Reporter vs Expert – Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting
- 30 Comments... Click to Contribute
There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).
If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.
I’ll be frank, you want to be the expert.
Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.
Most Bloggers Are Reporters
The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).
There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.
Don’t Replicate Your Teacher
If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.
The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.
Even people who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.
How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.
If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.
Report on Your Process, Not Others
The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.
It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.
Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.
You Are Already An Expert
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.
Blogs, and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.
Reporting Is A Stepping Stone
If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.
Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.
Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.
Yaro Starak
Big fish in a small pond
Subscribe to Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Free with subscription
"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1000 Onine"
Forward to Friend
Email a copy of this article to a friend
Loading ...Comments
Leave a comment
Trackbacks
-
1
[...] found a great article over at Yaro Starak’s [...]
-
2
[...] you a reporter or an expert? Or more important: What do you want to be? Yaro’s post “Reporter vs Expert – Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting” might help you to make up your [...]
-
3
[...] what is happening than to “make” thing happens. Just like what Yaro Starak said in Reporter vs. Expert – Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting, “There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at [...]
-
4
[...] has an interesting post about two kinds of bloggers – reporters and experts. He believes that experts will make more money than [...]
That is the best advice i have read on all of these “professional blogging” sites in a long time. Just be yourselves people and let us know what YOU know, the unique wisdom that you have acquired.
Don’t just parrot what the big guys say.
This is exactly what I am trying to do with my acne blog. There are way to many reporters in this niche, and I am looking to become an expert, by using the steps you have mentioned.
Awesome Post Yaro.
I’ve never thought of the way I blog before.
I love the comparison between the reporter and an expert.
Thanks for this.
Cheers,
Carlo Selorio
I agreed with your “Report on Your Process, Not Others”.
The only way to really learn is to blog about your own journey, your sweet and painful experience.
Overtime, you will gain your own followers.
Have a productive day.
Yaro,
I hope you are right. My blog is just that – a record of what I learn as I muddle through the learn to blog process. In fact my blog serves as a good form of documentation that I often turn to when I forget how I did something previously.
Excellent insights, as always, Yaro. A couple of thoughts:
Being an expert is one way to become remarkable. If you have deeper insights than everyone else, then you can write unique posts about the subject (like this one). In turn, you get attention, precisely because it’s both useful and rare.
Becoming an expert also takes time, and it’s hard to replicate. To use a Warren Buffett term, this is like building a moat. If you can write an info product on something no one else can write about, then, assuming it’s valuable to your readers, other people will have a hard time infringing on your “market share.”
Similarly, one of the reasons reporters are so seldom remarkable is because it takes less overall time and effort to find a story. The only real way you publish something remarkable is if you scoop a killer story first. You may get lucky and do it once in awhile, but it’s hard to do it consistently, taking a tremendous amount of work.
Look at the top Digg power users. These are your classic reporters in the Web 2.0 scheme of things. From what I’ve read, they spend hours every day looking up stories and trying to be the first one to break them. They can’t stop, either. If they quit posting new stories for a few weeks or months, then they quickly slip down the rankings.
Although, if you can do it consistently, the rewards are huge. Look at sites like Engadget. Sure, they are experts, but the real value of the site is they break news on new technology before anyone else. There are lots of people looking for news on this subject, so it’s a profitable niche. They’ve also built their reputation to a point where people send them the scoop first — a moat constructed of a massive readership and prestige.
Anyway, I think it comes down to being remarkable and doing it in a way no one else can replicate. Going after expert status is probably the safer bet for most people. On the other hand, if Bill Gates is your father and you hear all kinds of stuff before anyone else… maybe being a reporter is best.
Personally, I suck at reporting, but I’m a natural expert on certain rather difficult subjects. A couple of real estate gurus have been pushing me for over a year now to do a home study course on how to flip luxury homes ($500,000 US and up). People are hugely attracted to it because of how much money you can make per deal, and almost no one is qualified to comment on it… except me. The combination makes my knowledge very valuable.
Then again, I have no interest in doing it. But that’s another story
Hey Yaro
Cheers for the tips – very handy, especially as I’m just at the beginning of my latest blog.
I like your approach to doing things long term and building on your previous successes. Makes a lot of sense.
And it’s also comforting to once again hear that it takes time – it’s certainly not something that happens overnight! Unless of course, by overnight you mean working over the night for many days weeks and months!
Cheers!
Gideon Shalwick
Yaro,
Brilliant post! I’ve nurturing a blog that’s a few weeks old, I was getting ready to post a “reporter” article, promoting a fellow blogger’s wonderful site (which I will still do at some point) when I read your post. I’ve been struggling with finding the authority in me but it came out in the post I created, which has also served to inspire me go deeper with my passion.
I get now, very clearly, the importance of being authoritative, of standing up for what I believe in.
Thank you!
Sol Lederman
Yaro,
I had to laugh when you mentioned about reporting even if it means doing it about something we are trying to get out of. This is so true for me as I’m so over MLM and yet people pay me and search me out even to blog for them about the subject.
Guess this would make me some kind of expert then.
I also have to kick my butt into gear to get more busy with niches as you are so right.
Thanks for a great and thought provoking post.
Monika
I had never heard of the reporting / expert distinction before. I am neither
I fall into the ‘reporting your own progress’ category and it would be nice if I was an expert one day.
Though I think there are more roles in blogging than just those two – what about provoker? Entertainer? Steve Pavlina makes me think every day, I Can Has Cheezburger makes me laugh every day. I wouldn’t say that either one were reporters or experts at anything.
Great article.. I’m certainly still a reporter.. I guess I am trying to find my ‘Expert’ side… I’ve only had my blog up for a few months and still a little unsure of the direction I want to go with it.
I guess initially when you start a blog you think.. damn if they can do it why can’t I!? Its only writing.. and people will read anything.. well thats not entirely true.. people only read something that has some value. So now I just gotta work out what am I an expert in that is valuable to others..
Yo Yaro!
I have to tell you that when I started off my blog as I reporter, I got bored very quickly.
Now I can base my blog posts on my own experience, not only do I enjoy it, people are finding me online and I’ve made a few JV partners just since the beginning of the year when I decided to focus on what I do best, build wordpress blogs and market them to sell a service.
The plus is, I’ve made more affiliate commissions from my blog than I’d ever imagined possible as a result and it’s so sweet when those “you’ve made a sale” emails come in and it is because people see me as authority on this particular software and blog marketing.
Thanks again for the great post,
Trish
Great post. To me, “expert” isn’t a status you obtain. There are varying levels. You are an expert if you know a little bit more than the people you are teaching. If fact, those at a expert level above yours may not even be able to reach the readers that you can because for the most part, your expertise tends to limit the amount of people who understand what you are saying.
And of course, thinking outside of the box can help you obtain a more maverick expert status, where you don’t follow the crowd but you definitely get results.
Hi Yaro, What an inspired Post!
I think I learn the second lesson from you again
That is the best advice i have read, Just be yourselves and getting your own ways to earn. it’s like Dig to deeper, spread to wider and fly to higher
…
by the way, Thanks for visited my Blog Road-Entrepreneur.com
I completely agree with your approach, Yaro. Being a reporter often means re-hashing information that can be found elsewhere. Unless you are breaking new information, which most bloggers will be unable to sustain over the long hall, providing some expertise about some niche subject matter will keep readers who share the interest coming back time and time again.
Ryan
Thanks for the post.
My blog has only been around for a couple of months — but I’ve expanded it and I actually get some traffic from StumbleUpon.
The expert/reporter analysis was very helpful since I do a lot of report but I usually try to add some of my own insight.
Yaro,
Great post! So true about becoming an expert via a reporter. We totally agree with you regarding the fact that you really want to become an expert as this is the only way you will be taken seriously.
We are leveraging our knowledge and have started a new blog in hopes of becoming an expert. Even before reading your post, we realized this is the avenue to take!
Check us out at !
Good day Yaro!
Another inspiring piece from The Yaro. I could not agree with you more on the point about building one’s own expertise.
This entry lifted my spirit to complete a quest I’m currently embarking on, is inspired by what you’ve written in “Blog Profits Blueprint”
http://www.jaxons.org/2007/10/15/blogging-everyday-for-six-months/
I try hard not to even copy a topic idea from any blogs that I read in the personal development realm. I don’t want to sound like anyone else. I think much better to create your own messages, your own voice, your own topics, your own way of saying it… your own everything. If it’s something of worth – you’ll succeed with it. If not, better than having copied someone else’s ideas at least you’ll have unique content and be helping someone that thinks like you! Even if it’s only 1 guy in the corner of the internet cafe with a sunflower seed eating problem. You know? Vern
Hey Yaro, great post. I just got your email and was going to write something interesting in the comment but its all been covered.
So, great post! from a fellow QLD entrepreneur.
Cheers
Brad
I agree that the blogsphere seems over populated by SEO, blogging for profit, how to give up your day job blogs. I was surprised to find that when I started trying to find peers in my “budget travel” niche that it was really hard to find anything – the odd travel diary sure but not blogs on their own domains. Heaps of forums though!
It is all about self-expression, isn’t it?
I’m just in the beginning of the way to successful blogging, and I DO use other’s people thoughts to make a content for my blog, but I allways try to express my own opinion and I report of my results…
This is probably the best post i’ve read on the best way to approach blogging. I have recently started several blogs and your post has certainly given me food for thought and has probably changed the way I will approach my writing.
very useful article for me. From now on, I know better which path to choose, being an Experts rather than just being a Reporters. thx very much…
Hello Yara,
Two quick things … a thank you and a correction.
1) Thanks. I found your article very useful. Based on your definition, I guess I can call myself an expert on writing about vocal improvisation. (Who knew?)
2) There’s a tiny mistake in the section “Report on Your Process, Not Others” in the second paragraph, second sentence … “then report back YOUR results, not there’s.” “there’s” should be “theirs.”
(Hope you find this helpful rather than annoying *smile*)
singingly,
sg