You Want to Be An Expert. What Do You Talk About?

“…give away your best stuff for free: your knowledge.”

Holding the expert position offers a huge benefit, especially if you’re running a small company. Being the expert separates your brand from the rest of your competitors in your industry. There are many ways to establish your expertise, but the most actionable is to give away your best stuff for free: your knowledge.

Start by making a list of topics that you have a deep and wide knowledge base for. If you’ve been in your industry long enough then you should be able to come up with at least 20 topics. At this point in the process, we don’t want to self-edit.

Here are some ways to think of topics within your industry:

• What are some common problems your industry faces?
• What common mistakes do novices make?
• What piece of knowledge radically changed how you do your job?

After you’ve compiled a list of potential topics to teach then it’s time to verify it with your audience. This follows “The Lean Startup’s” model of feedback loops. Don’t waste your time building out a lesson plan if you haven’t tested your initial idea. Throw your ideas out to a survey, personally message people and ask if this is a course they might be interested in.

If you’re an existing content creator, then your audience may already be asking and commenting questions. Listen to them. This is how I’ve made most of my content. Answer the question that many people seem to have.

Originally published at https://www.jordanpanderson.com