How to Become an Expert in Your Niche And Get Paid For it.

I have often said that to make money online requires that you have a passion, a passion for a niche topic that you’re an expert in. But what happens if you don’t actually have this? 

Today I will address that. 

I’m going to show you how to become an expert in your niche (and get paid for it!).

But first, have you considered that:

You may actually be an expert but not know it? Case in point:

I attended a party a few days ago where I met with some old friends.

I sat next to a girl who had recently started college and while we were all eating, the parents of that girl were asking me what I do. Naturally when I said internet marketing and affiliate marketing. They nodded their heads, but really knew nothing about it.

I briefly explained it and while doing so, the girl who was sitting next to me began inquiring on how she could do it too. I asked her what her passion was and she told me that she doesn’t really know and isn’t really good at anything. 

But I knew this could not be true:

So I asked her what subjects she excels at and likes. She told me that she didn’t really like any subject but was good at math. When she said that, I knew we were close to figuring out how she could make money online with her passion for math. And here’s how:

As we continued talking, I found out that not only was she good at math, but she also used to tutor people on various math subjects. And when that was brought up, I snapped my fingers and told her she could make a business out of this by doing this:

Making a website covering high school and college level topics of math and offering tutoring services via Skype and/or having people email her to help with questions. 

And I also told her about work at home sites like Tutor.com where she could do this as well if she didn’t have time to build a website.

She obviously became excited about this idea, but hasn’t yet contacted me back on learning more. That’s fine, with me, but the point her is that in her case she though she was clueless on any topic, but it turns out she wasn’t.

I would also bet that if we talked more, she could have found several more topics she could make niche sites out of it. In fact, here is a list of 50 awesome niche ideas I also list with passions people have they could make into real businesses. You can use that list, write down your ideas, see which ones you’re an expert in and possibly create an online business.

But here’s an interesting question. Is she considered an expert in her niche? This is what I believe:

If you know more about a topic than most people do, you can be considered an expert:

• In the case of this girl, does she have a math degree? No.
• Has she competed in any competitions and received awards? No.

But why is she then an expert?

Simple: Because she got good grades in topics MANY people have problems with. Her knowledge on these topics and the fact that there are groups of people who need help there already makes her expert enough to help them.

As long as you possess solutions to a problem your niche has, you can be considered an expert (and make good money), although it obviously depends on how much you really know.

I can find countless examples where people are in the same dilemma as that girl who actually do have something to offer a niche topic.

The point is, the more you live life, the more experiences you attain and with that, you become knowledgeable in something. The question is finding a link between that knowledge and passion.

For example, maybe you have had a lot of bad relationship experiences, would that make you unqualified to create a dating website? I would say no as long as you tell people how not to screw things up.

Even knowledge that has led to failure can be very, very productive in helping build your business. 

Well ok, so let’s say I do have an interest, but I know very little about it. What do I do then?

In this case, you need to start at the beginning. The fact is, no one becomes experienced right away in anything. Everyone begins any type of topic with 0 knowledge for various reasons:

• They are required to (maybe their education requires it).
• They become interested in it and slowly begin learning.
• They had a bad experience, but this is still an experience nonetheless they can make money of. See my example.

When I began online marketing, do you think I knew what to do? No absolutely not.

What I did was start from 1 resource that knew about this topic, learned from it, tested it and drew experience from it. Now many of these experiences led to a lot of failure, but as I said, this too was an experience I took with me. 

How you can start from nothing, become an expert in your niche, and build a business from it:

What I would recommend is that unless you have 1 topic that stands out in your mind that you love, to do this:

Create this list of the following 3 categories: 

Things you like: Include any topic here that in life you found interesting or currently find interesting.

Things you don’t like. 

Things you have experience in: Now here’s the interesting, thing, if there is something on this list that repeats in the things you like, write it again so you can cross reference it.

Now again, this is an optional list if you can’t really think of any 1 thing that you truly love above all else. But by creating this, you can see clearly where most of your interest gravitate to and make that a starting point.

Now let’s say by doing this (or if you already chose something) that you picked 1 topic. If you are not an expert in that (and that is subjective if you’ve been reading what I wrote so far) and truly feel like you don’t know anything, what do you do?

Well you have to begin learning. Find a blog or any site on that topic where you can extract knowledge to go from 0 knowledge to something more than 0.

Let’s say it is in the area of weight loss. Start from a common topic on why people have problems losing weight, read a few articles, understand the problem and solutions offered. After you’ve read that, guess what?

You already have SOME bit of knowledge. Then read more, talk to people who know this stuff, learn and keep learning. As long you like the topic, you will have a demand to learn more.

Going from just learning to helping others while making money through a website:

You don’t really have to learn everything there is before starting your website. Even some knowledge can be enough to create content on your site that starts things and as you’re building it, you can always continue researching more and more.

Example:

Let’s take that girl who is good at math. Let’s say she listed everything she knows about math topics on her site. Then she runs into a new topic she is unfamiliar with. What does she have to do? Learn about it, master it and put it on her site. Then she will need to repeat this.

So once you find the topic and know something about it, you already have a reason to start the business. You just need to follow this road to building it.

Becoming and being knowledgeable is a constantly recurring experience.

Even when you know a lot about a topic, you will never know enough. There is always room for more information and knowledge to fill your existing experience and that is an important part of your business.

Any new information you attain can and should be added to your site. To this day, anything new I learn becomes a new idea that I add to my website and any niche topic website becomes more popular and traffic generated with more content meaning the more you learn equals the more you add to the site which equals to more people visiting that site.

Thus you can proportionally grow your business with each new thing you learn about the niche subject. Let me give you one more example:

Let’s imagine a person who isn’t an official mechanic but loves fixing cars. They already posses knowledge to write a blog on fixing car problems and helping people in that niche do so. They already have the knowledge to go forward with this and promote car accessories to help people fix things. They can also offer car fixing consultations online.

I guarantee you that if you create that above list I showed you, that at least several if not all the topics you list can be linked to niches.