The more I’ve been blogging, the more I see that tapping into your experience is the best source for blog post topics.
The posts where I share my experience are usually better received than my other posts. They get more traffic and comments.
Business Owners Have an Advantage
If you’re not familiar with blogs, you may not realize that many non-business bloggers don’t have a lot of experience. As a business owner, you have an advantage because you’re involved in your industry on a day to day basis whereas your average blogger is an amateur or a hobbyist.
I don’t want to downplay amateurs. In fact, there are many amateurs that have as much or more expertise than business owners. But for the most part, business owners have more experience.
Experience Trumps Book Knowledge
For many new business bloggers, after blogging for a while, they feel like they are running out of things to say. They had a good number of topics to cover but they can’t thing of any more topics.
For these bloggers, the problem is not seeing their experience as a source of blog topics. They feel like they don’t have anything left to share because they don’t keep up with their industry as much as they would like by reading books and magazines. However, practical experience is usually a better teacher than sharing something from a book.
Once these bloggers start seeing their experience as a vast knowledge pool, they overcome writer’s block and generate more than enough topics to keep their blog going.
This article, Report vs Expert, helped me realize this point. Yaro Starak, the author, argues that expert status is gained by having relevant experience and then sharing it. By sharing your experience, you give evidence that you are an expert in your field and your knowledge is worth listening to. You’re not just a reporter, or someone who just relays someone else’s content.
Yaro writes that it’s all about leveraging what you’ve experienced and overcoming fear and insecurity by sharing it with others. Here’s a relevant quote from his article:
Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.
Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously, you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.
Over to You
How often do you blog about your experience?
