You’re excited. You’ve started your journey from expertise to authority, and the ideas are flowing. Over the past few months, whenever inspiration strikes, you’ve captured it, turning thoughts into drafts. Leadership lessons from your corporate career. Your morning productivity routine. Industry trends you’re noticing. Reflections on work-life balance. Team collaboration approaches. That book that shaped your thinking.

Six polished drafts now sit in your folder. You’re writing consistently. You’re building momentum.

But here’s the problem: if you publish all six, you won’t build authority. You’ll scatter it.

Why? Because you haven’t yet asked the strategic question: Does sharing this information support my goals for building authority?

Not “Is the writing good enough?”—that’s a different question. This is about strategy and focus, and not every draft deserves to become public content.

Each piece you publish either strengthens your expertise in readers’ minds or scatters it. And time spent on content that doesn’t support your goals is time you could have invested elsewhere.

Before you start sharing your content with the world, ask yourself three questions.

Question 1: Does This Align with Your Expertise?

In the article “Which Area of Expertise Should You Build Authority Around?”, you identified your area of expertise—the one thing you want to be known for. Every piece of content you publish should demonstrate that expertise.

This doesn’t mean you can only write about one narrow topic. But it does mean everything you publish should connect to your core expertise in some meaningful way. Being known for too many things means being known for nothing. Just as thinking that your offering is for everyone actually makes it compelling to no one, spreading your content across too many domains dilutes your authority. Someone looking for expertise in productivity routines is less likely to pay attention to someone who also writes about leadership, work-life balance, team collaboration, industry trends, and book reviews. The more scattered your topics, the less credible you appear in any single domain.

Consider Marcus, a consultant who built his expertise in organizational change management. He wrote an article about effective meeting facilitation. It’s a good article. It’s helpful. But it positions him as a meetings expert, not a change management expert.

The test: Could this article have been written by anyone with general professional experience, or does it require your specific expertise to write it well?

When your article or post fails this test, you’re creating content, but you’re not building focused authority. Unfocused content can feel productive, but it doesn’t compound the way expertise-aligned content does.

Question 2: Does This Serve Your Objective?

In the article “How Does Your Objective Shape Your Pathway?”, we explored how different objectives—staying engaged, building influence, or earning income—require different approaches to authority-building. Your content needs to serve your objective.

Consider Elena, whose objective is earning income through consulting. She wrote a thoughtful, engaging article about why she loves her field and the joy of lifelong learning. It’s authentic and well-crafted.

But it doesn’t position her as someone organizations should hire. It positions her as someone who’s personally fulfilled by her work—which is wonderful, but irrelevant to her objective.

The test: If someone reads this piece and wants to act on it, what action would they take? Does that action align with your objective?

For staying engaged: Would they want to discuss this topic with you?

For building influence: Would they want to share this with their network or invite you to speak?

For earning income: Would they want to hire you or refer you to someone who needs your expertise?

Content that doesn’t serve your objective isn’t necessarily bad writing. It’s just not strategic for authority-building.

Question 3: Does This Speak to Your Audience?

In the article “Who Actually Needs to Hear from You?”, you identified your target audience by asking two questions: Can you benefit them? Can they benefit you?

Now ask: Does this content actually address their needs, challenges, or interests?

Consider Rashid, who identified corporate HR leaders as his target audience. He wrote an article about the theoretical frameworks underlying talent development—academic, research-heavy, fascinating to other academics.

But corporate HR leaders don’t need theoretical frameworks. They need practical approaches they can implement Monday morning.

The test: Would your target audience recognize this content as relevant to them? Not might they find it interesting if they stumbled across it—but would they actively seek out content like this?

If your audience is pre-retirees planning their finances, an article about cryptocurrency trends might be interesting, but an article about when to start taking Social Security is relevant.

When content doesn’t speak to your audience, it might attract readers—but probably not the readers you need to build authority with.

The Decision Framework

Now you have three criteria for evaluating your content:

Does it align with your expertise?

Does it serve your objective?

Does it speak to your audience?

Here’s how to use them:

If your content passes all three tests: Publish it. This content strengthens your authority.

If it fails one test: Revise it. Often a piece that’s largely aligned can be adjusted.

If it fails the expertise test, add insights or perspectives that only someone with your specific background could provide—turn general advice into expert guidance.

If it fails the objective test, adjust what you’re asking readers to do: if you need income, end with how to work with you rather than just inviting discussion.

If it fails the audience test, replace insider examples with scenarios your audience actually faces.

If it fails two or more tests: Shelve it. This doesn’t mean the writing was wasted—you practiced, you clarified your thinking, you learned what doesn’t serve your goals. Sometimes the answer is “not yet” (you’ll revise it later when you’re clearer on your positioning). Sometimes it’s “not ever” (this piece doesn’t serve your authority-building goals). Both answers are valuable. The goal isn’t to publish more. It’s to publish strategically.

Every piece you don’t publish protects the clarity of your expertise. Every piece you do publish should pass all three tests.

Your Next Step

Pull out that draft sitting in your folder. Run it through these three questions:

Does it align with your expertise?

Does it serve your objective?

Does it speak to your audience?

You’ll know within minutes whether it’s ready to publish, needs revision, or should be shelved.

Once you’ve determined your content is worth publishing, the next question is: where? Should it go on LinkedIn? Substack? Should you pitch it to an industry publication?

In the next article, we’ll tackle the platform decision—how to match your strategic content to the right outlet.

Matty Dalrymple guides professionals in building their presence through her consulting services and her workshop “From Expertise to Authority: Building Your Professional Presence for a Sideline or Second Act.” Learn more at https://www.theindyauthor.com/authority.

Read the accompanying article on Substack > Matty Dalrymple.

In my last article, How Does Your Objective Shape Your Pathway?, we explored how different pathways for sharing your expertise support different goals (for example, staying engaged, building influence, or earning income) as well as the idea that not every journey to authority needs to follow the pathway through all three stages of relationship-building (expertise-, personality-, and authority-based relationships).

But there’s another factor to consider when deciding where to invest your time, energy, and money: the audience you want to reach. You could write brilliant articles, engage in compelling podcast conversations, and deliver riveting talks and still fail to build authority if you’re not reaching the right audience.

The Two Questions for Identifying Your Audience

You can identify the right audience for your expertise by asking two questions: can you benefit them, and can they benefit you?

Can you benefit them?

Addressing this question helps to avoid two pitfalls that experts can fall into: the idea that your expertise will be valuable to everyone, and the idea that your expertise is for people like you. To avoid these pitfalls, consider five dimensions:

1. Topic — Will your area of expertise be of interest to them?

2. Context — What professional or personal context are they operating in?

3. Aptitude — What’s their comfort level with the mechanics of the area?

4. Goals — What are their goals, and how do they overlap with yours (even if priorities differ)?

5. Experience — Where are they in their journey with this topic, and how does their level of experience compare with yours?

Can they benefit you?

This question examines the extent to which your audience can support your pursuit of your own goals and primarily relates to their resources and authority. If your goal is to stay relevant within your field of expertise, then an audience’s willingness to invest their time to read one of your articles or to spend their money to purchase a book might be sufficient to meet that goal. However, if your goal is income-earning, you need to cultivate an audience that has more far-reaching resources and authority: for example, the ability to book you as a speaker or to hire you as a consultant.

Applying the Questions: My Podcasting Book Example

Let’s use an example from my own career about how to approach these questions.

In 2020, after four years of hosting The Indy Author Podcast, I felt ready to tap into the expertise I had developed to move into a position of authority on the topic of podcasting.

Can I benefit them?

Topic

It wasn’t hard for me to get past the misconception that my topic was for everyone. There are plenty of people for whom podcasts are just not compelling content, and I firmly believe that it’s difficult to create compelling content for a platform if you’re not first an enthusiastic consumer of that type of content. There are also plenty of people who might enjoy listening to podcasts, but who would prefer a trip to the dentist over a spell behind the mic.

Context

Even within the world of people interested in hosting a podcast, not everyone would be my audience. My content wouldn’t be of great value to someone who wanted to produce a limited series podcast featuring lightly edited interviews with relatives in order to make them easily accessible to friends and family. It also wouldn’t be of great value to someone who had hosted a podcast for a decade and wanted to parlay that experience into a position as a national or global influencer. I was neither of those people, and the audience I wanted to reach was more like me—someone who was using podcasting to build a community among people interested in my primary topic: the writing craft and the publishing voyage.

The topic area meant my audience would be fellow authors, meaning that in my book, I could explore the specific goals that this audience might have for a podcast, goals that might not be shared with sports commentator podcasters or academic podcasters or entertainment / pop culture podcasters.

And I wasn’t secretive about this context targeting—I reflected it in the title of the book: The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors.

Aptitude

By aptitude, I mean how comfortable someone will be with the mechanics of implementing your advice. In the case of the podcasting book, I was writing primarily for an audience who, like me, felt comfortable doing basic audio and video editing, loading content to distribution platforms, optimizing metadata, and so on. I wasn’t writing primarily for someone who just wanted to hit record on a device and then turn the audio or video file over to someone else to take it from there. I also wasn’t writing primarily for someone who planned to spend hours on each episode adjusting audio levels, compression ratios, or equalizer settings. My aptitude generally matched the aptitude I expected from my target audience.

Goals

I stated the reader goals that The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors would address right in the book’s subtitle: Creating Connections, Community, and Income. If a reader wasn’t interested in one of these things, then the book wasn’t for them.

However, the priority of the reader’s goals didn’t have to match mine. Income might be a tertiary goal for me, but the book would still offer value for someone for whom it was a primary goal.

Experience

So far, I was a pretty close avatar of the audience I wanted to reach, but experience is the area where most of us will be looking for someone unlike ourselves—someone not as far along in the development of an area of expertise. After all, if a reader had the same podcasting experience I had, they probably wouldn’t need to tap into my expertise.

Can they benefit you?

How could my target audience help me reach my own goals for the book and, more generally, for establishing myself as an authority? Of the three overarching goals most professionals have for building their authority—staying connected and relevant, building influence, and generating income—my goal for Podcasting for Authors was primarily building influence. That goal was met when an individual read the book, and as a result, I wrote with the solopreneur author in mind.

But if my primary goal had been income-earning, then I would have targeted the content to an audience that had the resources to hire me to consult with them about their own podcasting venture or had the authority to book me as a speaker on the topic. In this case, I might have adjusted the content to cater to publishing companies who wanted to launch branded podcasts.

Validating Your Audience Choice

Once you’ve identified a potential audience using these two questions, you can validate your assumption based on three simple tests:

The conversation test: Can you have three conversations with people in this audience where they express genuine interest in your expertise? Not polite interest—genuine engagement with the problems you solve. If you can’t find three people who care deeply, your audience definition might be off.

The search test: Are people in this audience already searching for solutions? Look for active LinkedIn groups, popular podcasts, well-attended conferences, frequent questions in professional forums. If there’s existing activity, there’s existing need.

The payment test: Are people in this audience already paying for similar expertise? Look for existing consultant or advisory services, paid courses, or speaking engagements. If no one within or serving this audience is paying for this expertise, question whether the need is real. (This test matters most if your objective is earning income; less so for influence or staying engaged.)

Run these tests to ensure that you don’t spend months creating content for an audience that doesn’t actually exist.

Your Starting Point

You can refine your audience as you learn more. Many professionals start with one audience in mind and then discover a more responsive segment along the way. I started my Indy Author consulting services thinking they would be most appealing to authors early in their indie publishing careers but began to niche down on experienced professionals preparing for a second act career or sideline as that became an emerging theme among my clients.

So here’s your action step—answer these questions about your target audience:

Can you benefit them?

1. Topic: Will your area of expertise interest them?

2. Context: What professional or personal context are they operating in?

3. Aptitude: What’s their comfort level with implementing your guidance?

4. Goals: What are their objectives, and how do they overlap with yours?

5. Experience: Where are they in their journey compared to you?

Can they benefit you?

Do they have the resources and authority needed to support your objective (whether that’s engaging with your content, amplifying your influence, or investing in your services)?

Does that audience stand up to the analysis? If not, what would you need to tweak to make the match fit?

Starting with intentional focus—understanding both how you can benefit your audience and how they can help you achieve your goals—beats starting with “everyone interested in my topic” or simply “people like me.”

Matty Dalrymple guides professionals in building their presence through her workshop “From Expertise to Authority: Building Your Professional Presence for a Sideline or Second Act.” Learn more at https://www.theindyauthor.com/authority.

If you'd like to read the article on which this episode is based, you'll find that at https://mattydalrymple.substack.com/publish/post/183379678

If you'd like to read the article on which this episode is based, you'll find that at https://mattydalrymple.substack.com/publish/post/183373810

If you'd like to read the article on which this episode is based, you'll find that at https://mattydalrymple.substack.com/publish/post/183368873

The transcript of this episode is available at https://mattydalrymple.substack.com/publish/post/183361332

In this episode of the From Expertise to Authority podcast, Matty Dalrymple shares how her consulting work with professionals outside the writing and publishing world revealed a clear, repeatable framework for transforming expertise into recognized authority.

Drawing on real-world client needs, she explains how activities like writing, podcasting, speaking, and consulting aren’t isolated tactics—but progressive stages of relationship-building. You’ll learn how these stages work together, why objectives matter, and how professionals can choose the pathways that best support a sideline venture, second act, or broader influence.

Prefer to read? This episode is based on an article you can find here: https://open.substack.com/pub/mattydalrymple/p/how-real-world-needs-shaped-a-universal