Fear of being the expert

One thing I love about this website is that it feels like a safe space. A sandbox to play and throw ideas around, and not worry if I sound stupid.

I don’t know how to process or explain it other than I’ve intellectually boxed off Vancano.com from any expectation. 

This is MY personal space and I don’t “have” to be an expert here. This is good to remind myself.

And that thought is funny. 

“be an expert”

In fact it’s absurd when viewed objectively.

Because the best content, in my experience, is when the author isn’t writing “as an expert” but is simply sharing their process or the steps they’ve done. Which of course demonstrates expertise. But it’s far more fascinating to delve into someone’s mind and see the thought process, even when that process might be unsure or messy. 

Do you agree?

So why do we feel this need to write as an expert.

Let me rephrase that.

Why do I feel the need to write as an expert when I’m writing for a business or one of my brands?

Here’s an example of “being the expert”

Let’s take the Worldbuilding School as an example.

The early articles are clearly the mark of someone learning a new skill set and writing about their process. But then the site gained success and I felt more pressure to be a expert, especially if I wanted to write books or courses and make money from my guides.

I never did those things because I didn’t feel good enough or that I was enough of an expert.

Having said that.

Marketing agencies push unqualified writers to churn out articles pretending to be experts and call it “thought leadership”. The Agencies motivation behind this is to complete billable hours or outputs for a client paying each month. Keep the client happy by publishing x number of blog posts each month, then it looks like we’re doing something to earn our money. 

The idea is the website will benefit from expertise in the hope Google will favour it and send all the traffic to that website. 

I’m not a fan of this tactic and it’s one of the reasons I didn’t stay at an agency as their Head of Content for long. I prefer to work on quality content.

I would rather see writers paired with subject experts. In this example, it’s the writer’s job to take the expert’s knowledge and turn it into an article that’s easy and enjoyable to read. 

It’s not the writer’s job to research the subject via Google, and slap a Frankenstein of the top 10 articles together. Or in todays age of ai, use ai to generate the Frankenstein article. Unfortunately I’ve seen many marketing agencies do this.

Has SEO killed the writer’s heart?