Becoming Buddha: Make Yourself an Online Guru
By: Cody Moya | Posted: 25th March 2006
Being known as a guru is a wonderful way to make yourself much more credible to the average visitor to your site. But how do you obtain guru status? Not everyone can get that instant recognizability – and then, not everyone with guru status deserves it.
What the gurus know that you may not is how to sell themselves.
Step One: Believe You Deserve It
No one is going to give you guru status; you must take it. Sell yourself as a guru: write authoritatively. Have more than one website as well on which you address issues in your area of specialization. And above all, be willing to help anyone who needs information. A guru is someone to whom we go for help and knowledge, so be ready to give up a chunk of your time to do this.
You will be rewarded for that willingness with instant respect, name recognition, and a much higher likelihood of selling your product or service than the average vendor.,
Step Two: Deserve It
If you don't really have the knowledge you claim, your guru status is not going to last long. Explore the websites of others in your field. Know what's out there, and learn everything you can about your field and fields closely related to it. For instance, if you are going to be a model train guru, know everything possible about model trains, and also learn something about scale modeling, miniaturization, and architecture.
Step Three: Don't Bite Off Too Much
Gurus hold sway over relatively focused subjects. If you try to be guru to a topic that's too broad, you'll find two distinct problems: it will take up too much of your time to keep up with the information out there for that topic, and you will find yourself responding to so many guru seekers that you won't have time to properly maintain your business.
Instead of adopting a huge area (dolls), determine a smaller area of specialization (antique Victorian wax-headed dolls) and focus on it. If it turns out that you've chosen a too-small slice of pie, you can always add a little more later, but if your slice is too large, it's fairly difficult to give that extra part back without destroying all the credibility you've built up.
Step Four: Publish Stuff for Free
Gurus share their knowledge freely. If you attain guru status, you should be ready to print articles and ebooks, freely downloadable, that those seeking your knowledge can access. This not only shows that you know enough to write entire books about a subject, it also keeps too many people from asking you for help. (The maintenance of an FAQ will free up your time as well.)
But here's where many would-be gurus hit a snag: no matter how much you know about a subject, you may not be able to write convincingly about it. That's not really that much of a problem, though, if you know where to go.
You don't have to write your own information, though you should have mastered it if you intend to be a guru. Instead, you can contract with a writer or with an article broker to either have articles custom written for you, or to buy pre-written articles that you can then publish as your own. Not only articles can be contracted in this way, but also ebooks, put together in PDF format and sharing a large quantity of information with your customers.
Don't put huge chunks of articles on your site, either; instead, dole out articles over time, either as regular posts to your website or as blog entries, or even as emailed newsletters. Later you can compile article series into ebooks and special reports which you can then distribute from your website as well.
The most important part, though, is that even though you may be paying for this writing, you must give your information away for free. You are a guru, after all. Information is of so little value to you that you can afford to distribute it to those who don't have it. Not only does this make you look knowledgeable to your customer, but it helps them get to know you, and makes it even more likely that they will buy from you.
About the Author
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts course on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his
Free Internet Marketing Course and get additional information at his website: http://www.marketing.us
Printed From: http://www.articlealley.com/article_38356_3.html
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Tags: chunk, likelihood, gurus, architecture, seekers, willingness, dolls, wonderful way, area of specialization, model trains, miniaturization, model train