Nick Williams Weblog

The biggest mistake you are likely to make in your journey to create your expert niche

Becoming perceived as an expert is one of the most important elements to creating a successful niche for yourself. But here is the biggest single mistake I see people make around beginning their expert journey: They view the people they look up to, the authors, writers, broadcasters and speakers, and they say to themselves, “But I’ll never be able to say it as well they do, know as much as them, be as good as them or be as well known as them.” They then use that as a judgement against themselves and don’t bother to start their expert journey. I am sure you can recognise that dynamic, focussing on what you don’t know, haven’t done, and what experience and qualifications you think you don’t have.

Shift your focus

As a trainee expert you need to shift your focus. You need to understand and recognise what you do know, the experience you do have, the goodwill you have already created and whatever profile you might have. Then you can look in the other direction to the people who don’t know what you know and see how you can inspire and teach them. Your job is to learn more from your expert heroes and heroines and teach what you know to the people coming up behind you.

Knowing what you know

I find that the biggest problem for many people is that they believe everyone knows what they know. They don’t recognise the significance of their own life experience, and the information and ideas they have. Often this is because it comes easily and naturally to them and they think it is easy for everyone.

So take an inventory of the following:

· What do you know?

· What successful experiences have you had?

· What have you learned how to do?

· What are your most significant personal achievements?

· What major obstacles have you overcome?

· What are you naturally good at?

· What have you spent years getting good at?

· What are you always being asked for your help with?

Millions of people don’t know what you know and have not had your life experience. Learn to treasure what you know and understand that there are people you could help, teach and mentor with what you know right now. You may need to take time to "unpack" and understand what it is that you uniquely know, but is in there waiting to be unlocked.

Want to know how to start to Establish Yourself as an Expert? Click here to look at our online learning programme.

How to share what you know with the people who would love to know it - teleseminar on March 7th 2007

Creating inspiring information products is very exciting. The idea of being an information packager or information entrepreneur as it is often now called may be very exciting to you and you can see the potential of it for you. Over the last five years I have made tens of thousands of pounds sharing ideas, inspiration, experience and information through products as well as through live talks and books. It has been a hugely fulfilling to be able to teach, inspire and educate people in dozens of countries without having to turn up personally every time. It has also enabled me to earn money while I sleep and while on holiday.

I am also an avid consumer of other people's information and ideas and have bought a number of other people's audio products, e book, home study packs and the like. Some of them have been helpful, but the majority have left me a little disappointed, and actually less inclined to want to do any further business with them than before I bought their product. We'd like to show you how to create great products that truly help people and then have them come back to you for more of your valuable information and experience. Having researched and delved into this area, I can see there are a number of key things you have to know and get right in order to do it successfully and start to reap the many rewards that are available.

I have created this teleseminar, along with my colleague and friend, Niki Hignett, to lay out the territory for you and show you what you need to know and do in order to succeed in this area. By the end of the seminar you have a clear knowledge of:

· What you need to know and do to succeed in packaging and sharing your ideas with a global audience
· The biggest mistakes most people make around creating their products
· What it is that makes your ideas and information valuable and sought after
· How to create your web site to support your success in providing information provides

Niki and I will guide you through this overview and you can see how you need to develop yourself to succeed. The teleseminar can help you wherever you are on your journey with creating information products.

· Are at the beginning of your journey.
· Already have content that you want to be able to share with a wider audience in different forms
· Have tried becoming an information packager but found it hasn't worked as well as you'd like

Once you know how to apply the ideas we are teaching, you can open the doors to the possibility to reach a wider audience, be more fulfilled and potentially earn thousands of pounds.

This international teleseminar on March 7th 2007 will especially benefit you if you are an author, writer, coach, speaker or consultant.

Click here to book your place on this inspiring and idea packed seminar

Click here to learn more about my friend and colleague Niki Hignett 

I never set out to become an expert

I never set out to become an expert. I knew I could never be an expert because to me an expert was someone who was world renowned, with at least one Ph.D, the most successful in the world in their subject, and that was never going to be me. But I had struggled with being unhappy in my own work and found ways to became a lot happier and fulfilled in what I did, and found a lot more meaning and purpose in my own life.

So I started to share ideas with other people who weren’t happy in their work. I started giving talks, then some workshops, then I started coaching people individually. I found that I could write so started writing some articles. I found myself being invited on the radio and TV, and invited to give comments and ideas to journalists. Then a publisher offered me a contract to write a book, and that went well and then I wrote another four books.

But I still didn’t consider myself to be an expert, but saw myself an author, coach and speaker. Today I seem to have helped enough people to have become regarded by some as an expert. By focusing on serving and contributing in the ways that I am passionate about, raising my profile and getting known for my contribution, people have start calling me an expert and I am getting comfortable in thinking of myself as one. I have now given hundreds of talks in dozens of cities in 14 different countries because of my perceived expert status, have an international coaching practice and have contributed to over 1,000 media features. And I love my life as an expert!

Why have I become known as an expert? Simply because I learned to solve a problem in my own life and then wondered how I could help people who had a similar problem in their lives. It has nothing to do with having a PhD – I have no qualifications to do what I do, but it has a lot to with my passion for my own life and work, and I want wholeheartedly to contribute to the lives of others. Today, most experts gain their credibility through their own life experience, not through credentials.

I have become good at inspiring and teaching other people. I have a thirst for improving and increasing my knowledge. I love being asked to share my knowledge and give tips and am asked to do so often. I have found a middle ground between thinking I know it all and I believing either I know nothing or not enough. I feel honoured and blessed to be considered an expert as it has opened so many doors for me that wouldn’t have opened otherwise.

Here are seven major benefits I have found from being regarded as an expert, and these are reasons why you should seriously consider thinking developing your own expert niche:

1. People know me and are attracted to me and are already willing to listen to me – I don’t need to cold call to get business
2. I positively differentiate myself from other people
3. As an expert I get paid to talk about what I think, what I know and share my experience
4. I receive a constant stream of enquiries to write, speak, broadcast and share my expertise
5. I get to experience fulfilment as I help hundreds and even thousands of people and get a regular flow of appreciative e mails for me and my work
6. I constantly recognise and create new ways of sharing my knowledge and expertise
7. I make a lot more money by sharing my expertise in many different ways with different groups of people

Today, no-one, not even major organisations, really serves a mass market. We all create and serve niche markets. You may become the expert in your town or community on a particular subject. Just think for a minute - if 200 people found your information, ideas and experience helpful to them and were willing to pay you £100 a year for the benefit of your expertise, you would create £20,000 ($39,000, €30,000) of income from just that. Then the idea of becoming an expert becomes exciting and appealing.

Now if you are reading this and wondering how you can get going with your own expert journey, I can help. I teamed up with Barbara Winter, author of the hugely successful book Making A Living Without A Job to create a simple but immensely powerful seven-week on line learning programme entitled Establish Yourself As An Expert. In it you’ll be guided through some of the core ways that all experts think and approach what they do. We don’t claim that this programme will make you an expert in seven weeks, but it will quickly and clearly start you on your own expert journey of sharing what you know and finding the people who need what you know. Click here to look at the programme or buy it now.

And in case you are thinking, "But that's OK for you. Having have written books so you can be expert." Let me suggets you think about it the other way around. You get to write books and be published because you have created a niche of expertise already.