Are You An Expert?

What exactly is an expert? Is an expert someone who does something professionally, is it someone who constantly strives to learn something new about a particular subject, or is it both? Why do some people claim they are experts even though they know little about the subject they blog about? Are you one of those people?

The “Expert” Test

Here’s a few questions for you to ponder:

How Much Time Do You Spend Learning?

Everything is about learning, you should constantly be learning something new. Even the top experts in any field are always discovering new concepts and ideas. If you’re not learning something new every day about your chosen blog topic, then you definitely aren’t an expert.

Do You Experiment?

You should constantly be learning, and you should constantly be taking all of those new ideas and and using them for experiments. Do you ever experiment?

Despite how you run your blog (from the perspective of an expert vs a journal/diary style), experimentation is the key to understanding everything. If you don’t try something out then how do you know the “expert” who you learn from isn’t full of crap? Maybe by experimenting you can find something wrong with a post someone made? That flaw could lead you to do a bit of research, do more experimentation, and write a kickass post.

Are Your Passionate?

Perhaps the most important question of all is, are you passionate about your topic? People are not stupid. Maybe foolish at times, but not stupid. It is pretty easy to tell if someone is blogging because a topic interests them and they know a lot about it, or if they are blogging for money.

A Real Life Example

Nusuni Dot Com is mainly about SEO and blogging. I try to fill in the cracks that many other similar blogs leave, and I personally only talk about stuff I am very knowledgeable of. For example, I don’t blog about monetizing websites too often because I don’t know a whole lot about it. However, the things I do blog about I know a lot about.

Let’s take SEO for example. I am subscribed to several of the top SEO and marketing blogs, I am always looking for new things to try out, and at least once a week I ask professional SEOs about some new idea I have and get their take on it. I run several little test sites that I usually test out SEO things on, although sometimes I skip them and immediately try it on this blog. Most importantly, I love the topic. Although I don’t do professional SEO, I know quite a lot about it.

The same goes for blogging, I only talk about blogging topics I know a bit about. I held off on making this blog series for a while for that exact reason - I like giving the best content possible. Even 3 months ago would have been too early to start it because I was still learning so many of the fundamentals. Now that Nusuni Dot Com has a fairly consistent growth each month, I feel that I know enough about the topic’s fundamentals to teach them to other people.

By no means am I a professional SEO or a professional blogger (although I could do freelance SEO and am hoping to reach problogger level someday), however, I do consider myself a bit of an “expert” in certain aspects of both topics. My point is - the things I actually talk about I know a lot about, and hours of research and planning go into each post.

Conclusion

You don’t have to be a professional (someone who does something as a career) to have expert knowledge of something, but you do have to know a bit about the subject. If you know nothing about a subject, then come right out and say it and don’t pretend to be an expert.

There are bloggers out there who throw content up “just to put content up” and they don’t care about the quality of it, but if those bloggers took 5 minutes and did proper research on a topic that actually interested them the blogosphere would be amazing.

Stay tuned for more Back To The Basics posts.

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