By {grow} Community Member Sarah Santacroce
When I speak to my clients about the benefits of blogging, I often get a pair of big, frightened eyes looking at me. ‘Sarah, I’m not an expert, who would care to read my stuff?’
According to Wikipedia an expert is “A person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.” OK, that’s pretty impressive. What probably scares my clients is the word “authoritative” which, means a) Able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable, clear, authoritative information’ and b)’Considered to be the best of its kind and unlikely to be improved upon.
Fair enough, that scares me too!
Reframing the discussion
What if we replaced the word “expert” with “specialist?”
My clients seem to prefer that! It’s not as exclusive, and if someone calls themselves a specialist, it tells me that they specialize in this topic, and has valuable knowledge and skills in this area. You don’t have to know absolutely everything, because of course there’s always room for improvement.
In fact, even pretending to be an expert can be a negative, right? Let’s face it, the person who pretends to know everything is just fooling themselves. I’ve always been more impressed by someone who admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, but promised to look them up, do her research, and then report back to me.
Let’s focus on your specialty
So how does that specialist title sound to you? Not that scary anymore, right?
You truly are a specialist at what you do, now you just need to let the world know about it. There’s no better marketing method than to position yourself as the expert/specialist and then writing about what you do.
Funny enough it’s often the same people who are scared of not being an expert, who are also not comfortable with selling their services. Well, that’s the nice thing about blogging — you don’t have to sell! You are just sharing your knowledge, educating your audience without bluntly selling your services.
Through your content people will get to see that you know your stuff and when they are ready to buy, they will contact you !
A few examples
Still not sure what you should write about? Let me give you a few examples:
- If you are a coach, write about your coaching approach, about the most frequently asked questions you get from potential clients, a series of coaching tips, a list of inspirational quotes.
- If you are a stylist, write about the different colors and which color fits which body type, about the latest winter fashion, about Coco Chanel or your favorite fashionista.
- If you are a nutritionist, write about the different food groups, about your best recipes, about the good fat in avocado, about the holiday over-eating.
Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s an endless list of topics for every specialty. What are you curious about? Write about it. You just need to get over that fear and start thinking “Yes, I’m a specialist at what I do and I’m going to tell the world about it!”
I call myself a specialist in Social Media, Online Presence & Internet Marketing, NOT an expert. Far from that in fact! I learn new things every day and there’s people out there who are way more experienced than I am. And yet you are reading my blog post 🙂
What do you think? How are you overcoming the fear factor in blogging?
Sarah Santacroce is a Social Media, Internet Marketing & Virtual Event specialist. She helps small business owners and individual entrepreneurs to find their place in today’s online world. Sarah is a Swiss national, but thinks with a global mind. Read Sarah’s latest blog posts.
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
