Excuse the weird title :)

If you didn't watch last week's 5 minute marketing tip on the Celebrity Showcase then the title won't make much sense. But the video is basically an approach to using Linkedin and Facebook Groups and Forums to quickly build visibility and credibility – but not in the way most people recommend.

The standard advice for a number of years on using Linkedin Groups or Facebook Groups or Forums on websites has been to become a valued contributor and to paste links to your blog posts and free reports to get people to your site and to sign up for your emails.

That approach just doesn't work any more.

Forums and groups are becoming bogged down in links to external resources that take people away from the group. So much so that many owners of the most vibrant groups don't allow promotional links like these because they take people away from the group and so kill off discussions if you get too many (and once one person leaves a link to their blog post or free report, everyone starts leaving links to their blog posts and free reports).

Instead, I recommend you use a variant of the Celebrity Showcase method to make your expertise visible to your potential clients in the group, but in a way that adds value to them and the group as a whole.

I explain how in this week's video…
 

 
Find this video helpful? Subscribe to the More Clients TV channel on youtube to get more of them:

Here's the link to last week's video on the Celebrity Showcase method:

>> The Celebrity Showcase Method For Building Authority <<

Video Transcript

Hi, it's Ian here. Welcome to another five-minute marketing tip. In last week's tip, I walked you through the celebrity showcase method for quickly building visibility and credibility amongst your target market by harnessing the existing reach of a well-known person to that market. But what happens if there isn't that kind of well-known celebrity or person amongst your target clients or you don't really know them? Or you can't persuade them to take part? That's where this week's tip comes in.

It's how to get the same effect as a celebrity showcase, so you get a lot of credibility and a lot of visibility fast, but without needing that well-known person. I guess in a way, it's the non-celebrity celebrity showcase. I'll show you how to do it after the break.

Hi there, welcome back. Quick recap of the celebrity showcase method. You can click on the link below this video to go and see the full video explaining it. Basically, in essence, the celebrity showcase method works by you doing a review or something else visible for a well-known person who is known by your target clients. They then make that review or discussion or whatever it is where you're showcasing your expertise visible to your target clients. You quickly get that visibility, but you also get that credibility because you're showcasing what it is you do. You're reviewing their website or a landing page or an email or a bit of a contract or something where people can see that you know what you're doing and you do a really great job.

Now, if you haven't got that celebrity you could harness, there are other ways of doing it. One of the very best ways of doing that is to harness to power of online groups or forums. In pretty much every market under the sun, there are either LinkedIn or Facebook groups where your potential clients hang out or on forums hosted on private websites. Most of them are free, some of them you have to pay to join. There are always some vibrant, active groups with your potential clients in there. If you haven't found them, to be honest, you just haven't looked hard enough. You might have to discard a whole bunch that have hardly any people in them or they're just a bit spammy or whatever, but there will be these active groups.

Now, a few years ago the advice you would've got for dealing with groups like that is to be a valued contributor to the group, which I think goes without saying. Then the advice would go to drop a link to some of your blog posts or your free lead magnet, and people would go off and click those and sign up for your emails, etc. Now that kind of method hasn't worked for a couple of years. For a couple of reasons, one is everybody's doing it.

When everybody is contributing and answering questions, it's very difficult to stand out and unfortunately, when everybody's dropping links to their blog posts or their lead magnet reports, it means that the group just becomes kind of spammed almost with links to blog posts. It loses a lot of the interaction and the discussion that makes it vibrant. If 9 out of 10 of the items in a group are a link to someone's blog post and all they've done is come along and posted it and then disappeared again with no interaction. All that does is it leads people to click away from the group and the group slowly withers and dies because there's no interaction on it. So much so that a lot of the owners or administrators of very vibrant groups now don't allow links to blog posts or lead magnets, free reports, that kind of thing. They call it self promotional links and they say you can't do those.

Quite rightly, because it takes away from the group. When one person does it and you're the only one contributing like that, that's probably great. When everyone's doing it, it takes everyone away from the group and the group loses its interaction.

What do you do instead? Well, the thing to do is to use the showcase method, but do it on the group itself. I'll illustrate it with an example.

I first saw someone use this method about a year ago, in a group I'm a part of on Facebook for business owners and people who do online marketing. A guy appeared on there, kind of contributed to the group in the usual way, and then he posted an item on that group, saying, “Hey, I'm a copywriter. I help people improve their landing pages and sales pages. I really enjoy being a member of the group, I'm finding it very useful. I've got a few hours free, so what I'd like to do, is if someone has a landing page or a web page they want me to review, just post up the link here and I'll do a thorough review in this post.” A couple people of did, a couple people dared to do it. They shared their links to their landing pages and this guy made good on his promise and he did a very very thorough review.

It was insightful, it was useful, came up with some really good points. I think he actually did a video, but he didn't put the video on a separate web page that people clicked to go through. He uploaded the video to the post itself I think so that people could watch it in the group. That did a number of things. First, he made the people whose websites and page he reviewed very happy and very grateful. It visibly made him stand out contributor. He went above and beyond what everyone else was doing: was seen as a very giving person. But of course, it also showcased his talents because he did a really insightful couple of reviews. It showcased his talents and his expertise to a very broad range of people. Everyone's really keen to see someone else's website or someone else's page or contract or document or whatever it is get reviewed, to see what other people are doing. Lots of people saw him demonstrate his expertise.

Most importantly, because he did the review on the group itself, it didn't take people away, so the administrators the group were very happy with that. It actually added to the group by getting more and more discussion and debate going on that particular post, rather than taking people away from the group. Now I think he did that about a couple of times. Then within a couple of weeks what I noticed was that whenever anyone on the group said, “Hey, does anyone know a good copywriter?” This guy's name was the first one that got mentioned by a lot of people. Even though they'd never worked with him, even though they didn't know him. What they had done is they'd seen his work in action, they knew he knew what he was talking about. They knew he was kind of a giving, sharing person because he'd offered this for free. They were very happy to recommend him. This guy built a really big reputation, very fast. Just by offering a few reviews on the group.

That's really the non-celebrity celebrity showcase method. It's essentially to do a review or whatever it is you can do visibly with your particular skill or expertise. It doesn't just have to be a review, but that's a very obvious example of one. You'd offer to do that for people on the group itself. Don't take people away from the group: share the review or share the feedback or the discussion, or whatever it is that happens on the group to build the community and keep building the engagement in the group, but also, of course, demonstrating your expertise to a large number of your potential clients. It really pays off. It helps you stand out above the crowd in that group where your potential clients hang out.

That's it for this week. See you next week.