Just a short post to wish all my readers a happy and prosperous new year.

Less than 5 hours left here in the UK before 2009 ends.  I have seen video of the Sydney bridge fireworks display to welcome in the New Year in Australia, and I know the east coast of the USA has nearly 10 hours to wait whilst the Pacific coast has even longer to wait.

I wish you all success in 2010 with whatever you are planning to do.

If you have been following my posts about David Walker’s webinars another one will appear tomorrow 1stJanuary 2010 followed by more posts over the next few weeks.

This is the third part of the information I have gained from David Walker’s third webinar in a series of 6 training webinars. It was called Respect My Authoritah and covered the following:

1. Branding yourself as an expert
2. Entering your community as an expert
3. Focusing on becoming the best in your niche
4. Proof and credentials
5. Story telling to cement your authority
6. Staying ahead of the game
7. Swipe file for success as an authority

Focusing On Becoming The Best In Your Niche

Narrow Your Focus

Carve out a place in your niche

• People assume a ‘Specialist’ knows someone who has a broad knowledge of a general topic
• People don’t want information, they want specific advice from someone they trust
• Your sub Niche needs to be large enough to make money, but focused enough so you can become the best
• If you can create your own category you will have ZERO competition

Become The Best

Take A Stand

• Have a clear point of view identified in your introductory blog post.
• A controversial position is not a bad thing.
• Be in the best interests of your marketplace.
• You MUST be able to do something better than your competitors, but remember competition is healthy.  If you have no competition you may have too small a niche to may it viable.  You can check out your competitors by doing a Google search for your niche and looking for advertisers or blogs in your niche.
• What area of expertise do you bring to the marketplace?
• What do you want to be known for?
• What do you want your customers to say about you?

Your Competitive Advantage Will Answer Potential Customers Questions

• Why should I do business with you?
• Why are you the best choice, why not so and so?
• What can you give that is not available elsewhere?
• And so on. There are probably dozens more questions that you can think of that customers may want answered in their minds before selecting you to do business with.  If you can think of the question and answer it your competitive advantage will stand out from the crowd.
• Turn your advantage into a unique promise
• Who and what you are promising. When and how you will deliver on your promise
• Success does not just happen, it is engineered.

Listen Before You Speak

People make the mistake of using different marketing tactics without trying to understand the needs of their customers and then wonder why they are failing to make any forward progress.

Four Reasons Why You Must Listen

1. It will help develop insider knowledge of your marketplace
2. You can identify problems and sell a solution rather than trying to sell a benefit
3. You will differentiate yourself from your competitors
4. You should view marketing as a long term commitment with the best interests of your customers at heart not as a get rich quick process.

Places Where You Must Listen

1. Other experts blogs

• You will get points of view and topics of interest to their readers and this will help you when writing your own posts.
• Sign up for feeds and alerts from Technorati and Google Blog Search.

2.  By reverse engineering product sales letters you can uncover the emotional messages contained in them.

3.  Forums in your niche

4.  Social bookmarking websites eg Facebook, Twitter, You Tube etc.

Joining The Community

1.  Community vs Marketplace

• Some people enter the marketplace and have absolutely no interest in the community
• Some people are passionate about the community but never buy any products – all they want is freebees
• Products are what make you an expert in the community – especially your own products

2.  The community has a major influence on how you perform in the marketplace

3.  ideally you need to be an expert in both

Butting Into The Conversation

• Write about other experts on your blog — When an expert mentions you Milk It to the fullest extent
• Leave quality comments on other blogs — This is what Alex Jeffreys calls Oil Rig Hopping
• Stimulate conversation on your own blog
• Be confident in your own ability — Do not ask for specific answers to questions
• Intelligent conversations spread across blogs, you should contribute your opinion and link out as this may stimulate links back to your blog.

Value! Value! Value!

1. You must provide expertise, value and quality
2. You must provide content from the heart – PASSION
3. Don’t try to hide valuable information – but don’t reveal everything as you will have nothing left to sell.
4. If you don’t share high quality information, someone else will beat you to it.
5. Always remember to thank people for their time and respond quickly to blog posts.
6. Be yourself, treat people well and you will be rewarded.

This concludes my third post on module 3 of David Walker’s webinars. I will continue in part 4 to be published shortly.  Any comments will be welcome. If you wish to receive notification when a new post appears sign up to receive these notifications.

As it is Christmas Eve may I take the opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas.

This is the second part of the information I have gained from David Walker’s third webinar in a series of 6 training webinars. It was called Respect My Authoritah and covered the following:

1. Branding yourself as an expert
2. Entering your community as an expert
3. Focusing on becoming the best in your niche
4. Proof and credentials
5. Story telling to cement your authority
6. Staying ahead of the game
7. Swipe file for success as an authority

In the last post I covered Branding yourself as an expert and we are starting here with:

Entering Your Community As An Expert.

Why Do You Need To Be Seen As An Expert?

There are a number of reasons why you need to be seen as an expert.  They are:

1. To make you stand out from the crowd
2. So that you are trusted
3. So that you are seen as knowledgeable
4. So that you are seen as relevant
5. So that you have influence in the marketplace
6. It makes marketing numerous times easier

Essential Expert Skills

1.  Your area of expertise

• Your ability to apply it
• Your ability to communicate it
• your ability to share it

This shows other people that you know what you are claiming to know and can pass the information on to others.  However it is important that you do not give all the information away, you need to hold some back so that you can sell it later.  Some GURU’s take this literally and although they make big claims for their products leave out some essential information so that you are unable to use their system effectively, even though you may have paid up to $5,000 for it.

2.  The Ability To Market Your Expertise

• To promote the category
• To promote your purpose
• To attract, convert and retain customers or clients

If you do not have the ability to market yourself and your expertise you will not succeed in your online business as you will not be able to get the customer base you need.  You may get people to sign up for your first free giveaway product but they will not stay on your mailing list and will not purchase from you in the future.

Why It Is Important That You Have Passion For your Niche

• It shows if you are passionate or not
• Passion will draw people to you
• Passion drives your brand
• Authenticity matters
• DON’T brand yourself around a Hot Topic if you are not passionate about the topic you will waste your time, effort and even your money in doing so.

This concludes my second post on module 3 of David Walker’s webinars. I will continue in part 3 to be published shortly.  Any comments will be welcome. If you wish to receive notification when a new post appears sign up to receive these notifications.

This is the first part of the information I have gained from David Walker’s third webinar in a series of 6 training webinars. It was called Respect My Authoritah and covered the following:

1. Branding yourself as an expert
2. Entering your community as an expert
3. Focusing on becoming the best in your niche
4. Proof and credentials
5. Story telling to cement your authority
6. Staying ahead of the game
7. Swipe file for success as an authority

1.  Branding Yourself As An Expert.

What Is An Expert?

Wikipedia defines an expert as:

• An expert is someone widely recognised as a reliable source of technique or skill, whose facility for judging or deciding rightly, justly or wisely is accorded authority, or status by their peers or the public in a specific well distinguished domain.  An expert can be by virtue of credential, training, education, profession, publication or experience, believed to have specific knowledge of a subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially rely upon the individuals opinion.

I think that the important words in the above definaton are “An expert is someone believed to have specific knowledge of a subject.” If you are perceived to have the knowledge of your niche, even if you don’t have as much knowledge as others think, you are an expert in that niche.

Expert status is built by marketing.  But don’t try to go too far too fast.  You need to start slowly and build momentum, you will not be recognised as an expert from the word go.

Your Personal Brand

• Your personal brand is a unique set of attributes or characteristics that makes you stand out as different to others.
• You are marketing yourself as something different from the rest of the pack.
• A strong personal brand is a mix of reputation, trust, attention and execution.  It gives you the ability to stand out in a sea of similar products.  This is why when talking about blogging I said you should try and get your own name for your website.

Your Personal Brand Of Expert

This means:

• You have the ability to differentiate and stand out from the crowd
• You have a strong reputation and ability to do what you say you can do.  If you say you can do something and then, when put to the test, are unable to perform you will be labeled as a con artist not an expert.
• You are widely recognised as a reliable source of skill
• You are accorded authority and status by your peers

You can gain this status through:

1. Education and / or training
2. Profession ie what formal or informal qualifications you have that apply to what you are professing to be an expert in
3. Experience – you may not have any qualifications but through your practical experience and the mistakes you have made and learned from you know a lot about your subject.
4. Publication – any books, ebooks, audios, videos etc that you have published on or off line which relate to your niche give you expert suatus.  You may have published these items as giveaways and not actually have made any money from them, it is the fact that you are a published author that gives you status.

This concludes the first of my posts on module 3 of David Walker’s webinars. I will continue in my next post to be published shortly.  Any comments will be welcome. If you wish to receive notification when a new post appears sign up to receive these notifications.

For the past few days, I have been searching for videos with resell rights that I can resell in the ‘business opportunity’ niche.

And no niche is hotter than the eBay niche right now because as the recession deepens, more and more people are looking to make money online (specifically eBay).

One product that I came across is Francis Ochoco’s video series titled, “Live eBay Training Videos”.

If you’ve never heard of Francis Ochoco, he was awarded the first ever ‘eBay Entrepreneur Of The Year’ award a few years ago.

“Live eBay Training Videos” is a set of 28 videos that show Francis selling on eBay in real time.

I am actually surprised that he is giving away these videos for free because it is my opinion that this is the best eBay course I have seen in a long time.

Not only he is giving away these videos for free, but he is also giving away Resell Rights for free.  This means that you can resell these videos yourself and keep 100% of the profits.

These videos are very detailed so it won’t surprise me if your 10 year old child starts selling on eBay immediately after watching these videos.

If you have ever purchased resell rights to ebay video tutorials in the past, I’m sure you’ll find there was nothing spectacular about them.  (This is because they were created by average joe’s who haven’t had any real success on eBay)

So I should point out that if you are looking for a hot product that you can resell in a hot niche, make sure that it was created by someone that is successful in that niche.

That being said, I highly recommend Francis Ochoco’s “Live eBay Training Videos”.

Best of all, it is free.

To see the titles for each of the 28 videos in “Live eBay Training Videos”, click here

Regards,