Chapter 61
Build Massive Credibility
Why should I listen to you?!?
Credibility sits at the heart of business success, particularly if you're a service professional or a subject matter expert where people rely on (and pay you for) your expertise. Luckily, modern technology has created tons of great opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and build credibility fast. This chapter focuses on two of my favorites.
Record Your Own CD
Recording and producing an informational CD product—or a series of informational CDs—is a great way to build credibility. It's easier than you might think and the production costs are shockingly low.
Keep in mind that you can download the free Audacity recording software, buy a decent microphone with a pop filter (refer back to Chapter 51 for more details), and you're ready to go.
A typical CD runs about 60 minutes. Personally, I speak at a rate of about 140 words per minute. That means a CD represents about 8,400 words for me. In a standard Word document, that's about 17 typed pages. If you have an outline, you could probably write the whole text over a weekend.
Here's another approach. You can have a friend do an interview with you and record the whole thing. You could write a bunch of questions and prepare all your answers ahead of time. If you take this approach, you'll need a second microphone and a jack splitter to plug into your laptop. Otherwise, you could use FreeConferenceCall.com to make the recording.
In 2007, I produced 11 educational CD ...
