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Become Seen As An Authority By Using A “Celebrity Showcase”

Become Seen As An Authority By Using A “Celebrity Showcase”

Introduction

More Clients TV

Become Seen As An Authority By Using A “Celebrity Showcase”

Another simple “recipe” for becoming seen as an authority in your field this week: using a “Celebrity Showcase”.

This is an approach that doesn't work for everyone: you need a couple of specific conditions in place. But if you can get it to work for you it can be hugely powerful as it allows you to rapidly build both visibility and credibility in parallel.

Watch this week's video to find out how to make it work for you…
 

 
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Here's the link to Derek Halpern using his variant of the “Celebrity Showcase” with me:

>> Derek Halpern Reviews ianbrodie.com <<

Video Transcript

Hi. It's Ian here. Welcome to another 5-minute Marketing Tip. On this week's tip, we're going to look at the Celebrity Showcase Method for becoming seen as an authority in your field. Now, this is a method that won't work for everyone. You need a couple of things in your favor for this method to work, but if it can work for you, then it works really well because it can both significantly increase your visibility and enhance your credibility as well at the same time, so well worth thinking about whether you can make it work for you. I'll explain all after the break.

Hi. It's Ian. Welcome back. It's probably easiest if I explain the Celebrity Showcase Method by means of an example, and this is how I actually stumbled across it when someone used their version on me. I think it was probably about 5 or 6 years ago I got a message from a guy called Derek Halpern. Now, many of you may know Derek right now because he runs one of the biggest marketing blogs on the internet, Social Triggers. He's a very well known name in the field of marketing, particularly for bringing a psychological spin or angle into marketing. 5 or 6 years ago though, he was pretty much unknown.

He emailed out of the blue and offered to review my website for me, and the terms and conditions of the review would be that he would do a review of my website using his psychological principles, give me some feedback on how I could improve that website as long as we could video the review and I would share it on my blog and with my email subscribers. He shared a couple of links to some other people who he did reviews for. I think at that stage, he'd just done a review for Pat Flynn, who is a very well known affiliate marketer, Chris Brogan, who is the social media guy, Amy Porterfield, the Facebook lady. I looked at those reviews. They looked very good, so I said yes. We then organized it. Derek came on. We did a live Skype chat where he reviewed my site, gave me some feedback, some things I could do to improve it, and then went away, post-processed the video, sent it to me. I published it on my blog and sent an email out.

Now, that worked for Derek in a couple of ways. Obviously, because I was emailing out to my email list and putting it on my blog, it meant he got exposed to all my audience, and of course, he did similar things with Chris Brogan, Pat Flynn, Amy Porterfield, and about a dozen other people, so he got much-increased visibility through it. Of course, those reviews always contained a link to his website and his free report type offer. Secondly, it also significantly increased his credibility, and it did that in 2 ways. One is the obvious way. What we shared was a video of him using his techniques to review someone's website, so people got to see him in action and demonstrating that he really did know what he was talking about, and they got to see a bit of his personality as well on the video.

Secondly and more subtlety, the people he offered to do the critiques for were weren't unknowns. Obviously, he picked people who were fairly well-known in their fields because they had a big email list. But they were also people who were fairly well-respected in their fields, at least in terms of Chris Brogan, Amy Porterfield, and Pat Flynn: I don't know about me! What that means is people can't help but think when they watch someone like Derek reviewing Chris Brogan's site or Amy Porterfield's site, kind of thinking Chris and Amy are very successful at what they do. They kind of know what they're talking about. If they're taking advice from Derek, he must really know what he's talking about. He must be a real expert, the expert's expert. So he positioned himself by doing a review or critique for these well-known, “celebrities,” in their field who are known as being experts in their own right. He was positioning himself as the expert's expert, someone who knew even more than most people did.

Now, you can do something very similar in your field. The 2 criteria you probably guessed that you need is you need to have amongst your client community, there need to be some well-known and stand-out people who are known by lots of the community who ideally can reach that community either through an email list, a blog, a Facebook or a LinkedIn group, somewhere they can share what you do with them so you get that visibility. Secondly, of course, they must be respected by that group. If you did something for them, you would become seen as an expert, and the key thing about what you do for them is you have to be able to demonstrate your expertise.

Now, in the case of Derek, he was demonstrating his knowledge of the psychology of marketing by doing a website critique. That's probably just one small part of what he does, but it's something he could demonstrate on a video, and you need something else like that. In my case, for example, I guess with email marketing, because I work with a lot of consultants, I could go to some well-known consultants. I don't know, I could offer it to Tom Peters, for example. A lot of consultants follow Tom Peters. I could maybe offer to review some of his regular emails that he sends out to help improve them to help him better results and record maybe an interview where I give him feedback on video, and he would then send that out to his list. That's an idea for how I could do it.

Now, what you share doesn't have to be a critique or a review. That's a really good example of doing that because it's visible demonstration of your expertise. For example, I don't know, let's say you were some kind of expert on communication skills, or let's say you were an expert on high-end recruiting of senior executives, maybe what you could organize is a round table, like a little Blab Chat with senior clients who are well-known in client organizations, the type of clients that you would like to work for, and organize a round table and discuss with them and share opinions. Get them from the HR, the recruitment side, and discuss recruitment trends or something like that. That way you get to demonstrate your expertise. They would share with their audience.

The key thing is this. It's not a review but you've got to find something that is of benefit to them in their case. In this case, it would beneficial to their careers, in HR or recruitment to be seen by other people as an expert as well, so they would be willing to share and get involved. These sort of people often speak on panels in conferences. All you're doing is doing it online and then getting people to share it more widely. That's really the key.

Look at what it is you do, what your expertise is, and focus in something that you can demonstrate visibily with a review or round table. Anything you could video record you sharing that expertise with someone who is well-known amongst your client community and would therefore be willing to share that thing with other people who know them in that community. That gets you the visibility because of the sharing, and it also positions you as an expert because they see your expertise in action. Of course, if you're the one who's guiding the celebrity or the expert or the well-known person in the field, well you must really be an expert, so people will make judgments based on that.

That's the Celebrity Showcase Method. There's a variation of this that doesn't need you to do it with a celebrity, and I'll explain that next week. See you then

Ian Brodie

Ian Brodie

https://www.ianbrodie.com

Ian Brodie is the best-selling author of Email Persuasion and the creator of Unsnooze Your Inbox - *the* guide to crafting engaging emails and newsletters that captivate your audience, build authority and generate more sales.

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