FAQs for Prospective Clients

Expert Guide is the largest guide of its kind and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. As a result, organisations looking to promote their experts can be found by a global audience who may not otherwise have been able to locate you. Expert Guide allows people to find your experts, even if they didn’t know your organisation. Examples of outcomes Expert Guide has generated for our clients include:

• Media coverage quoting experts;
• Speaking engagements (paid and community service);
• Opportunities for research and professional collaboration with other experts;
• Private sector consulting opportunities;
• Paid expert witness work for law firms;
• Enquiries from prospective students to study or conduct research with experts.

Expert Guide was designed to help organisations looking to create opportunities for their experts to be interviewed by the media, and/or to engage with government, academia or industry. With this in mind, we cater specifically for organisations such as:

• Universities and educational institutions
• Research centres and institutes
• Museums
• Associations and special interest groups
• Commercial organisations that employ experts.

Expert Guide is not a commercial Yellow Pages designed to advertise our clients’ products. We offer a service that provides organisations with an opportunity to promote their experts for contact with journalists, government, industry and academia. If you are thinking of joining to market your product/service directly to potential customers, we cannot guarantee results, as our site is not designed for that purpose.

Expert Guide offers plans based on the number of experts listed:

One (1) expert - $295

Up to 30 experts - $395

Unlimited experts – from $1250.

Please contact us for an estimate based on your organisation’s requirements.

Expert Guide provides you with a password-protected login system whereby you can add, change and work with your experts’ profile/s at any time. Visitors find your experts by keyword searching, and you have complete control over choosing keywords for your experts. Each expert profile can also include your organisation’s logo, a backup public relations contact name and number, and a photo of the expert.

As well as listing your expert profile/s on Expert Guide, our clients are promoted in the following ways:

• Organisations with more than one expert on the site can list their logo on our homepage display
• We will send out an Expert Alert to subscribing journalists and visitors when you join to advise them of your participation
• You can submit research/expertise-related media releases to us to display on our homepage
• We will remind you and your experts quarterly to check your profile online and submit any changes
• We will let you know how you are going every quarter, by sending you hit statistics for each of your experts.

In 2006, visitors searched for more than 10,000 different keywords and phrases on Expert Guide. At the top of the list were topics that mirrored some of the year’s most prominent news stories: water, nuclear energy, climate change, terrorism, and weather. However, among the 10,000 topics were also keywords spanning thousands of individual areas of expertise across education, health, the arts, science, technology, law, politics, media, popular culture, and history, to name a few.

We make every effort to promote Expert Guide and ensure the site continues to be easy to find, easy to use and achieves high numbers of hits. In our 2006 client survey, around 70 per cent of responding organisations said they were definitely aware of an enquiry generated by Expert Guide. However, we cannot guarantee that our visitors will choose to contact you or your experts. Your hits depend on the keywords you list and whether individuals are searching for someone with your expertise.

In 2006, Expert Guide received 263,848 visits from Australia and overseas. These visitors resulted in our pages being “hit” 2,060,902 times.

Expert Guide is promoted directly to professionals we are trying to attract (such as journalists), and through other web sites these professionals use. However, we also make Expert Guide accessible to the world by programming the site so all experts’ profiles can be found through google and other search engines. This means our experts can be found by people anywhere in the world.

Expert Guide is accessible to all, but is particularly tailored for use by the media and other professionals seeking experts. Some of our key visitor groups include:

• Journalists
• Government representatives
• Speakers’ agencies
• Lawyers
• Academics and researchers
• Business and industry.

No. How much information you display is up to you. We recommend that you list as much information as possible, but you can choose to display only one central administration/public relations contact for all your experts if you want all enquiries coming to one number.

Each organisation on Expert Guide is registered by a central contact (often the PR/media manager) who can verify the expertise of the people who are listed for that organisation. The central contact also acts as a backup contact for enquiries.

This system ensures that the affiliation of experts on Expert Guide can be verified and that experts have the authority to represent themselves as members of the organisation.

If you are an individual looking to register, you will need to provide us with a central contact for your organisation who can verify your identify.

Yes, this is possible if you are a sole operator of your own business or are the sole contact in a small organisation. We reserve the right to verify your identify and decline subscriptions at our discretion.

No, not without verification. If you are in this situation, simply contact your organisation’s PR/media contact and ask them if they will verify you. Then contact us with your details and the details of your verification person. We can sign you up after verifying your identity with your employer.

All email contact information on this site is hidden from view, and visitors can only email you through an email form. This means that the person emailing you doesn't actually view your email address. This protects your privacy and also ensures your email address does not get added to spam lists.

The fees paid by participating organisations keep Expert Guide running, as journalists and other users don't pay to use this site. If you can't afford to pay and want to be listed, please email us through our contact page. Expert Guide supports a number of genuine nonprofit organisations through reduced-fee, basic subscriptions, and will consider these on a case-by-case basis, using merit and financial hardship as evaluation criteria.

No. People use Expert Guide because the site makes registration available to all organisations who could potentially offer experts. If exclusivity is granted, it will detract from the credibility of the site and as such, people are less likely to use it. So exclusivity will not increase your chance of media or other enquiries.

When a visitor uses the keyword search facility, the expert listing that most closely matches the search term/s is displayed. If several entries match the search word/s, these entries are then displayed in alphabetical order, by surname of expert. In this way, all organisations, whether they be regional or metropolitan, large or small, have an equal chance of their experts being displayed at the top of the list.

We are always interested in developing partnerships that will benefit our clients and visitors. If you belong to an organisation that wants to communicate with our visitors click here to contact us.

Just Contact Us to submit your question and we will either respond to you directly or post the answer here.