Ready to get yourself and your online business more publicity than you can handle? More "celebrity status" equals more sales, and more sales equals more profit than you can shake a stick at.

Discover exactly how to build your online credibility and clout and become an Internet marketing force to be reckoned with ... in only seven simple steps.

1. Recognize Your Strengths and Accept Your Weaknesses

What are you the best at? What do you love to do?

First, get a pen and pad, and write down five things you REALLY excel at. This can be anything from writing poetry, to doing hair, to making people feel comfortable, to taking leadership roles, to baking perfect cakes.

Now, walk away from that list for a few days, and come back ready to redefine your focus.

Next, narrow those five items down to ONE topic which you can be considered (or by doing a little research, can quickly become) a "pro" on. This should be something you're VERY good at, and LIKE doing.

This is the niche you'll be focusing on in this article.

Now, think about which three items you removed, and WHY. Understanding this will help you realize your weaknesses, helping you strengthen your focus to determine the ideal target market for YOU.

TIP: How so? No one can be an expert on EVERYTHING.  Realizing what you're *not* so good at will help you to  maintain a tight focus, and avoid taking on projects in  those areas, which would be better left to an expert in another field.

2. Know Your Niche Inside and Out

You can become a "guru" on an unfamiliar topic with a lot of sweat and research, but it's going to take longer and be much more difficult. The fastest, easiest way is to choose a topic that you *already* know a lot about, and simply further the learning process.

So how do you know when you know "enough" to be considered an expert?

Here's one rule of thumb:

If you wouldn't feel comfortable speaking or writing an in-depth report on your niche, CHOOSE ANOTHER ONE.

But of course, you still won't know EVERYTHING there is to know about absolutely everything in ANY niche you choose. So, try to identify the areas within the knowledge of your niche with which you're not completely comfortable, research them until you are, and THEN -- and only then -- continue on to the five steps below.

3. Start Establishing Yourself as an Expert in Your Field

Add content to your website and/or ezine which directly relates to your niche market.

If you don't have either, create a small site and/or ezine very specifically targeted towards that niche, and promote them often to build name brand recognition, and get the market aware of you. For help writing articles that bring you endless publicity and prospects, and that help you become a well-respected authority in your niche, you may want to check out Ezine Writer, an e-book that does just that.

Send lots of freely reprintable articles to ezines, and have an article archive available on your website that publishers and site owners can access when they need content to reprint. (If you make it easy for publishers by pre-formatting your articles on autoresponders at 60-65 characters per line, it will get you published more.)

This is how I started building my own brand awareness. Every time I published my ezine, I'd take that article and send it to a list of targeted publishers, and submit it to article directories.

When people start seeing your name all over the place, they automatically assume that you really must know your stuff -- whether that's true or not. <G>

Why else would people publish your work so much?

And as you get that exposure, you'll start to get more business proposals, joint venture offers, and people will be tons more receptive to offers that YOU approach THEM with. There's really no negative aspect to article writing. (For help putting your article promotion on auto-pilot, you might try Ezine Announcer.)

4. Start Working Your Way Into the Public Eye

Here's where it starts getting easier. Post to discussion forums related to your niche, and keep writing and submitting articles.

Not only are these easy ways to make yourself known, all they cost is your time. It doesn't very take long at all for your credibility and publicity to soar as a result of posting to forums and getting your articles published in prestigious ezines.

TIP: Even if the ezines aren't very well-known, if you constantly have articles running in several smaller ezines, as people continue to see you, you'll soon become more popular, and your work will become a hot commodity.

5. Give Your Publicity and Credibility a Final, Powerful Boost

Now that you've established yourself as an expert of a tightly-focused niche, you can really start pushing for PUBLICITY. Are you ready for success? Now is the time to approach high-profile marketers in your industry and collaborate. This shouldn't be very hard at all ... so long as you HAVEN'T skipped any steps!

Recommend each other's ezines on your respective websites, offer well-established marketers a high commission to resell your products (if you have any at this point), or ask them to work with you to complete a new product.

You can even combine all of these ideas and do them all at once to really come out with a bang. But the absolute FASTEST way to boost publicity and name recognition for free is to co-author a product with an already "high-profile" marketer.

If you're partnered with someone who's already made a name for themselves in your market, people will automatically think of YOU as the "next big thing" ... by association. (This works best and is LONGER-LASTING when you partner with someone to actually co-author a product, rather just endorsing each other's products to your subscribers.)

6. Don't Be Afraid to Milk the "High-Income Market"

People always come to me asking if their products are priced too high. Sometimes it's truly laughable -- their products could be UNDER $30!

No price can be "too high" as long as the quality of your product is in sync with its price. And the higher your prices, the more people who'll sit up and take notice of you.

High prices aren't very common in Internet marketing -- though I've watched the "sell your product for peanuts" trend diminish over the past couple of years, thank goodness.

Even so, most marketers still:

A) Try to "over deliver," by offering ridiculously low prices to gain immediate profit or a large customer base to "back-end" to, and are convinced that quantity = quality.

*NOT!*

I'd rather have a 25-page special report telling me ONLY what I need to know to master a topic ... than a 500-page overstuffed "manual" (that probably STILL comes up short in at least one area) ANY day.

Who has time to read all THAT crap ... and actually *APPLY it* after they wade through it??

Or, most marketers still...

B) Are afraid to meet price resistance -- whether real or imagined -- by charging over a certain price that they've got set in their OWN minds as "expensive." Over delivering is great, so long as you're not shortchanging yourself in the process.

TIP: The next time you get the "high price jitters," remember that there are MILLIONS of Internet users in the high-income bracket. Don't build up a base of "cheapskate" customers and try to force an expensive product on them later on. Instead, START OUT with customers who are willing to invest "big money" into top-quality products that will save them time and effort.

On the same token, you can't expect first-time buyers to invest $500 in you up front! It's a tricky business, this pricing thing.

In this case, it's smart to have several pricing levels for a product, to "create" entry-level, mid-level, and "expensive" pricing options, so customers still have something "low-cost" to choose from, while also seeing that you're not into pricing ALL of your products for little to nothing.

Whew! This needs to be broken down into yet ANOTHER article if I hope to ever fully explain it all. We'll save that one for next week.

7. Finished? Now Do It Again!

Making yourself a "guru" really isn't a hard job. Knowing your niche inside and out and making YOURSELF known is pretty much all there is to it.

Think about it -- who do most online marketers consider to be "gurus" or experts in YOUR field?

HINT: "Gurus" are nothing more than VERY widely-known EXPERTS in a certain field of expertise.

NO PUBLICITY/*NAME RECOGNITION* = NO GURU STATUS.

So get out there and make yourself "a guru." I'm behind you 100%!