Look, listen, learn: Every day you’re assaulted with signals and suggestions that present you with inspiration to give your insight and share your experiences for the benefit of your customers.

If you’re an estate agent, there’ never been a better time to help people find the best mortgages in the area, or show your sellers how to get the best price for their house.

Newsletters are a great way to keep people in the loop. You need a list of people to send them to – so get a free Mailchimp account today and incentivise people to join your list with a free chapter of your eBook, or a 15-minute audit for you to help people figure out the best product or service for their needs.

Alternatively, another service recently acquired b y MailChimp – TinyLetter - makes creating newsletters as easy as pie. Literally a couple of clicks is all it takes to create a subscriber list – and now MailChimp is behind it you can rest assured of the best of service and the option to export your list to a more powerful solution when the need arises.

Let’s look at the content scene, in a nutshell. There are two types:

1. Content for your website
2. Content for other websites

Never forget this: You only own the content on your website (or your hard drive). Never assume that for anything you publish elsewhere, especially on platforms that are ‘free’ – because as we all know, there is really no such thing as free. And as soon as you use free tools or services, you’re the product, not the customer.

Look at it another way – not only could other sites close down without warning; something in the terms and conditions could allow them to manipulate or change your content.

Here’s an example of an interesting development that hit tech headlines recently. A stock photo library allowed purchased images to be manipulated. One of its clients bought a photo of a crowd of people, to be used to warn people of the dangers of obesity in contracting diabetes. Thanks to the miracles of Photoshop, one of the people on that photo subsequently lost one of their legs to show diabetes could lead to amputation. It came as quite a surprise to that guy when he saw the picture, which was used in a national campaign…

About this content marketing thing

Content isn’t going to build a better business for you unless you think of it in the right context. Content marketing is a phrase dismissed by many as an oxymoron – if it’s truthful, authentic and transparent, then how can it be ‘marketing’?

The problem some of us have is understanding that any form of communication is marketing. Someone, somewhere, is selling something – with monetary value, or otherwise – whenever they open their mouth, or set finger to keyboard.

I want you to remove from your head any negative connotations you have about content marketing. The principles of content marketing are sound.

At its purest content marketing is simply the art of information sharing, from finding the right stuff to fit the right holes. Content at its best solves, entertains, inspires or coaches.

The number one resource you’ll need to tap when composing your sharing strategy – after defining your customer and her needs and likes – is your imagination.

Tools to use

If you could visualise epiphanies as fireworks, then check your calendar and hear those bangs because it’s November 5, already!

Sharing Superheroes are neck-deep in options, methods and channels to showcase their knowledge and passion. The Jedi in them, however, can cut through the myriad choices and focus only on those that generate the traffic, relationships and reactions that they want.

Surprising as an admission from your geek author, unsurprising because this book is an exposition of honesty and openness, is that the ways to share your expertise are not simply available online.

As our Sharing Superhero CMO showed, the internet gives us an immediacy and efficiency we could never have dreamt of in the pre-networked age.

But Gene also takes what he’s learned in cyberspace to the ‘outofnet’ (clearly a backfiring nerdy gag) and on the road to give his most influential customers the kind of service and consideration that borders on the sixth sense.

Put simply, Sharing Superheroes use whichever channel and tool they need to deliver results and learn more about their customers. And along the way, they’re measuring, altering their techniques and improving. The job is easier online because the applications to analyse are freely available – but one of the finest culinary artisans (a baker) I ever met knew more about what his customers wanted through feedback forms on his counter, responding accordingly with the finest pastries I’d ever tasted, than with any amount of time scouring Google Analytics.

But giving it away should be easy!

It’s true – stand on any street corner, occupy any website, and you’ll get a certain level of interest when you show your content is useful and relevant. But we want magic, and the alchemy occurs when you know where liberating information generates the greatest rewards.

Thankfully you can start right away. Right away – as soon as you’ve read this book.

We’ve briefly discussed Blogging, inspired you to get Podcasting, had a fascinating introduction to the art of Web Video from Mark Johnson, and there are many other elements to consider besides. Presentations, White Papers, Webinars, even real-life meetings and workshops.

Better yet if you use a few of them in concert to create an arsenal of mighty content firepower. You can win at roulette by putting a chip on a number but much easier when you cover your bases.

You’re smart because you’re sharing, and sharing because you’re smart.

Complementing your offline efforts with online activity is crucial – promoting each, to the other, essential.

As State Farm shows later in this book, the knowledge they’ve garnered of their customers both on and offline has helped them create a unique and irresistible stance in their marketplace (and the great coffee certainly helps).

But here’s a secret I hit upon the other day that helps make sense of that myriad of options.

Start with a blog post > Turn it into a podcast > Turn it into a slideshow > Turn the slideshow into a video > WIN!

How about that? With one piece of content, you’ve got four different options. It’s called repurposing and it’s probably the most effective way to use your time content marketing.

Alternatively, go down the route of repetition and put out a different presentation each week for two months on Slideshare, promoting them on all your social networks and measuring their effectiveness and impact.

Doesn’t work for you? Try something else. Limited benefit? Dig deeper and see which kinds of people your presentations inspired. You can do this by linking them to your contact page or email address, or seeing who retweeted them to their communities.

I’m not going to go into social networks, and specifically Twitter, into detail at this point – it’ll be different tomorrow, and frankly there are squillions of resources more specialised than this book on that matter.

But one tip I will give you at this point: Find on Twitter the people in your industry who have already made a name for themselves. Check out their lists, and follow those people. You’ve instantly built a great number of Tweeps who can help you leapfrog your competition and give you the intel you need to evolve your business, possibly in a whole new direction altogether.

You’ll know by now my favourite three content marketing tools:

• Video
• Radio
• Text/blog

I choose these because they’re not going away. It doesn’t matter what the next shiny social network might be – you’re not getting rid of radio, video and blogging, no matter what.

And the beauty of these three media types is that you don’t need to work independently on each of them. In fact, one begets the next, and the next.

One more thing…

Never forget the value of tagging.

As I wrote this it had all gone relatively quiet on the ‘semantic web’ front. Semantic is all about the tagging you employ and how search engines will be able to deliver better results based on how your website interacts with the rest of the internet.

So manual tagging is one of the most important things you can do to make your content discoverable by as many people as possible..

If you’re ranking top on YouTube for a certain keyphrase, then you’ll appear about fifth on the first page of results on Google. Does that compel you to create targeted keywords for your content?

That rounds up the content creation section of Sharing Superheroes. I’d love to hear your favourites, so get in touch and let’s help future Sharing Superheroes unleash their superpowers in the most effective, and exciting, way.

Anyone can produce a podcast. Seriously.

Go create a free channel at audioboo.fm and hit the big red button. You don’t even need a standalone microphone – just say anything that comes into your head through the integrated mic on your webcam.

Wait a few seconds and you’ve got an RSS feed (the link is hidden under that orange circle with the three curved lines inside – the universal RSS symbol).

If you want to get your teeth stuck into something meatier, go check out the Spreaker web radio platform. Same kinda rules, longer form content. Both will have you on iTunes before you can say, well, a very long poem.

Congratulations! You’re a podcaster. Because, what’s a podcast, memory fans? Why, it’s an audio file that people can subscribe to.

I say ‘can’ because it’s not compulsory. In fact it takes incredible effort on the part of the podcast producer to demonstrate taking action is worthwhile. You’re making a sale, even if the physical transaction equates to zero money down.

Subscribing to a podcast is a big commitment. Sure, folks can listen to your show on a website – but it takes effort to click a button saying ‘please tell me when your latest show is done so I can take a listen’.

Unless you’re Lady GaGa I’m figuring you’re not going to have a whole load of listeners using the most basic example of podcasting I could think of, shown above. Let’s break it down to understand why.

You don’t need a standalone microphone. That’s the first humdinger. When we talk quality, we’re not just talking content – we’re talking sound. Listenability and listeners are two of the most important elements of a podcast (one of them is #1, the other one not far behind). We’ll be talking about sound quality and how to get it, later on.

Just say anything that comes into your head. Uh-oh. Do you really have the twisted (but beautiful) mind of Howard Stern, or the comedy smarts of Adam Carolla? Even these guys need some help to create world-changing content. Which means you do, too. Don’t think for a second that you can just wax on about something without planning and preparation. At this point, a caveat: I’m not going to candy coat this ride around the podcasting world. If you want a popular podcast, you’ve come to the right place – but there are some rules of the game we both need to know:

• I want you to learn
• I want you to change
• I want you to be incredible

If you’re happy with these conditions, then let’s move it.

Why podcasting? And why now?

I do hope you’re still with me. It’s bad enough that I’ve already hogged lots of pixel trees in the manufacture of this virtual book. Don’t judge me. I even grow my own tomatoes to help the Italians preserve their supply, and to help with lowering food miles and all that.

If there’s something I know, and am dying to tell you about, it’s the primary benefits are of podcasting.

1. Credibility
2. Authority
3. Authenticity
4. Reputation

as a result, you create unprecedented levels of

• trust
• engagement
• loyalty

There are no words to describe the value of loyal customers. If you’re anything like me (big mouth, 6”1’, freckled, lanky, plastic Scouser and dog lover), you’ll know the existing customer is five times cheaper to sell to than acquiring a new one.

There’s something incredible about learning by listening. All that valuable information soaks in much quicker than by reading. And have you ever tried to drive while you’re scanning a blog post? It’s not easy and, in many countries, illegal.

So avoid careering off the edge of that mountainside in your chic motor and tune in to the latest and greatest way to build your brand, grow your reputation and generate customers who cost less and buy more.

All while saving time.

Podcasting – audio marketing, interchangeable in my head though many also roll ‘customised automated phone responders’ into that description – is interactive marketing, relationship marketing, experiential marketing and listening marketing, all rolled into one.

You can see why hundreds charities, councils and companies are starting to wake up to the infinite potential of podcasting to build incredible relationships with their communities.

And that Pyramid?

Oh yeah, about that. Here’s the script: When you create any kind of content, you want to be able to repurpose it. There’s a girl called Dr Rachna Jain who can tell you more about all that repurposing stuff. It’s powerful – it’s transformative – and she’s got one heck of a left hook after too many hours in boxing class, so I volunteered (ouch) to give her a big up here in return for protection in case I ever go back to the casino.

Repurposing in this case is easy. If you start by broadcasting a web radio show, you have an audio file packed with great content that wouldn’t look out of place on a blog when it’s been transcribed.

Ooh. Think of the opportunities there!

Take it a step further. How about if you started right at the top of the pyramid: With a video? You record the episode, post it to YouTube, strip out the audio using SnipMP3, then you have a video and a podcast. And wait: You still have the content you can transcribe to a blog post!

Tools you’ll need for the ‘Pyramid

Web Video content to Web Radio content: SnipMP3

Web Radio to Blog content: Transcribe

Results: Amazing!

Tomorrow: Let’s talk web video

Online, there are hundreds of ways to give everything away. And disconcertingly, that number seems to grow almost daily.

But most of the magic happens when you know where liberating information generates the greatest rewards. If you’re going to be a content concierge you’ll be driven by passion, and that passion needs feeding and enlivening by measurable results.

1. Whenever I think about where to post content, I start with my home turf – the Word And Mouth website – and radiate my efforts from there.
2. I’m the world’s biggest fan of Hootsuite because that lets me take an hour every Sunday night and schedule insightful updates and ideas to our followers at @getWAM, on our Facebook page, or on my LinkedIn profile. I’m a bit gutted they don’t let peasants like me update Google+ there yet, but it might happen one day (if you’re an Enterprise user, then I rever the ground you walk on for you already have this capability. Meh).

First, let’s look at a rather long list of methods you can use – right now – to bring your brand to life and show your customers you’re the natural go-to for all of their needs in your area of expertise:

• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Web video
• Presentations for Slideshare
• White papers
• Newsletters
• Answering questions on forums and sites like Quora, and on dedicated site sections such as Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers

Go double

Better yet if you use a few of them in concert to create an arsenal of mighty content firepower. You can win at roulette by putting a chip on a number but much easier when you cover your bases.

Yup, I used to be a croupier. I quit after taking £70,000 in 40 minutes from a bunch of Japanese guys who proceeded to look way too threatening for my liking and I realised that life preservation was far smarter than spinning wheels for a living.

Smart because you’re sharing, and sharing because you’re smart

But where do you begin? If there are so many ways to strip the willow (a ceilidh term – clearly my youth wasn’t as misspent as it should have been) how do you start out?

My recommendation is start with one. Focus hard on it, and work outwards from there, once you’ve juiced it as hard as you can.

My pal in content awesomeness Chris Brogan introduced me to @Fitarella’ #12in12 concept at the start of the year, as he embarked on a month of yoga.

The theory is that by trying something new each month for a year, you get 12 bites at habitualising yourself to a practice you’ve always wanted to try.

Then there’s Malcolm Gladwell preaching 10,000 hours of practice to mastery.

And there’s something indubitably safe and addictive from a customer’ standpoint about finding your content delivered in a certain way, on a certain channel, time and again. It feels like home – it feels like more than just a business.

Please never underestimate the value of consistency and frequency. These are two of the most important tenets of every successful content marketing strategy.

All of this leads towards me pleading with you to focus hard on delivering your Superhero content in one way for at least the first few months.

Alternatively, you could go at it like a bull in a china shop. Some do. They rarely last the course, getting deflated and deenergised by having 35 shop windows and only one pair of hands.

What freaks me out about numberless ways to share is forgetting the value of content.

Every day for a year you could optimise your efforts for a different social network, video site or radio show directory. And every day you’d be analysing your stats and scratching your head wondering why the traffic you hoped for wasn’t flooding in.

The truth is if you follow some basic practices and keep your eyes on one method of content delivery, and one partner distribution system, you’ll have much more success than the yield of any scattergun approach.

Where I think you should start

As an expert you need not only to demonstrate you have the content – heck, is there anyone out there who hasn’t written a blog post?

You have to go beyond that. Much further, in fact. You need to breathe life into your online presence. You have to literally awaken the senses of your customer-to-be.

And you can do that in two different ways:

1. Web video
2. Web radio

We could in actual fact define these both as podcasting, but let’s simplify things here, for a moment.

We’ve talked before about content creation and content creation.

To be a superstar of content marketing, the number one resource you’ll need to tap into – after defining your customer and her needs and likes – is your imagination.

You bring your creativity to the party with your passion and prowess, and you’re already well on the way to fashioning a dynamic content strategy to encapsulate web video and web radio.

A few weeks ago I created a studio in my home. It cost me a few hundred pounds, and now whenever I want to talk through a new idea, I not only write it down on my blog – I talk about it, face to face with my reader. Wherever she is. So she can hear me or – heaven forbid – see me, the guy behind the thoughts.

It’s irresistible. We’re making connections, here – building relationships.

And the beauty of web video and web radio – and let’s throw in blogging here since these three folks are kinda inseparable – is that you don’t need to work independently on each of them. In fact, one begets the next, and the next.

It’s the Podcasting Pyramid (tm, etc)!

Students of mine at The Podcast Guy got bored, some literally to death although their bodies are still unaccounted for, about me waxing on about my Podcasting Pyramid. It works perfectly here. Let me explain… tomorrow.

You only need a small customer base to build huge rewards for your business. Being a Sharing Superhero means you’re first in line to the spoils since everything you do is dedicated to long-range customer relationships.

Can you feel the force?

In one of the most influential blog posts I have ever read over at The Technium, if you cosset and caress ten hundred customers to the point where they’re threaded into the tapestry of your business being you have a perfectly successful business.

If you can allocate people to customer care positions where they demonstrate actual care, rather than an aptitude for reading scripts and saying no a lot, then you can scale this – but the road is strewn with cautionary tales of those companies who have strived for greater success setting off for the skies in their hot air balloon, only to look down and realise they’d built their business on everything but the balloon and basket.

The long tail of our times (the concept and book idea belongs to Chris Anderson of Wired) signifies we all have the opportunity to thrive, despite increased choice. Humans are human, after all, and we largely subscribe to similar ideas, hobbies and desires. So the chances are that if you got hooked on a passion, thousands of others the world over will share your thirst for more.

So as you thirst for world domination and exponential growth, it’s vital to remember that phase 1 – and perhaps the only phase of customer expansion you might ever need – starts with a relentless focus on that first 1,000. Walk in their shoes, belong where they are, understand their habits and concerns and be a leader in the world they crave.

What’s more surprising than this small number is the empowerment that tribe generates. Once those folks start loving your way, their power to raise your business way above your boldest expectations will be fully realised.

1,000 is achieveable. 1,000 is a number you can work with; your chief customer officer, whether that’s you or a colleague, will love you for setting your primary goals at that level. It’s perfect. And once the 1,000 is attained, you just need to work harder at making them happier. Then it’s time to turn on the celebratory tap and let the good times roll!

So come on, spill – who are they? Why was your business created in the first place? Who loves ya, baby?

Facing up to the fact you don’t truly understand who your customer is, what they do, and why they buy from you is something we all have to do from time to time.

People change, just as your product line does. Yet rarely do we keep up with the times.

So the one thing you need to do right now in your schooling for Sharing Superheroes is to make a list of the benefits you offer to your customers, to understand the solutions they are looking for, to finally come to the point where you understand the solution-seekers and how you can best address their needs.

Gina’s a florist. She has two customer streams – local people, and everyone else. Sounds pretty loose-fitting, right?

Well, not exactly. We just haven’t narrowed it down, yet. And before we do, we already know that Gina has to approach marketing in two entirely different ways. On the one hand, she can talk face-to-face with her customers and prospects, running through a personal discovery process to understand how to match her service benefits to their needs. Here, word of mouth is literally that.

Onward!

To the second category of customer, Gina has to rely on her tech skills, in addition to the passion and prowess that has made her such a valued member of her local community. Her website has to be swimming with valuable key words and phrases relevant to her service, but also be the shop window to her uniqueness and accessibility (yes, you can buy my stuff, so long as it’s not got a short shelf-life, and I’ll ship it for you).

She’s savvy

But Gina has an ace up her sleeve. Having already scoured the web for partners who can provide her with leads in exchange for commission, Gina’s professional network includes a healthy database of estate agents who in addition to selling houses sell her services as an ideas-driven interior design consultant.

It was that that inspired her to focus on those people who have just moved house. Thanks to the wide array of house-moving forums, and using “moved house” as a search term for one of her Twitter columns on TweetDeck, Gina is able to do for beautifying the homes of the newly-moved what Gary V did for the understanding of wine.

It’s all about thinking laterally, as well as on the obvious. And it’s ensuring that your customers share your objectives: A well-aligned company and customer produces infinitely desirable results.

The more the customer you target behaves like you and your team, the more likely you can get under their skin, intelligently and with integrity, and almost instinctively.

And if you can’t do that, then you need to do more research until you can at least grow to act that way.

Ok this is a big one. Are you ready? When I wrote this I had no idea how much I and my clients would come to rely on the advice held within this section of Sharing Superheroes. Consume it, devour it, and then put it into action. It’ll make more difference to the way you do business than you’ll ever know…

If you’re remotely like me you just want the practical guide to doing something. You had to wade through a vast wave of insight to get here, so let’ hit it without any further ado.

About time we talked about that new Sharing Superheroes gig in more detail…

The ultimate goal of sharing media is to create more loyal customers, building a brand that is both loved and sustainable. With that in mind, here are the 7 things you need to do to get started on your Sharing Superheroes strategy for success:

1. Identify the essence, history, story and strengths of your business and brand. Why did you launch it in the first place? What got you hot under the collar with excitement? Why do your customers need your stuff? Who’s in your team? Who are your favourite suppliers? What inspires you most about the industry you’re in? What happens next?
2. Take a close look at the most popular parts of your website. If you’ve got a blog on-site, that’s a perfect place to start since it’s oh-so-obvious what your top 25 articles are, both by traffic and comment count. If not, you can examine your sales process and see which parts are working, and which aren’t. This is equal parts useful to become a Sharing Superhero, since you’ll be able to see where you’re particularly strong and where you need to fill in the gaps, and refining your web proposition, since you’ll obviously be able to sell better as a result
3. Consult your customers to find out what’s going well, and not so well. Include in your survey questions about what they like best about your service and products – and what would make them even better into the future. This is perhaps the most important part of your discovery process as a Superhero apprentice: Understanding the minutiae of what your company and brand represents in the mind of the customer.
4. Start a list. The ultimate goal of sharing the story of your business is, as we’ve already learned, to grow your customer community. Therefore it stands to reason that the moment you start sharing content is the moment you give interested people – prospective clients – a way to get more. Setting up a mailing list is your goal here, and it doesn’t come easier or quicker than by signing up to Mailchimp. Creating the account and then adding a widget to your WordPress website means you’re ready to start building that list. But I have something that will make it oh so easy to get even more people ‘in the pipe’ and that’s called adding value. When people sign up for something, they’re effectively offering their email address as currency. How often do you pay for nothing but a promise? It doesn’t make good business sense from either side – because it is precisely at the moment when that customer-in-waiting signs up that you have the greatest opportunity of moving them up the board towards the win. Reinforce the decision they’re about to make by giving something away of value – whether it’s a five-step course, a series of videos, a whitepaper or ebook, or even a link to a virtual conference of YouTube videos you’ve curated. Don’t miss this chance.
5. Create a website that’s easy to use. If you’ve been living with a clunky site that you have someone manage on your behalf, stop. Stop having it managed by someone else, and stop settling for second best. You have two options: Either learn how to create a WordPress website or head over to SquareSpace and have them host and help you design one, for a small monthly fee. If you go the WordPress route you simply need to buy a domain name, grab some webspace from a company like Clook, have WordPress installed automagically in your control panel using Softaculous, and then go and add your first bit of content (or migrate existing pages over to it).
6. Identify your top 25 suppliers/partners/customers/employees. Tell them you’re in training to become a Sharing Superhero and you want to tell the world how awesome they are. Set up some guest posting opportunities, think about having them guest on your forthcoming radio show, even (gasp!) arrange to meet them to find out more about what they do and how you can work more closely together. The whole world is a focus group these days – so why not make the most of every contact to move closer together? That’s effective communications and one of the easiest ways to attain expert status and amplify your exposure to new customer communities. There are few better ways to spend your time than on building partnerships which trigger unprecedented levels of word of mouth marketing…
7. Start a Superhero sharing schedule. Your aim here is to be as useful and relevant as you possibly can. While YouTube and video are darlings of the day don’t dismiss resources such as Quora and LinkedIn Answers for showing your smarts. You should be spending half an hour a day on sharing content. Don’t shirk – this is your business’ best marketing opportunity.

If you’re short on ideas you can base your Sharing Superhero efforts upon, how about this for a list?

Tomayto, tomato

Content creation and content curation.

Let’s talk about those for a moment.

There are about 160 million blogs, according to Blogpulse. If you could browse a different website every second from the moment you were born, to the second you leap off this mortal coil, you’d be able to visit each blog just under 15 times.

I’m not suggesting you attempt this, or bear progeny in experimentation – but that’ not nearly enough time to build a relationship with every blog producer.

Or put another way, that’ a lot of content. A heck of a lot of content. And what puts a lot of people off blogging is the ‘competition’.

Well let’s cut to the chase here:

• The vast majority of blogs are dead
• Blogs cover a near-limitless range of stories. Few, if any, are actually in the same vein as yours
• Some of those blogs are in Iranian. English is your first language, I would imagine, so remove a fair share of foreign language blogs from your calculation
• Some of those blogs can actually help yours be better.

That this book appears to flow effortlessly is unintentional. But point 4 leads on to a seamless segue and helps define the difference between content creation and curation.

Unique content is wonderful. It often sparks greater recognition among search engines (and keep an eye on Bing, by the way. It’ starting to challenge Google. But more on that, possibly, in a future blog post at Word And Mouth).

But you can often do wonders with a fresh perspective on what you have to say, no matter which medium you’re foraging. And the beauty of the internet connecting people with all different ideas and insights is you can harness their input and use it to challenge yours.

That, at it’s most elementary, is content curation. Finding ideas relating to your subject matter or service, and bringing them into the fray to offer your customers truly holistic and turbocharged content.

Content curation also manifests itself in many websites’ mashed-up RSS feeds.

A client of mine operates a very successful business in the travel industry. We’ve cherrypicked 15 blogs, fed them into Yahoo! Pipes (which takes the very latest information from these blogs via their RSS feeds, and mixes them up before serving them with a very elegant garnish of clear format) and added the resultant output to a section of their site under the title of ‘latest news from across the industry’.

Content curation can simply be a case of checking your RSS feeds each day, and adding whichever stories tickle your fancy to your Delicious bookmarks with a memorable ‘tag’ you can pull up when you’re ready to write or produce a podcast.

Or you could add them to a page on Evernote, or Wunderlist, or a plain old Google Spreadsheet.

I mentioned podcast, back there. Many people power podcasts with the thoughts and scribblings of others, adding their own thoughts and inviting listeners to share theirs.

Content creation is your chance to appear even cleverer than you are, without risk of people .calling you out as a proper smart arse. And the good news doesn’t stop there.

Whenever you link to someone else’ content from yours (and make sure you do give them proper credit, at the very least by using a link back to the original story on their website) chances are you’ll appear on their content management system as a ‘trackback’.

This shows the webmaster which sites are linking to theirs. It could be the start of a fruitful, and profitable, friendship – all for the cost of growing respect among your customers for not only giving them the latest and greatest information, but for potentially opening their eyes to new products and services they might never before have considered.

Let’s get to it. It’s Week 3 of the School for Sharing Superheroes – the book that’s set to change the way you do business, better, forever. We start by unlocking your incredible savvy. Lose all inhibitions and gain everything. Let’s GO!

Expertise is where the magic begins for our Sharing Superheroes. It’s the bedrock on which great successes are built, from the general on the battlefield to the owner of the shop.

Expertise is an intoxicating perfume that we all wear, yet few of us recognise how sweet it smells to everyone around us. Expertise births incredible reputations for business operators with sustainable success in mind. Expertise produces remarkable results and crafts staggeringly-impressive relationships between supplier and customer.

Expertise is, in a nutshell, the very lifeblood of your growth – as a person, and as an entrepreneur. And when it’s paired with passion, expertise is dynamite.

Remember when you were at school and the teacher with the Tefal forehead dropped a strip of potassium into water and the collected audience of pupils gasped and screamed like they were on the scariest rollercoaster ride in the world?

Blow it up!

Let’s focus on the potassium, and let’s call it passion. It looks so innocent and meek when it’s contained, yet when you add it to your expertise, or rather a jug of H20 – WAM!

So why do we hide our expert status so readily? It depends on the person. There are

• Those who have it, and know it, but don’t think it’s important to anyone else
• Those who have it but guard it like a prisoner in a dungeon
• Those who have it but don’t know what to do with it
• Those who have it but don’t know it

Each is equally dangerous.

Expertise is important. Without experts, we fail. We need leadership, we need visionaries, and we need advice. Some people – they’re generally called women, because men like me are in the main far too conceited and riddled with bravado to have to leave their ego at the door for a minute to ask counsel of another – are clever enough to seek experts to get on the fast-track to answers rather than trudge through treacle themselves.

Remember we said ‘no secrets’? No self-respecting Sharing Superhero wants to come face-to-face with a big slice of Kryptonite, and we’ll be exploring later in this book why holding back on your knowledge is about the most daft thing you can do.

Get scribing

The #1 thing you need to do next, is start writing like a madman. I expect to see that pen pumping out some serious steam from its stem as you scribble down all the things you’ve experienced in your realm as an expert. The events you’ve been to, the people you’ve helped, the talks you’ve given, the books you’ve written, the articles that have compelled dozens or hundreds of people to share their stories aligned to yours…

Soon a pattern emerges. If you’re truly passionate about it, the light bulb moment will dawn and you’ll find your life’s purpose (or at least your graduation certificate from the School of Sharing Superheroes) waiting to be aired and amplified.

We’ve got issues. You’ll know you’re an expert because you’re either working in that space where you hold expertise already, or you have a burning desire to know even more about something. The triggers are there – the nuances, like people asking for your insight, right through to the overt and blatant being downright obsessed by something to the point where you can’t sleep without thinking about it.

So watch, listen to and read the signals and start making a song and dance about your talent. 7 billion people out there, and even if you’re into some random, esoteric hobby a tiny fraction of that audience loving your work can amount to a generous dollop of business.

Each type of expert – and chances are you’re one of them – will continue to learn, and change, and develop, and that’s part of the reason why it’s crucial that you take the next step and start sharing your savvy right away. We’ll be learning why it’s so important to extol your expertise later in the book.

To me, the most frightening type of expert is she who denies her aptitude. The simple fact of expertise is this: If you spend one hour doing something, you’re an expert over anyone else who didn’t. So you quickly come to realise that you’re an expert in a great many things.

You’re the expert. So use it.

Having knowledge or skill, as the dictionary definition intones, is what it takes to make an expert. So now it’s time to decide which of those areas of expertise is having a big snog with your passion.

The smart Sharing Superhero has already dropped the potassium in the water. They know that being expert in something they’re truly passionate about, they simply cannot fail. The world appreciates expertise and passion equally, and understands those who make the most of both, concurrently, are rare and to be cherished.

Being passionate and expert aren’t uncommon – it’s the sharing what you know, in the way only you know, that is uncommon.

Get to work

So now you’ve locked in on what makes your heart leap, and you’ve committed to doing something about it, we’ll take a look at how you start making headway towards establishing yourself as the thought leader and automatic go-to guy or gal who inspires and influences customer communities of today and tomorrow.

We’ll then create a Sharing Superheroes success strategy with tools to get your message across and bring your business to life.

Finally, we’ll look to the future and how to grow your reputation which in turn puts your business on a fully-fuelled jetpack taking you on a journey to as much success as you can handle.

So let’s get to it!

Tomorrow, we’re looking at content curation – the most powerful weapon in your smart marketing arsenal. Don’t miss it!