I don’t know if you’ve ever been here, but Yahoo Answers represents the strangest concept I’ve seen lately–try the human powered search engine.  How it works is, essentially, you pose a question to the Yahoo Answers community and wait a few days.  Come back and check it, and it’s entirely possible that people have answered your questions.  Some answers are excellent, well-reasoned and clearly well thought out, while others are utter garbage.

But where this comes in for you is that, if you become one of those people, and one of those excellent, well-reasoned, and well thought out responses, you get to establish yourself, if only for a short while, as someone who knows what they’re talking about.  And if you include a link back to your blog, you can continue to show the Yahoo Answers folks that you really know your stuff.

And convincing a community the size of Yahoo Answers that you are indeed an expert in your field of choice can’t help but light a fire under your readership counts.

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There are two really, really good reasons to spare a post or two in your normal round of blogging for the really obscure stuff in life.

No matter what your blog of choice is–Spider Man costumes, wood beads, web design or mortgage loans–you know there are little bits of esoterica roaming around everywhere.

Most of the time you don’t even consider them as posts because they’re just too out there, but if you try it sometime, your readers might enjoy.  Here’s why.

1. Your advanced readers will love hearing about something different. If you can talk to experts and tell them something they don’t know, you’ll win massive respect points.  In fact, you’ll likely be seen as an expert yourself, and we all know how valuable that classification is.

2. Your newer readers will love being “in on the secret”. Sure, they won’t understand everything about what you just said, but the fact that you took the time to try and explain it to them is going to be worth huge respect points in THEIR book too.  Naturally, you don’t want to do this often or you’ll be regarded as inaccessible, but every so often, it can’t hurt.

If you can make the strange and obscure understandable for new readers, you’ll catch the eye of the experts too, who can then stage discussions about your unusual topic.  So every so often, try and stretch your readers’ minds.  They’ll thank you for it.

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Now, while we’re working on the subject of “really obvious ways to make your blog look better”, and by doing so improve your bottom line, one great subject to look at is the topic of CREDIBILITY.

Credibility, basically, is the standard people use to judge the weight your opinions carry.  For instance, if I went up to you and asked, who would you sooner ask for stock advice, Joe who runs the Edward Jones office downtown or Crazy Larry who lives in the alley between the Edward Jones and the Chinese take-out place, who would you go with?  Clearly, Joe–if for no other reason than Crazy Larry won’t stop screaming about how the government took his fillings in the seventies and replaced them with cheese.  But if I posed that same question, replacing Crazy Larry with Warren Buffett, the so-called Omaha Oracle, Joe sort of looks like, well, Crazy Larry when put alongside the Buffett.

It’s all about your credibility.  What do you bring to the table?  Have you been working in HR for years?  Your HR blog now makes a lot of sense.  Been weaving baskets since you were a kid?  A crafts blog is a good fit for you.  If you’re an auto mechanic, you probably shouldn’t be writing about marine biology, nor should a software salesman be writing about canning fruit.

Remember, outside a court of law, the term “expert” really only means “person who’s really good at or knows a lot about something in particular”, and if you’re an expert in anything, it’s a great topic to start a blog about.

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Lots of people, especially in the online world, are self-proclaimed experts. Whenever I read a bio that says “expert” I am always very wary of that person. Expertise is something that is usually acquired over a period of time and experts become experts because others recognize them as such not because they call themselves an expert.

So, how do you become an expert? The answer is painfully simple, practice. Doing something over and over and becoming proficient at it will give you expertise. What separates those that do this and those who go on to become recognized as experts is the sharing part.

Experts - real experts share the knowledge that they have gained from their experiences with other people, helping them grow and gain knowledge. Those people then apply that new knowledge, find that it works, and then refer to the person who shared it as an expert.

What knowledge can you share with your readers that will earn you the title of expert?

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