Part Six: Showcasing Your Expertise and Credibility
During this post we’ll cover how to best display your professional accomplishments and abilities. Before now we’ve covered:
- Part One — Bio, Headshots & Business Cards
- Part Two — Elevator Speech
- Part Three — One Sheet
- Part Four — Internet Presence
- Part Five — Social Media Presence
Using Your One-Sheet to Effectively Communicate Your Expertise
In the process of packaging yourself with class, you should be setting yourself apart, communicating your expertise, becoming an expert in your field, and building credibility. There are many ways to do that, but if we just begin with your one-sheet, developing your credibility by showing your published works, articles, and speaking topics is a good place to start. As you can see in Shannon’s one-sheet below, her credibility builders are the 3 icons on the bottom half:
- Featured on
- Author of
- Also offers
If you’ve done interviews with TV or radio stations/networks this can be a way to leverage that past experience. Kind of the “as seen on TV” saying. Listing your publishing credits is also essential. You may not be a million-copy best-selling author like Shannon Ethridge, but having a book in print is a huge accomplishment and definitely builds trustworthiness, in a sense, (that is, assuming that you’ve published well and your product is professionally designed and edited…without doing it well you can actually hurt your credibility!). Certainly, if you don’t have other areas of expertise like Shannon shows in the 3rd column, consider putting two or three endorsements or quotes about your book and/or ministry.
Using Your LinkedIn Account to Build Author Credibility
Another way to build your credibility is developing a LinkedIn account where you show your professional history. As an example, because I owned WinePress Publishing for nearly 20 years before it fell into the wrong hands, I have lots of editors, publishers, vendors and authors who have worked with me over the years and are happy to attest to my integrity and publishing savvy. The image below shows just the first handful of recommendations that show up on my LinkedIn profile. With this social media platform you are able to request a recommendation from people you’ve worked with or ministered to and build up your credibility in a powerful way…through the words of others who know and trust you!
I also have plenty of folks who endorse my skills of publishing, marketing, coaching, and many others. So this segment of your LinkedIn profile can add the opinions of others regarding your work and abilities.
On your LinkedIn profile you are able to list all the publications you have authored as well as articles published in magazines, print as well as online.
Showing the organizations you’re currently involved in or have been with in the past is another element of your profile.
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
But let’s also consider the challenge of the accessibility the internet offers to those who have an axe to grind or want to intentionally ruin a person’s reputation and credibility. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of allowing my former business to fall into the hands of unethical and spiritually abusive leadership, recognizing after it was way too late that the “church” I was supporting was actually a cult.
As is the typical behavior of toxic leaders of spiritually abusive organizations, when someone stands up and tells their story, the status quo is to threaten to sue the person who is speaking up, in an attempt to silence them, and then follow that up with whatever is necessary to destroy the person’s reputation so that no one will believe their story.
Now, with the internet, people with a little knowledge can completely trash a person’s reputation online in an extreme effort to protect their fraudulent and abusive activities. The challenge is there are no internet police who make sure what is posted online is the truth, the result is that people end up being unfairly judged and condemned because of the sinful behavior of someone trying to suppress the truth.
It’s a good thing I have such a good reputation from my many years leading up to my company being hijacked by the enemy, as I do not think I could have survived in business now with the level of defamation occurring about me. Because there are so many people and companies experiencing situations that threaten their good reputations on line there are a bevy of reputation management companies sprouting up all across the country.
I’m not sure I have the answer to this dilemma…not everyone can afford to spend $10,000 to $15,000 to salvage their online reputation…I certainly couldn’t afford it. But there are some practical steps to take to address it, if in fact you are facing this type of challenge.
Please email or message me if you’ve got this type of opposition and I’ll be happy to tell you what I know about cleaning up an online mess. Next time we’ll be taking a look at some of the intangible components that are vital in leaving a positive lasting impression…see you then!
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