“Can Anyone Else Do What She Does?”

That was the critical phrase when I was working in the corporate world.  It was the phrase that got me hired, kept me in my job, that helped me realize that I didn’t even need to have a job.

Because the answer to the question was always “No.”

In the corporate world, though, this sometimes worked against me. If you want to keep yourself from getting promoted, or if you want to get yourself promoted into a job no one else wants, become indispensable.  (Of course, in our recovering economy, there are a lot of people who would have loved to stay in jobs they hated.)

Creating a situation where no one else could do what you do…

that training someone to do it the way you do is too expensive….

that replacing part of your job with unmanned robots or computers creates more problems than it solves…

Can result in a blissful permanent job situation, or with you being trapped in your chosen vocation forever.

However – and this is how it relates to marketing or entrepreneurship in general – when you own or run a small business, being indispensable can be the first step to unblocking a river of lifetime, repeat customers and clients.

There’s nothing like being considered an expert in your field to set yourself apart from the crowd. It also acts as a kind of job security, at least as close as one can get to having job security as a business owner. How?

Because now that we have the web, there’s a permanent, eternal record of your expertise that you’ll be able to fall back on and refer to forever.  The results for the searches potential customers will do on your name may fluctuate from time to time as your marketing does, but some results will be there.

At any time of the day or night, someone can look you up and find out about you, your company, and what your happy customers think of you.

But it’s not enough to be an expert. You’ve got to be an expert that has a reputation for getting results. Great reputations don’t happen at random, they are built. And the best way to affect what people see about you is to market yourself.

Many people think that promoting expert status or doing reputation management for search results is something that only needs to be done if you have something to hide.

On the contrary, everyone needs to be on a constant mission to make sure that at minimum, the first page of results for their name and their company name brings up the proper information.

After all, if someone’s thinking of buying something and types in your name, it’s not going to help them with their research if your Amazon wish list and favorite stories on Digg come up instead of your website, company information and product/service pages, right?

Yet, that’s what often happens to people who aren’t paying attention.

It’s evident that the edge you need to succeed, online or offline, is to attain or maintain expert status. It’s all for nothing if no one knows about it though.

Become an expert, and then market through your expertise to get faster sales, and better traffic – the kind that buys.

I’ll tell you a story from my life to illustrate it.