I heard an advert on the radio earlier today for “Volatarol: experts in pain relief”.

Now Votarol is an over the counter gel you can get in any pharmacy or supermarket here in the UK. So I began to wonder who these pain relief experts were and where you could find them? Presumably not standing next to every tube of Voltarol on the shelves.

And it's a drug that's been around pretty much unchanged since 1973. So it's not as if there's a team of pain relief boffins beavering away in R&D somewhere to consistently innovate the product.

But it just goes to show the power of being seen as an expert when they're using that line to sell over the counter pain meds.

So if pretty much every Tom, Dick & Harry is claiming to be an expert, how do you set yourself apart if you genuinely are one?

The answer isn't to claim you're an expert. It's to demonstrate you are.

That's the real value of blogging, lead magnets and email marketing for us consultants and coaches.

We're never going to attract millions of visitors or hundreds of thousands of email subscribers through our content – it's too specialist (and we probably couldn't cope with those numbers anyway).

But what we can do is use our content to prove our expertise to the small number of people who are perfect as clients for us.

So whenever you're blogging or writing emails or creating a new lead magnet, don't just take the quick and easy route. Don't just recycle the “same old same old” that everyone else is saying. Get your own unique ideas and insights out there to prove you really know what you're talking about.

That'll make a real difference.