13 Awesome Marketing Tactics to Turn Ordinary Partners into Internet Superstars

Get Found, Convert Site Visitors to Leads, and Make a Personal Brand that’s Irresistible to Prospects

In the old days, it could take dozens of years, if not longer, before a partner became a superstar …. a “go to” recognized authority that everyone knows and trusts. They got there painfully slowly, more often by chance then design, and truth be told, if you look around at most CPA, consulting and law firms today, only a very few number of partners are truly superstars.

While there’s no disagreement that superstardom is directly related to sales, conventional wisdom is that becoming a superstar is a combination of doing great work for clients that get results, building a personal network of referral sources, joining civic organizations, and making presentations at trade associations. And, if you’re lucky enough to work in a firm that has a marketing department worth its salt, you’ve been getting some business development and public relations support.

This is all great stuff that works, but in an age where communications are delivered in 140 character chunks, where digital communities are hangouts for prospects, and where digital networking has hundreds of millions of participants, this go slow route to superstardom just doesn’t cut it.

It’s an era where traditional ways of building superstars need to give ways to strategies and tactics that recognize that prospects now first turn to online search to find solutions and information for their problems. So today, now more than ever, becoming a superstar involves being found first online.

But being found first isn’t enough in and by itself. Today, superstars and superstars in the making need to differentiate by virtue of their thought leadership, not by virtue of how long they’ve sat behind a desk. Thought leadership – delivered though content marketing tactics like blogging, videos, podcasts, whitepaper and so on - is the great differentiator and a way to level the competitive playing field.

Here are 13 tactics that may not necessarily help you leap over tall buildings in a single bound, but will most definitely help you  leap over your competitors when it comes to building your Internet presence:

1. Optimize your website bio using keywords related to your subject matter and industry expertise
2. Do a much better job with LinkedIn: update your profile, specify your skills, ask for referrals and skills recommendations, link back to your web site, link back to your blog postings, and get involved in LinkedIn groups to promote your blog and any new content you’re using for lead generation
3. Do lots of blogging on your subject matter expertise, and tag your posts they can be indexed in a way that showcases your experience and expertise
4. Put a call to action button on your bio page that links to all of your blog posts so a site visitor can then do a deeper dive on your thought leadership
5. Put a call to action button on your bio page that links to all of your white papers so a site visitor can then do a deeper dive on your thought leadership, and so you can generate a lead by tucking access to the whitepaper behind a form
6. Do short videos on key issues or pains your prospects or client are facing, post them to the website, and optimize them for searchability on YouTube 
7. Take slide shows or Power Point presentation you’ve done and post them to the website and slide sharing sites, making sure that they have been titled correctly for key word optimization purposes
8. When show casing services on the  website, have a link to the partners serving that service or niche
9. When show casing industries on the  website, have a link to the partners serving that service or niche
10. Repurpose any speeches or presentations you have given into content that can be used on the website, in particular for lead generation
11. Write whitepapers – use these for showcasing your thought leadership and for lead generation
12. Guest blog on other sites
13. Make your bio engaging, tell a story, not just an inventory of who/what/when/where

In the final analysis, there are so many more opportunities for professionals to become superstars than ever before. You don’t have to  wait 20 or 30 years like today’s baby boomer partners, you just have to understand the world of search and inbound marketing, and make a commitment to incorporating a content marketing strategy into your personal brand development efforts.