Why Building an Expertise Ain't Enough to Make Money With Your Content – Here's What To Do Instead
Mediocre creators succeed while many experts bite the dust
“Build an expertise and monetize it.”
That’s the typical chorus you hear all over the WWW.
Truth is, expertise ain’t enough.
Sure. You want to know what you’re talking about.
But the ones who’ll thrive in the Creator Economy aren’t necessarily the best in their field.
This letter shows you why.
The 10k-hour myth
The common myth goes like this: Devote 10,000 hours of your life to a skill, and you’ll become world-class at it.
I don’t believe in the 10k rule. At least not to make money.
If you already devoted those 10k hours, good. If not, then you probably won’t need to lock yourself in your basement and devote the next 8 years of your life to learning one skill.
The reason? The good ol' Pareto principle.
Creating content is not just about one skill or expertise… It’s about a set of different skills.
You probably need a few hundred hours of deliberate practice to spot the 20% that really move the needle.
Going deeper down the rabbit hole will fill your time with a tiny minority of things that aren’t that valuable.
Worse.
It may result in overthinking, overcomplicating, and plain procrastination.
Once you’ve mastered the 20%, don’t go deeper – go wider.
Too many things to know, too little time to learn
Scientific output doubles every 10 years.
You can’t keep up with everything.
Instead, you want to identify a type of expertise worth acquiring that will last. I call these evergreen skills.
Not only that: You want to identify a set of evergreen skills that you can stack to build a multi-layered expertise.
If you can combine being above average in several fields, you’ll end up with a unique skill set that most can’t compete with.
That’s true leverage.
It’s not about the expertise, but about the outcome
Nobody cares about your expertise.
I’m serious.
If you want to make money with your content, you need to become a problem solver. Instead of beginning with an expertise, begin with a problem.
People pay to solve problems.
Keep your antennae constantly open. That’s how you’ll find different ways (and skills) to solve the problem in a better way.
Here’s how
Let’s assume you want to teach people how to achieve higher rankings on Google.
You don’t need to be the best SEO wizard in the world to do that. At one condition: if you know how to combine a layer of several evergreen skills.
One of the skills is, being better than average at UX (User Experience.)
When you know exactly what type of font to use and how to find the right mix of colors, you’ll make a website visually appealing.
And this will inherently increase the time people spend on your site and improve your SEO rankings. The reason is that dwell time is one of the ranking factors that matters.
Humans are visual creatures.
Add to this…some rudimentary coding skills to make your website faster (also one of Google’s ranking factors).
Add on top of that, knowing how to create a lot of content fast. (While creating content quickly is not directly related to SEO… it will help you rank higher. The reason? You can’t predict which content will rank. So your safest bet is to crank out a lot of content and see which will take off.)
And if you also know how to write compelling articles (which goes back to understanding the fundamentals of copywriting), then you have a unique skill set to win the game.
You don’t need to be the best. Just above average in multiple skills.
And you do that by identifying the 20% that matters in each of them.
Stop daydreaming about your expertise. Build your skill set today.
Matt Giaro
As I was pondering over what to inscribe in response to this beguiling article, my heart swelled with an inexplicable elation. The resplendence of its words and the profundity of its thoughts left me in a state of awe. Alas, my search for an evergreen verbiage to do justice to this masterpiece begins.