Being considered an expert in your field by your peers and other media sources can pay off in increased authority for your website and opportunities for your business. We’ve been collaborating with Sales Tax DataLINK to develop their CEO as a go-to source for information about sales tax and it’s working — he was recently quoted in an article in a major industry magazine. Not only did this article introduce the company to a new set of potential customers, it was a nice feather in Sales Tax DataLINK’s cap.
The process behind building authority is twofold:
- First, develop an idea.
- Second, share that idea.
Depending on how you share your idea, you can develop yourself into an expert for your industry, meaning that other people in your niche see you as a knowledgeable person, or you can become an industry expert who is looked to by outsiders to explain it. Our goal for Sales Tax DataLINK is to develop the CEO in both directions.
Content is always the cornerstone of this technique. We crafted a well-written blog post on a newsworthy issue related to the company’s topic: sales tax.
We shared these blog posts on LinkedIn through the CEO’s account in niche industry groups of which he is a member. Since LinkedIn is full of other industry experts in these types of groups, sharing our blog post with them helped to form other’s ideas and opinions. As this issue develops further, we’ll write more blog posts and share them in industry groups to develop the CEO as an expert in the industry on this specific issue. Since he’s the expert who originally started this strain of discussion, other industry experts will consider the CEO a thought leader. In the future when someone from these groups needs an expert, they’ll probably turn to Sales Tax DataLink’s CEO. For your own business, be sure to ask yourself where your industry hangs out to take advantage of this technique.
We could have taken a different approach, however, and written directly in LinkedIn about this issue instead of writing a blog post accessible to the public. By using a blog post, when a reporter looking for information about the issue researched it, our post turned up in Google because it was optimized. LinkedIn discussions in closed industry groups wouldn’t achieve that. When the reporter had questions about the issue, he knew that the company with the best article was the place to turn to— that’s how the CEO became the go-to resource for sales tax.
Of course to be an industry expert you need to know your industry intimately and that’s where collaboration works best. While our writers are great researchers, the CEO’s years of experience provided insight that can develop him into an industry expert.
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