1. Commitment and Passion
That favorite cliché of high school sports coaches turns out to be true: You have to have heart.
2. An Expert Brand Strategy
Passion alone will not get you to the top, however. As famous attorney and author Andrew Sherman notes, "You wouldn't wake up and say 'I'm going to win a gold medal today.' It takes a lot of training."
3. A Target Audience
Becoming well known is much harder if you are trying to appeal to a general audience. Instead, Visible Experts choose a highly targeted audience and focus their efforts on meeting, educating, and understanding that group.
4. Continual Expertise
The term Visible Expert was coined to highlight the two critical components at the center of every industry star: visibility and expertise.
5. Communication Skills
Visible Experts are skilled communicators, equally at ease speaking in front of an audience of hundreds of CEOs and helping a client troubleshoot a problem one-on-one. They are also writers—of blog posts, articles, whitepapers, and even books.
6. Teaching Ability
Hand in hand with good communication is the ability to teach. Visible Experts are skilled teachers, able to translate complex ideas into understandable takeaways easily understood by their target audience.
7. Getting Help
Becoming a Visible Expert is no easy task, and at some point the sheer number of demands on your time will threaten to overwhelm you. A defining quality of Visible Experts is the ability to delegate and to ask for help.