Creating credibility

The more credibility you can prove you have, the easier it is to get accepted as an expert.  Can you get an honorary or volunteer role with your industry body to represent them in some way or include their logo on your website?  It’s why I became an ambassador for the royally Chartered Institute of Marketing.  If you are booking a speaker on marketing, you’d take the guy who was on The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s regional board, wouldn’t you?  And organisations know that this is how it works; the CIM were happy for me to take the extra authority that being associated with them brought in return for the work I put in promoting them and helping run their activities in a specific sector.  No money had to change hands.  If you need to build yourself as an expert in your industry, find the organisation that leads in your industry and see if you can get a role with them.

Writing a column or regularly having articles published is also a great way to build your authority.  Lisa writes the monthly business column for Vegan Food & Living Magazine. She has a lot of fun interviewing businesses for the column and the team at VFL are an amazing bunch of people.  It’s great for our credibility and in return the magazine has one less feature they have to write each month.  Lisa also has a number of articles published in various food industry magazines and being able to use clippings of these proves her credibility with our food-based customers.  You will have to prove your expertise with other activities first before you get into a national magazine, but all industries have trade publications that need good content, or you can find regional publications looking for experts first.  With most magazine content now also being published online, if you are contributing to the Bristol Post you will still be able to reach a national audience when they share your column on their social media or website.  Being on a judging panel, co-authoring a study, being a board member of a relevant charity, these are all shorthand that you are an expert in your field.

The real goal however is for someone else to introduce you to their audience as an expert.  This might be being invited to be a speaker at an event or being interviewed on someone’s podcast.  If you deliver a talk then people will assume that the reason you have been booked is because you are worth listening to.  You don’t have to start the session proving to the audience that you are an expert – the assumption is that you would not be standing up there if that wasn’t the case. And even if someone has never heard one of your talks, the fact that you give talks is obviously proof that you are an authority.  So, make sure you get lots of photos of your time standing up in front of others.  If there’s an official event photographer then charm them into taking a few extra shots of you and get their card so that you can get copies afterwards.  If it’s a Zoom interview then take some screenshots, or if you’re being interviewed on a podcast or your local radio station make sure to take selfies with the host in the studio.  And if you find yourself doing a TV interview, make that your entire Instagram story for the day!