In last week’s blog we looked at the challenge of not having an established business reputation – whether you’re new to business or you’ve made of change of direction. We saw that having a strong reputation is vital if you’re going to grow a successful business.

So how do you go about building your reputation? You could shout loudly about your business and tell people how great you are at what you do. You could spend a lot of money advertising your services and hope that the right people will see your adverts. You could even ask some other people to shout about how good you are. But will people really believe what you say?

A much better way to build a solid reputation is by sharing and showing off your expertise. Instead of telling people how good you are at what you do, show them. Here are a few of my favourite ways of doing this:

Blogs – every week at Appletree we post a blog that talks about a different aspect of content marketing. We share tips and we solve problems that we know many of our prospective clients are struggling with. We give all this away for free and never brag about how great we are. Sometimes we include details of a book you can buy or an event that you can attend, but there’s no hard selling. We use the blog to show people that we know what we’re talking about.

Newsletters – each month we publish another issue of Scribbles, our email newsletter. (You can subscribe here if you don’t already receive it.) As with our blogs, Scribbles is all about sharing our marketing knowledge and expertise. We chose a different topic each month and go into detail about how you can use it to market your business.

Books – these really are one of my favourite ways to share your expertise with people. Writing a book can be hard work, but doing it shows that you’re really committed to helping other people and to sharing your knowledge with others. Writing a book automatically gives you a good reputation in business. It does have to be a good book, mind you! It needs to be well written (preferably by you, rather than by a group of other people), carefully thought out and expertly edited and proof read. There are too many books appearing these days that have been knocked up in a couple of weeks and it shows! A cheaply printed book with a homemade design on the flimsy cover will do more to harm your reputation than build it.

In last week’s blog I told you about one of my clients who is changing direction in business. He wrote a book a few years ago about the topic he used to speak on and it served him very well, as a way of building up his reputation as an expert in that field. Now that he’s moving into a new area of business with his public speaking, he’s about to start work on writing a new book. He knows that it will be hard work, but he also knows that writing and publishing a book is a really effective way of sharing his expertise and therefore establishing his reputation.

Next week in this blog we’ll look into more detail at how you can use a book to share your expertise and develop a strong business reputation. If you can’t wait that long and want to talk to someone about using a book to promote your business, click here to email us, or call us on 01635 578 500.