Choosing Experts to Help with Online Marketing

When you bring in an expert to help you with your online marketing by contributing content to your blog or to your website, you are taking a substantial risk and you should be aware of that. There is no shortage of old adages that have to do with being judged by the company you keep. When you choose poor company, you’re going to find a lot of the work you may have put into establishing yourself as an expert on a given subject fading away as people begin to associate you with somebody who talks a lot, but who apparently doesn’t research what they say.

Some Tips of Experts

Validating Credentials

The Internet has, for better or worse, taken down a lot of the formalities that people used to deal with on a regular basis. For example, if you were running a brick-and-mortar business and somebody came in and said that they would like to offer themselves as a referred source for your clients when they need expert advice on a given subject, you would likely vet that person very diligently to make certain that you weren’t sending your clients to somebody who didn’t know what they were talking about. You need to do the same thing online.

When somebody approaches you and says that they are an expert blogger in one subject or another, the first thing you should do is to read their blog in depth. If they make claims, check to see if those claims are valid. If they seem to be a genuine expert on the subject, take the time to make certain that they are not plagiarizing other people’s content and putting it up as their own. This can help you avoid looking silly in the eyes of your readers.

Above all other things, if the person claims to be a PhD or to have some other impressive credential, verify that. There are plenty of people out there who do have PhDs and who use their PhD’s as ways to establish credibility for themselves when the field that they hold a PhD in has nothing to do with the subject that they talk about.

Set Limits

If you decide to take someone on as a contributor to your website, don’t be afraid to be a little bit domineering about the limits involved. Let them know which subjects are appropriate and which are not for your blog. If your blog happens to forward a particular viewpoint, let them know that your blog is not a place for them to debate the validity of that viewpoint, unless they happen to be shoring it up in some regard.

You’ll also want to be very careful about becoming the only venue for your expert on the Internet. Anybody who is an expert should have some other form of an Internet voice that they rely upon to publicize themselves. Essentially, you don’t want to end up in a situation where your website is the equivalent of a neighborhood pub and your expert becomes a house band that everybody is sick of hearing within a month.

Use Collaboration Features

WordPress themes allow you to set different levels of authority on your website for contributors. As you get to know someone better and, if they prove to be a very valuable resource and unfailingly reliable, you may want to give them a slightly higher level of privileges on your site. For instance, you may start them out as a Contributor, meaning they can send articles in for approval but cannot publish them themselves and, over time, you may want to make them into an Author, who can publish their own articles without your approval. The features in WordPress actually do provide a handy way for you to reward a good contributor and to set limits on your relationship with them.