What skills does one need to build an audience by becoming a recognised expert in a niche community?

I was reading @arvidkahl ‘s https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-two-goals-of-audience-building/ about audience building,
And reading it, I was amazed by the depth of the thoughts he shared.
And I want to share some of those thoughts too:

@arvidkahl writes: “The first goal is becoming a trusted domain expert”. And later, he says that in the personal brand context, one should be learning in public. Thus he adds a recognition layer.

Although recognition is always hard, especially if one starts from zero, one can be an expert, but he can't leverage his expertise while unrecognised by his niche community.

And recognition is a product of community trust and personal exposure. It comes with an intrinsic price
- be brave enough even to start
- be humble and stoic to learn from feedback no matter how it’s provided
- be deliberate and consistent
- create value



All of these are hard, but the last one is the hardest IMO. What’s the real value for the community? Helping people by solving their issues? Or teaching them to solve those issues on their own? Arvid suggests that teaching.

But to start teaching, one has to learn first. And most importantly, one has to learn how to learn. And do it in public. And it goes with the same price.

Btw, a great place to start learning how to learn IMO is here: https://nesslabs.com/learning-how-to-learn — an awesome piece by @anthilemoon at @ness_labs -> great thoughts and links to valuable sources.

But are there any other points of value except teaching and helping solve problems for the community? Arvid suggests that one can help with finding and solving a common problem or a pain.

In addition to these great thoughts, I’d suggest that one that wants to become a recognised expert must learn how to express his thoughts in a simple and comprehensible way.

There are people out there that are actually experts in their fields, and they would love to become recognised, but they just don’t know how to teach and explain things. And it goes deeper than just expertise in some subject matter. It goes down to personal skills to be learned as well.

Communication, I think, is one of the key skills here. You can be an expert, learner, engaged, but if you don’t know how to communicate — it will be much harder to become recognised.

A great place to start with learning how to communicate is to learn about storytelling.

In short:
- Learn how to learn
- Learn how to communicate
- Engage
- Be brave, deliberate and consistent
- Strive to create value




I personally lack the last 3 from this list. I will have to learn them. Any suggestions on where to start?