I think people get this from their years in the workforce. When you got a performance review, your boss would usually talk about ways to improve performance, and a lot of times it involved getting a certification, learning a new skill or software, cross-training in another department, etc.

You know what though? If you are a business professional and have some level of expertise, you know more than a lot of people out there! There is someone who would love to know what you know, and in that way, you offer value to them.

Now, I’m not saying that additional training is important. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs use the excuse of wanting to get more training/skill/knowledge/another certification as a way to avoid taking that next big step, stepping up, and really marketing their business and seeing the success they deserve.

“Marketing is more important than mastery”.
-Ali Brown

Marketing is THAT important. And if you’ve been holding back until you get that next level of education, I challenge you to STOP! It might take a major shift in the way you’re currently thinking about your business, but think about it this way: it doesn’t matter how much you know, if nobody knows about you, you’ll be out of business before you know it.

How can you best showcase the expertise you already have?

A quick, easy and low-cost way to get started showcasing that expertise is online marketing. You could write a series of articles on a topic that a lot of people have questions on, or a How-To series. Share little mini-tips regularly on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Use some of this content, and create short videos that you put on YouTube. Fill your blog with all of these different pieces, and you might just be amazed at your own expertise!

Not only does this increase your visibility and get you out of your own head, it helps you get more clients through the Know Like and Trust factor. People will see your expertise, they’ll get to know you, and they begin to trust you. And that is an awesome way to start a new client relationship.

If you’re ready to embrace your current expertise and start marketing yourself online, there are lots of articles here on my blog, and online, to get you started. But if you’d rather have a system to work from to help you generate expert content and increase your visibility, take a look at my Social Media Content Creation Kit. It’s a step-by-step system for quickly creating lots of content for your blog and social media. It lays out a simple strategy for creating a content calendar, generating original ideas for your own content, and quickly distributing it across the web, so you build up the expert presence online that you deserve!

Register Your FREE Seat on this Teleseminar NOW!
Tuesday, August 10th at 3pm EST

Can’t make the call live? No worries! Be sure to register, and we’ll send you a copy of the recording.

Web Search Strategies in Plain English

RSS In Plain English

What is a Browser?

To get started setting up a new Twitter list for yourself, watch the following video to learn some of the in’s and out’s of using Twitter lists. And don’t forget, these are the kinds of social media tasks that can easily be outsourced to a VA, once you give them a good sense of your strategy for your social media marketing, and the types of content you want to be sharing with your followers. Your VA can do a quick check-in daily and preschedule content to keep your Twitter stream full.

Want to take advantage of the power of article marketing, but aren’t sure how to write web-friendly articles? Here are some great resources on how to write good articles that can be used in your newsletter, on your blog and can be submitted to article directories:

5 Basics to Article Writing

Writing Persuasive Articles

Feature Article Writing – Uncover 4 Incredible Feature Article Writing Tips

Article Writing Solutions – Discover 4 Effective Secrets to Multiply the Number of Your Articles

The truth is that there are many tasks you’ll come across in your web-based business that do not fall within your area of expertise. The right virtual assistant will get you set up, going and be on to the next task in the time it will take you to read the FAQ’s! Think of them as your virtual help-desk for developing, implementing and marketing your internet presence

1. Take a look at your current time spent on certain social media marketing related tasks? Do you find yourself losing hours on Facebook a day? While you may enjoy it, this could be a great first step to outsourcing, as you’ll immediately be more productive.

2. What parts of your online marketing strategy do you dislike? If there are things you know you should be doing, like looking at your analytics, but find you’re always putting them off, outsource them. You’re feeling guilt over a task you don’t like, instead of feeling positive about all the tasks in your business you do enjoy. This can immediately affect your perceived happiness/stress levels.

3. Or, if you find that you really enjoy social marketing, and aren’t getting your business must-do’s done (like bookkeeping, billing, scheduling, etc.) find a VA that can assist with those annoying tasks so you’re free to do the tasks you enjoy.

4. Find a VA by referral – the beauty of social networking is that it allows you easy access to all sorts of people that may be using similar tools as you. You can go to them for recommendations on programs, services and people. And this gives you more peace of mind as you start outsourcing projects.

5. If you’re so overwhelmed that you don’t even know where to start with outsourcing, find one tasks that stands alone (something like getting out your newsletter). You can send over your template, article, and site logins and know the task will get finished. That alone can help you see the forest for the trees and start to delegate more.

6. Know that sometimes you just have to stop and take the time to delegate, even if you feel too busy. It’s better for your peace of mind now, and you’ll never get to it later. So just do it!

7. Finally, remember that having a more objective perspective on your business can do wonders as well. A VA with good business sense can help streamline systems, suggest areas for improvement, strategize your marketing and generally provide you balance when things get crazy.

The best way to approach this is as an opportunity for you to learn more about your customers and for them to learn more about you and your brand.

Here are several great tips for doing so, from Jason Baer, at Connect and Convert:

1. Collect Profile Data in Subscription Forms

Offer your email subscribers the option of including their Twitter name on your subscription form. Something like:

“We care about our customers. Can we follow you on Twitter?” Please provide your Twitter name, and we’ll follow you ASAP. (We’re at @companyname, by the way)

2. Promote Social Media Outposts in Welcome Messages

When you send your welcome message after initial subscription (you ARE sending welcome messages, aren’t you?), include links to your various social media outposts. Carefully track which links get clicked, as it will give you an indication of which are most popular among your customers.

3. Social Media-Only Offers

If you really want to get a handle on which social media venues your customers prefer, and in what intensity, create an email that includes links to special offers or promotion codes that are shown only on your social media profile pages. Something like: “We’ve got incredible offers available on items we think you’d love. For details and promotion codes, visit us online on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter”

1. Twitter is one of the most active social media sites, and it can be easy to spend lots of time there during the day. But if you run one of the many (great!) Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Twhirl, you might notice that it’s distracting, as well as possibly slowing down your computer a bit. For quick updates, try installing the Twitter Gadget for Gmail. While it may not have all the functionality of other Twitter clients, it lets you reply, retweet, or post an update quickly, and get back to business, all without leaving your email inbox.

2. Sharing Content – Looking for some content to share quickly through your Twitter Gadget? Try installing the Delicious Gadget. Essentially, you see a list of current links you’ve bookmarked, which make for easy reference for your social media efforts or to send via email.  Or, for Firefox users, you can install Google Reader as a sidebar in your Firefox window. Then, you can quickly grab a link to an article to share on Twitter, or you can share through Google, and again spread valuable content quickly without getting distracted by a new window.

3. Facebook is the definitely one of the most popular social networking sites, and I imagine many Gmail users have a account in Facebook. The Facebook Gadget for Gmail will allow you to see your friend requests, friend updates, photo updates and more within the comfort of your Gmail inbox

4. FriendFeed is a social networking aggregator that combines data from various social networking sites into a single place, allowing you to keep an eye on everyone you follow without having to visit individual sites. If you are a Friendfeed user, you can easily view your update streams in the Gmail sidebar with the Friendfeed Gadget.

4. Want more? – There are even gadgets for Digg and Flickr.

These widgets and gadgets are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to increasing your productivity within Gmail. If you’re looking for more, beyond just social networking and social media, check out these great resources:

14 Add-On’s that make Gmail more awesomely productive

How to make Gmail your ultimate productivity center

Don’t have the time or know-how to get these set up on your Gmail account? This is a great task for a social media virtual assistant to work on for you!

Online, you can take a single article, and break it into several blog posts. You can then break these posts into several tips to tweet out or share on Facebook. Why not record a video or podcast of the same information, and upload to YouTube and iTunes?

Another great ideas for repurposing – take online content and share it offline, or vice versa. If you’re doing a printed newsletter, that’s a great source of material for your blog. If it’s your content, never feel like it cannot go both ways. It might need a bit of tweaking, but good, helpful content is good, helpful content.

Finally, think about ways that this content can be used for other purposes. A great example of this comes from a post from Rich Rogala, a real estate marketing coach, entitled Any Holiday Happenings in your area? He share a good system that any business owner with a local audience could use.

In it, he recommends that real estate agents create a calendar of local holiday events, which they can email, mail and add to their website. This generates a month-long series of blog post ideas, as they can write posts with details on particular events (great search engine material). Finally, on the calendar, he lets offline readers know that they can find this detailed information on his blog (generates new readers and more eyes on your website).

There are so many different ways you can reuse your content, sometimes it just takes thinking about it differently. Every time you create content of any sort (written, audio or video), think about other ways you might be able to use it. Make it a contest! I’m sure no matter how many ways you think of, you’ll always be the winner!

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Need support with your blog, social media or more ideas like this for your business? Marketing Geeks Inc. is a full-service online marketing support company, providing you with web-savvy coaching to build your business, and web-savvy implementation support by our multi-VA team.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the way it works. Weight loss comes from a consistent calorie deficit. If I try to lose weight by working out for 2 hours once a week, my results will never be as good as they could be if I worked out even just 20 minutes a day 5 times a week. That consistency sets up a system in my body to burn more calories all the time.

The same thing goes for online marketing. Posting a couple posts on your blog one day while you’re thinking about it,  or tweeting a bunch one morning and then disappearing for a week will not get you regular traffic to your site. Nor will it help you make connections with other bloggers, possible JVs, or potential clients.

Online marketing, done regularly, can do wonders for your web traffic and filling your client funnel. And it doesn’t have to be hugely time consuming.  Here are a few ways you can fit it into your schedule

• Take one day per month to write several longer articles (think: 500-700 words). If you’re keeping a list of ideas, this probably won’t take you much more than an hour or two. But don’t do anything with them just yet.
• Once a week, take one of those articles, and break it into 2 or 3 blog posts. Preschedule these into your blog. Should only take about 15 minutes.
• Once every week or two, take the previous week’s article, and post it to 2 or 3 articles sites. Should only take about 20-30 minutes.
• Set up an RSS reader with the blog feeds from industry leaders, people you’d like to partner with in the future, or blogs that have a similar target market to yours. Once a day, find one post that you can comment on. Now, you can’t just say “Great post!” You have to add something to the conversation. But this shouldn’t get too overwhelming if you know you’re only looking for one to comment on. Time? Probably no more than 10 minutes.
• Use a service like SocialOomph.com or Hootsuite.com to schedule in some tips, links, articles etc. to go out throughout the week on Twitter. Then you’re maintaining visibility, even if you haven’t stopped by yet that day. When you do stop by, you can focus more on conversation and relationship building, knowing that you’ve already shared some great content. If you are very clear on your purpose for social networking, you should be able to come up with ideas pretty easily. And since you’ll be looking at your RSS Feeds daily, you’ll be able to grab good articles to share quickly too.

So while it’s tempting to tell yourself that you’re on top of your online marketing because you took 3 hours one day last month to do some, you’ll be a lot more happy with yourself and your results if you make it happen regularly. You’ll get that web traffic sleek and sexy in no time! Now I gotta get going. I need to work out!