it? (She hated “Z,” too.) Accept the situation to the point of embracing it. Take as a given that it won’t ever change, and turn it into an asset. What can you do with the fact that it won’t ever change? Maybe it presents a heretofore unseen opportunity. Maybe you build it into your product or service in a way that no competitor (having not acted) could imagine. Could you do it on your own? Could you take the idea to a competitor and use it as your calling card to look for the next job?

The thing to remember is this: Successful people work with what they have at hand—whatever comes along—and try to use everything at their disposal in achieving their goals. And that is why they are grateful for surprises, obstacles, and even disappointments.

It gives them more information and resources to draw upon.

SOURCE

There are just 34 Lions left in Nigeria.

30 years ago, there were 200,000 lions roaming wild across the African continent but now there are only between 15,000 and 32,000 left. Of the lions left, it is a estimated that there are just 645 genetically distinct wild lions left in western and central Africa with “only 34 left in Nigeria“.

That is most recent report from leading charity to protect and conserve endangered lions worldwide, lion aid as reported in the UK Daily Mail. Dr Pieter Kat, trustee of LionAid told the UK Guardian, “There has been a catastrophic decline in the populations of lions in Africa, and particularly west Africa.

These lions have been neglected for a very long time and do not have adequate protection programs. Even though the national parks in west Africa contain very distinct and very important fauna compared to eastern Africa, people tend to ignore that west Africa is a very special place. As a result, the populations in west Africa are declining so quickly.

Yohanna Saidu, a research officer at Nigeria’s interior ministry confirmed that thenumber of lions in Nigeria is declining fast! Nigeria officially had 44 lions in 2009 and now 34 lions remain.

“We are doing our best to protect our lions but we are very concerned about them” he said. Dr Pieter Kat confirmed the dire situation – “As a biologist I would say that in a country like Nigeria, which has only 34 lions left, they are already extinct.

It’s almost impossible to build up a population from such a small number.“ This is so sad. Nigerians travel to South Africa and Kenya on Safari. That’s great but our wildlife is going extinct and little is being done to reserve this trend.

SOURCE