This can be its own section because it accomplishes two things at the same time:

You need to become the expert in your field

Yes, YOU, not your company.

It's common to want to make everything about your company, but in this instance it's important that the expert is human. People want a person they trust to be the one giving advice, not a company.

A simple example is that people trusted Rand Fishkin in the SEO space. Sure, he did everything for Moz, but people saw it as his advice. He was the expert.

That expertise followed him to SparkTorro that is doing well now.

You need to become that expert in your specific niche.

Sure, that makes sense on the surface, but HOW do you do this?

Hopefully, you have a niche. So there aren't already hundreds of other people claiming the same expertise. Then, you do the following:

Have a press section on your website

This should have your logo in an easy-to-use format. A professional headshot. A short bio and anything else that a reporter can copy and paste for their story.

Sign up for HARO and similar

HARO or Help a Reporter Out is a simple tool where reporters ask for experts to answer questions or do interviews.

It's far from perfect and depending on the subject it can be hit or miss in terms of opportunities, but it can lead to some awesome opportunities.

Another tool is SourceBottle. There are others as well to check out.

Get on podcasts!

In the next section, I will be recommending that you start a podcast. I'll go over the reasons then, but, I am not the first to make this recommendation. There are now thousands of new podcasts starting all the time, and basically all of them want to do interviews.

Let them.

I have found that podcasts are incredibly easy to get onto if you are an expert, and once the podcast goes out on the wire they will advertise the heck out of it. Which in turn advertising you. They show you as the expert, link to your site and more.

Guest posting

This is the most effective form of link building out there. The issue is that it is a lot of manual work. Basically any way to scale or automate this system has been caught by Google and gotten companies kicked off the search engine entirely. 

This is the system that many people consider hiring an agency for. It’s impactful but can take up all of your time. The agency solves for that. Up to you if that is worth it to you.

The system: 

Create a ton of content (what to create is detailed above in the content section) 

Find websites looking for contributors. I often search for “keyword + contributor guidelines” or “keyword + write for us”. 

This will often net you highly relevant, high quality sites that you want linking to your content. Follow their guidelines and write content for them 

Within the content you write, reference your own content and link to it

This is a lot of manual work - mainly because the publications you contact will probably have strict quality guidelines for the content itself that you send them. It is the most impactful way to build links though and has been very successful in the past.

Social media

You might find it interesting that the social media section of this is buried in one single chapter around being an expert.

To be honest, I don't have much experience getting actual growth from social. I have had tons of customers, as well as myself, go viral on various social media networks for various reasons and the actual results just didn't get much in terms of new customers.

It just got fake internet points. All those vanity metrics I talk about.

There is one good thing social media can do, though: it can be yet another way for you to show your expertise.

Keeping an eye on LinkedIn and other professional networks for terms I am expert in, and simply answering questions or becoming part of the conversations, has gotten be far further.

Basically, turn it into a human thing. You are simply always there and being helpful when people talk about your niche.