Yes. What you need isn’t a formal qualification — it’s a perspective. More specifically: direct experience with the topic, enough curiosity to keep learning, and enough honesty to be clear about where your knowledge ends.
Those things are available to most people. A PhD is not.
What “expertise” actually means in the context of blogging
EEAT — Google’s framework for evaluating content quality — stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It sounds intimidating until you understand what “experience” and “expertise” actually mean in practice.
Google isn’t asking whether you have a certificate on the wall. It’s asking whether you have direct, relevant experience with the topic you’re writing about. There are three types of expertise that matter for a blogger:
Formal expertise — qualifications, credentials, professional experience in the field. Useful where you have it, but not a requirement.
Experiential expertise — you’ve actually done the thing. You’ve grown the plants, followed the budget, run the races, cooked the meals. This is what most successful bloggers are actually operating on, and it’s entirely legitimate.
Relational expertise — you’ve spent significant time helping others with this problem, in whatever context. Customer service, community moderating, teaching, parenting. You’ve seen the questions people have, you know what helps and what doesn’t.
Most bloggers have at least one of these in their chosen niche. The bar is much lower than it feels from the outside.
The case for being slightly ahead, not miles ahead
There’s a gap in almost every niche online between total beginner content (“what is X?”) and expert-level content (“advanced techniques for X”). That gap exists because the people who are 6 to 12 months past the beginner stage tend to move on — they stop being new at it, so they stop writing about being new at it. They either become experts who write at an expert level, or they just get on with living it.
That intermediate zone is where the most useful content lives. The “I just worked this out” content. The “this is the thing nobody told me” content. The “here’s the mistake I made and here’s what I’d do differently” content.
You can’t write that content if you’ve been doing the thing for 20 years and the beginner confusion is a distant memory. But you absolutely can write it if you’re 6 months ahead of your reader.
When I started Planet Houseplant in 2019, I was not a plant expert. I had become obsessed with houseplants relatively recently and had the search history to prove it — I knew exactly what people were Googling because it was what I’d been Googling a few months earlier. I was my own ideal reader, very recently graduated. That’s an incredibly useful position to write from.
And then a year later, I’d totally changed up my techniques. More content. Update the old content. Repeat forever.
The purl stitch principle
Here’s a small but perfect example of why the intermediate gap matters.
When I tried to learn to knit, I could not get the hang of purl stitch. The piece kept getting tighter and tighter no matter what I did. I gave up and switched to crochet (much easier, highly recommend). Years later, I found out the problem: for purl stitch, the wool needs to be behind the work, between you and the needles. For knit stitch, it goes in front. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Every knitting tutorial I’d read at the time had covered purl stitch. None of them had mentioned this specific thing — because to anyone who can already knit, it’s so obvious it doesn’t occur to them to say it.
That gap — between “this is obvious to me now” and “this would have saved me hours” — is exactly where useful blog content lives. You can only see it clearly from the intermediate zone. Experts have forgotten what it felt like not to know it.
When lack of expertise actually matters
There are niches where thin authority is a problem, and I want to be straight with you about that.
If you’re covering territory where someone could be financially or physically harmed by incorrect information — specific investment advice, medical dosing, legal guidance in specific jurisdictions, high-ticket financial product recommendations — then experience and good intentions aren’t enough. The stakes are too high for well-meaning but incomplete information.
The rule I’d apply: if something could seriously hurt someone if you got it wrong, either develop the expertise properly, bring in expert voices through interviews and citations, or build very clear caveats into every relevant piece of content.
If you’re writing about houseplants, budgeting as a general practice, beginner fitness, or which blog platform to use — your honest experience is enough, and being slightly wrong is correctable. Scale the level of care to the level of risk.
my blog became successful in the era of ‘just write a shit tonne of content’ but now I recommend you write 60-100 articles and concentrate on keeping them updated. Obvs write new articles as necessary (i.e. when you’re like, ‘ooh, I haven’t covered that’) but don’t feel like you need to write more blog posts for the sake of it.
How to build authority while you’re still learning
Document the learning process. This is the most underrated approach in beginner blogging. You don’t need to already know everything — you can write about figuring it out. What you tried, what worked, what didn’t, what you’d do differently. That content is uniquely useful precisely because it’s in progress. The pothos site is a live version of this: a new, tighter niche, documented as it develops, with real results fed back into the articles as they come in.
Link to authoritative sources where you’re covering sensitive territory. If you’re not the expert on something, cite the people who are. This is what journalism does. It’s also what Google rewards. Don’t be afraid to recommend other creators that will benefit your reader – sending your readers to someone that can help them if you can’t is a very easy way to build trust and network.
Be transparent about where your knowledge ends. “I’m not a vet, but here’s what I found when I researched this” is more trustworthy than presenting information with false confidence. Readers respect honesty about limits far more than they respect the appearance of omniscience.
Aspire to become the expert. This is the critical part. Blogging while you’re learning only works if you’re genuinely interested enough to keep learning. If you’re not, the content will thin out, you’ll burn out, and it will show. This is the thing that sustains a blog over years — not existing expertise.
The thing that actually kills non-expert blogs
It isn’t lack of credentials. It’s lack of interest.
If you’re blogging about something you’re not actually invested in — because someone told you it was profitable, or because you think you should be interested in it — the content will be thin, the voice will be flat, and you’ll run out of things to say around month three.
You don’t need to be the world’s foremost authority. You need to be curious enough to keep learning, interested enough to keep writing, and honest enough to be clear about what you know and what you don’t. That’s a much lower bar than credentials — but it is a real bar.
I made this mistake with personal finance. I had genuine lived experience of managing money carefully on a low income — that’s actually exactly what EEAT rewards when handled well. But I talked myself out of it once EEAT became a conversation, assuming I needed formal qualifications. With hindsight, my specific experience of being poor and frugal was more useful to most readers than any qualification would have been.
I should pivoted to frugal, vegan content, rather than scrapping all my old personal finance and replacing with generic ‘do vegans hate tigers’ content. If you’re interested, I don’t hate tigers a vegan. They’re doing their best. I do hate orcas though. They’re pricks.
Don’t disqualify yourself from something you actually know about. Just be honest about the nature of what you know.
For the full story of how this plays out across multiple niches — including the ones where I did and didn’t have enough to say — see Article #11: How I Tried 4 Niches Before Finding the One That Made Money.