The Blogger’s Secret is a method and a system for developing and sharpening your expertise on a specific topic. It can be expressed very simply:
Write about a topic twice a day for six months and you will be recognized as an expert in that field.
Hidden inside this simple method is a system for making it possible to sustain this output and to weave a set of connections (in your work and in the world) that go beyond a simple cut and paste of other people’s words and ideas.
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This site puts these ideas into practice. It’s a demonstration of systematic and deliberate efforts to write with authority while still learning what there is to learn.
You can become expert simply by being persistent and methodical and public in your efforts to learn. Your site constructed for this purpose cannot be about anything and everything that comes to mind; as soon as someone describes it as eclectic or has a hard time pinning down what you are doing, you have strayed from a purpose. That doesn’t mean that random synaptic firings are bad, just that they have no place here.
An advantage to this style, however, is that you don’t need to know what you are expert at until you become that expert. The unique writing atmosphere of the Internet means that you and your readers and will guide you there. Once you have pinpointed where you have a unique expertise, you can adapt what you write to explore it at more depth.
Originally written November 3, 2008, and edited July 5, 2017.