Promote your expertise with these five tips

The new book “The Million-dollar Idea in Everyone–Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions” includes five of my tips on how experts can promote themselves. 

Author Michael Collins asked me to contribute some of my best ideas for the book, and of course I said yes. (By the way, accepting invitations like this one to be in an author’s book is a powerful publicity strategy.)  

Here are five ways to promote your expertise:

1. Use website statistics to track what keywords and phrases people are using to get to your site. Although I write predonimantly about free publicity, I about fell out of my chair when the statistics on my site showed that I get more hits for the phrase “how to write a bio” than any other publicity-related keyword. Use the statistics to create more products and services geared toward the things people are looking for.
2. Use Google Alerts to find out what is happening in your niche. Every night, I get an email listing of websites, blogs, news stories, etc., on “writing press releases,” because I have created a Google Alert for that  topic. Then I go through the list and look for publicity opportunities. I get very excited when I find a blogger writing about my area of expertise. This opens the door for me to go to the blog, read the comments, and post a few expert comments of my own. I recently posted a comment to a high-trafficked site. Not only did the blogger respond to my comments, but he invited me to be a guest blogger. (See “Let Bloggers Create Publicity for You.”)
3. Write and post articles that content-hungry online editors, publishers and bloggers can use for free. EzineArticles.com is the best free article directory around because it has a high page rank, will give you a byline for your article and will allow you to link back to your rown site. Post several articles here and I promise you” will be amazed at how often they appear elsewhere online. (See “How to Write How-to Articles.“) 
4. Speak at tradeshows, industry conferences, and other gatherings for free or for fee. I speak publicly all the time. But I always bring a door prize that I can raffle off while I’m there. Then I tell the people in the audience that I’ll send them my free newsletter, “The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week,” if they write “tips” on the back of their business card and drop it into the basket that I send around the room.  That way, I leave the speaking engagement with a fistful of new email addresses. I can market to them indefinitely until they tell me to stop.
5. Take small steps. There are so many ways to get free publicity that trying to do them all at once can be overwhelming. I tell my clients to pick three options. Do those. See how they work. Then pick three more.