Whether you are promoting a book or promoting a company, one integral step is establishing your expertise in your field. If you are a novelist, your “field” is your genre. If you write non-fiction, your “field” is your topic or subject matter. If you own a clothing store, your “field” includes the clothing lines you carry.
The question is not whether you are an expert in your field, since, presumably, you are if you have either written a book or started a business. The question is, how do you establish that expertise publicly by sharing it with others, either your potential readers or your potential customers?
There are a number of ways to establish your expertise, and they are the same regardless of whether you have written a book or started a company. One way is to write a blog. Another method is to write articles and distribute them through “article banks” on the Internet. These are not mutually exclusive. In fact, once you are doing one of these things, you can easily do the other. The writer’s maxim is the opposite of the old carpenter’s maxim: you should write it once, and use it twice — or even more!
Interestingly, if you own a business, one of the best ways to establish your expertise in your field is to write a book and publish it.
President of Outskirts Press 