This morning I was reading through my feed reader and came across an article called The Power of RSS Subscriptions. What caught my attention wasn’t the article itself but a comment that NickyCakes left in reply to someone else.

How’s that for a revelation? The internet has all but demolished our preconceived notions of what makes an expert. Anyone can be an expert on any topic. Throw a blog into the mix and not only can you become an expert at your topic of choice, but now the entire internet can benefit from your expert advice. That’s a hard concept to beat. In the past people have paid tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for specialized education and training just to have the honor of becoming an expert. Not anymore! Now you just spend a few hours reading the internet and gathering information.

Is it really that easy to become an expert?

On paper yes, in reality no. Anyone can throw up a blog and talk at length about literally any subject in the world. We can write thousands of articles and be read by millions of people talking about whatever topic we like and that’s great, but it doesn’t make you an expert.

The primary reason why is that the internet doesn’t spread information based on accuracy. It is spread based on popularity. Some times people assume that their is a natural vetting process in which bad information is culled and removed from the public eye simply because it is bad. Unfortunately in a world where everyone is looking to go viral bad information if presented skillfully will easily outlive accurate information.

To illustrate suppose I setup a blog extolling the virtues of eating grass. Day after day after day I post articles about eating grass. How it makes your eyes glimmer, and your teeth shimmer. How it all but eliminates the free radicals that are wreaking havoc with your body. I throw in some links to various sites about the benefits of juicing grass (yes people actually do this search for “juicing grass” on your favorite search engine), and participate in various forums about it. But most importantly of all I work the proper keywords and get myself ranked high in the search results article after article. Suddenly I’m everywhere and suddenly I appear to be an expert. Because everyone sees what I have to say.

The problem is I haven’t a clue about grass. I don’t know the first thing about it other than what I’ve read on various blogs and websites by the people who were smart enough to work certain keywords and rank before I came along and took over. So if the people I learned from were giving bad information then it naturally follows that my information will be bad.

How can you protect yourself?

Just use some good old fashioned common sense. Before you buy that lame ebook that guarantees to teach you how to make money online think for just a minute. There are umpteen zillion ebooks promising the exact same thing. All written by umpteen zillion different people. Guess what?! 99.99999% of those people who wrote an ebook and spent time, energy, and money to market it were banking on the “expert” advice of another ebook writer. And guess what that advice was? That’s right it went something like this “I’ll teach you how to write an ebook and start making hundreds of dollars a day so you’ll never have to work again!!”

Sounds good until you realize that the guy/gal who said they were going to teach you how to write an ebook so you don’t have to write again is not only still working, but still writing ebooks because apparently teaching someone how to make hundreds of dollars a day doesn’t pay as well as one might expect it to.

Like I said common sense is the way you protect yourself. Anytime anyone online claims to be an expert at anything be suspicious. Run like hell if they claim to be an expert and can’t (or won’t) show you the fruits of their labors.

In the end you need to decide if what you come across online is expert advice or not. On my other blog I talk about snakes and in the about us section I personally try to make it clear that I’m not an expert and am just learning about snakes and passing on what I learn. In fact after having written this article went back in and made it even clearer over there. Lots of people are like that, but most of them fail to mention that they are “learning and passing it on” instead they just keep their mouths shut a let people assume they are experts.

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Tags: expert advice