Simply speaking being recognized as an expert in a particular business category or subject adds to your credibility. As you increase your credibility, you build trust with potential clients. This increased trust eventually leads to increased sales. Internet article marketing is no different.

You can become a subject matter expert using these 7 steps. These steps are based upon EzineArticles website, but they can be incorporated into any article database provided the site has similar tools to EzineArticles.

1. Review Your Strategic Plan and Target Market Demographics: Your articles should focus on the needs of your target market. If you specialty is business coaching, then your articles should address specific issues such as strategic planning, marketing, employee retention or executive leadership.
2. Visit Article Categories on the Home Page of EzineArticles: Select those categories and sub-categories that align to the potential needs or issues of your customers.
3. Visit Each Article Sub Category: Select a specific sub category such as Business: Strategic Planning.
4. Identify Top Authors within Category or Sub-Category Click on the category and sub-category. Let's use Business: Strategic Planning as an example. You will be taken to a new page. Toward the top of that page is the anchor text link Top Authors in Business: Strategic-Planning. You will then see the top 10 authors for that category and the number of articles each has written. Knowing how many articles the author has written helps to construct a plan to submit the critical number of articles to become number one.
5. Visit the Top Author Within that Category Click on the name for the top author and then click on Sort by Newest. This will put all articles in this category in order from newest to oldest.
6. Read the First Article Displayed: Click to read the first article. Make sure you read all the way down to see the number of views as well as the actual date submitted. Reading is necessary to understand this writer's style and to determine if you can write even better. The submission date will tell you if the author is still actively submitting articles in that category. If an author is not actively writing articles for that category, it provides you an opportunity to sneak under the radar screen so to speak.
7. Visit Authors Section Within the authors section at EzineArticles under the Authors Tools button is a drop down menu. Click on View My Author Rankings. This will take you to another page where it shows your author rankings for each of the categories where you have submitted articles. You then can click on any of those categories and find your author ranking. Then you determine how many articles that you need to become number one or get in at least the 10 ten authors for that category. Now all is left is to write the articles.

During my first two years of article marketing, I made some mistakes, but have learned from those mistakes. There is definite value in being the number one author for a specific category. By concentrating your focus on a select group of categories will allow you to write more articles within each of those categories and to get you where you want to be.

Simply speaking, leaders are readers. If you enjoyed this article, sign up for Power Choices and join over 1,000 valued subscribers who receive this unique monthly newsletter designed to help your business life while improving your interpersonal skills.

Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S. is a speaker and Indianapolis business coach & Chicago business coach who has written hundreds of articles with a focus on improving individual and organizational performance through excellence in leadership to executable strategic plans.

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