Often, when we think about starting a blog, we feel that we need to come up with something extraordinary, something that will blow the reader’s mind. And with so many brilliant blogs around, it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with such a wonder. What we don’t realise is that often our own area of expertise is fairly obvious to ourselves, but quite interesting and obscure to others.

Things that are obvious to you might not be obvious to the rest.

An example. I love doing systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and have done quite a few. So, after going through the process of learning how to do them, I feel confident about this particular methodology. And because I feel confident about it, I tend to assume that it is easy for everyone. Wrong.

I am lucky to work with many talented, hard-working people, and they each have their own area/s of expertise. Some of them do not know how to do systematic reviews (I am not talking about literature reviews; I am talking about proper, scientific methodology systematic reviews). So now and then they come and ask me for advise about it, which I am more than happy to provide. After all, I often ask them for advise too. But it took me a while to realise that what seemed obvious to me (for instance, designing a solid and comprehensive search strategy) was not obvious to my colleagues. This made me realise that I knew some stuff, and that I could blog about it. Before that, I felt that I did not have anything interesting to say.

So my advise would be: blog about things you know about, not about things you think you should be blogging about.

Read more about the essentials of blogging.