You’re genuinely good at what you do. You can do things most people in your field can’t. And right now, that’s probably the world’s best-kept secret.
If you’re an expert, a developer, a founder, a freelancer, or a consultant who does remarkable work and stays nearly invisible while doing it, this one’s for you. That invisibility has a name, at least in my head: the expertise-visibility gap. And I want to show you how to bridge it.
Because if your expertise isn’t visible, the opportunities that depend on it never reach you. The clients don’t call. The hiring manager never hears your name. The cool projects, the community recognition, the speaker invitations: they never come.
I first understood the flip side of this back in 2010, at the very first WordCamp Bulgaria. My talk’s topic itself barely matters now, as I look back. What stuck was what happened after I stepped off the stage: people came over, introduced themselves, asked the questions my talk had raised for them, told me about their own situations.
Somewhere in those hallway conversations, a realization clicked that has shaped how I work ever since. When you share what you know, when you tell people what you can actually help them with, you start building real connections. And that, the way I see it, is the whole point of personal branding.
I hadn’t thought about that stage in years, until I started preparing for WordCamp Europe recently and realized I was about to give a much bigger version of the same talk. You can watch the recording of that session, or read on for richer context and a few points I didn’t have room for on stage:
Being visible is hard and getting harder
There’s a great quote that exemplifies the issue we’re facing:
“Times are bad. Children disobey their parents and everyone is writing a book.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero (supposedly)
Sounds timely, right? However, it was said in 50 BC by Marcus Tullius Cicero. (Well, supposedly. This was never verified, but digging into this isn’t helping my narrative here, so let’s leave it.)
So while making your expertise show is nothing new, it is truly getting harder, for three reasons.
The first is noise.
We’re all publishing into an environment that’s louder than it has ever been, and the volume is climbing from two directions at once.
More experts are showing up than ever: somewhere around 2 million posts, articles, and videos go up on LinkedIn every single day. And the machines have now overtaken them. When the growth agency Graphite analyzed a large sample of the web, they found that as of November 2024, more new articles are being published by AI than by humans.
More people, more bots, around the clock, and the odds that any one thing you say gets noticed keep shrinking.
The second is fragmentation.
This is especially true for independent professionals and small agencies.
When a new client comes looking, I’m not competing with two or three big agencies. I’m competing with a thousand other marketing, positioning, and brand experts, all individually excellent, none of us able to out-position all the others. You can’t out-brand a field that large. Out-thinking it, though, is wide open. The data backs this up: in the 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership report, 53% of buyers said that when an organization produces genuinely good content and shares insights, a big brand name matters much less to them. People want to see you think before they hire you.
The third is the “I’ll just use AI” reflex.
For about a year now, a striking number of prospects have arrived already holding a fifty-page strategy document, generated by AI, that they’d like me to “please just implement.” When I read those documents, they’re page after page of confident, fluent sludge that will make the company sound exactly like every other company. However, a non-marketer will see the AI slop as a good basis for a project and then wonder why they should even hire an expert, if the AI can produce the strategy.
It’s easy to just blame the customer, but knowing good strategy from strategy-shaped nonsense isn’t their job. What you need to do as the expert is to highlight the value you bring, being a real human with a real brain and real experience-based opinions.
The value and the hurdles
So why fight to close the expertise-visibility gap at all?
Because visibility is what turns expertise into opportunity. The same Edelman–LinkedIn research found that 64% of B2B buyers trust thought leadership more than a vendor’s own product sheets and brochures, and 95% say strong thinking makes them more receptive when you reach out with a pitch. None of this is about vanity. Visibility is simply the mechanism that turns what you know into work you actually get hired for.
I understand why this is hard, though, even if you don’t need the numbers to convince you. I talked to founders and agency owners before and after my talk at WordCamp Europe and heard a common refrain about how hard branding yourself is. It comes down to two very human things: they didn’t know how to start, and putting themselves out there felt a little too cringe.
This whole piece is my answer to both.
The three-step process below handles the first, and the very last thing I’ll say handles the second.
My beef with the “personal branding” volume game
For the longest time, almost every piece of personal branding advice I came across was some version of “share more, post more, show up more.” Listening to the gurus meant you were convinced that a certain version of ceaseless spewing of stuff somehow equates to “profit”. The one thing I kept not seeing was the part that matters most before any of that: a clear sense of direction.
My background is in strategic marketing, the kind of work that starts by defining a brand’s positioning and messaging before anyone writes a single post. Spend years doing that and the disconnect becomes impossible to unsee. On one side, “build your personal brand.” On the other, “here are a bajillion content ideas, go.” And nothing in between to connect them.
It doesn’t really matter how fast you’re going if you’re heading in the wrong direction.
Stephen R. Covey
A content engine running flat-out toward nowhere in particular is just a faster way to stay invisible.
So before we talk about producing anything, we need two other things. First, personal positioning strategy. Then, your message. Then, and only then, a consistent presence. Get the first two right and the third gets dramatically easier.
Step 1: Start with strategy
Before we get to “be visible by talking more online,” we need a couple of answers. They become crucial building blocks of a foundation for all your public presence, because if you know this, you essentially know everything else, too.
Audiences: Who are you actually talking to?
Every marketer worth their salt will tell you to start in the same place: figure out who you’re talking to. So take a beat and define your key target audiences. The obvious place to start is “my best potential clients,” and that’s right, but it’s incomplete.
When you map this for yourself, there are at least five groups worth your attention:
- The people who could become your best customers or clients.
- The people who could amplify your ideas to a much wider audience: other voices in your field, thinking about the same problems.
- The peers who could become project partners. I work alongside designers and developers constantly, and I want to be in their field of view, so that when their client has a messaging problem they think of me, the same way I think of them when I need design or dev work.
- The people who could recommend you: community leaders and senior folks with a wide circle around them.
- And, honestly the most important, the people you actually want to hang out with and learn from. A big part of doing this work well is enjoying it, so use your newfound visibility to connect with people you admire and learn from.
Once you know who these people are, a lot of the decisions you usually agonize over answer themselves. Which channels should you be on? Wherever they already gather. Which formats? Whatever they like to consume, whether that’s video or writing or audio. Which topics? The ones they actually want to hear about.
The audience question sits upstream of nearly every other one.
Want to actually put this to work? It all works better once you turn it into a proper audience map: clear personas, real names, specific situations. I’ve put the persona prompts and the trigger questions I use for exactly that into the free resource pack from the talk.
Positioning: Stand for one thing
If someone spoke about you to others, how would they describe you? Is it a vague “Oh, she’s great” or a specific “She’s the person if you need X”?
For the longest time, I was stuck in the former group. Being a full-stack marketer sounded appealing when I first got into freelancing. I’d be able to work on more projects, attract more clients. But while people knew I’m good, I’d never be the person to come to mind when a colleague needed a recommendation. There wasn’t a neat box to put “all-purpose Vassy” in, so my name didn’t come up.
The clearest signal you can send is to be known for one thing. It helps the humans, because you become top-of-mind when someone needs exactly your kind of expertise. And it helps the algorithms, which place you and surface your ideas far more confidently when they can tell what you’re about.
The WordPress world is full of good examples. When I think “fast WordPress sites,” I think of Remkus de Vries, because he has owned the topic of performance for years. Piccia Neri, with accessible, well-designed UX. Francesca Marano is who I associate with inclusivity and women in WordPress. Mario Peshev, with scaling a real business around WordPress. Not one of them is limited by being known for a single thing. Being known for one thing is exactly what gets them more attention.
Not sure what you stand for? Ask.
Whenever I share this piece of advice, people immediately say it’s hard. And I agree. The reason is simple: we have a particular type of blindness when it comes to how others perceive us.
If you can’t yet name your one thing, you don’t have to work it out alone. The simplest customer research you’ll ever do is to ask a few friends, colleagues, or past clients a handful of questions:
- What are the first three words that come to mind when you think of me?
- What are some of my most notable contributions to a project we worked on together?
- What skills or qualities do you think of first when you think of me?
- How well does what I know line up with how I want to be seen?
Their answers tend to reveal a pattern you’ve been too close to notice yourself.
Channels: Make your voice go farther
When you do know who you’re reaching and how to present yourself, the next question is how to make a finite amount of effort travel as far as possible. The most useful frame here is Jay Clouse’s distinction between discovery platforms and relationship platforms.
Social media is a discovery platform. Its job is to introduce you to people who don’t know you yet. That’s genuinely valuable, but it’s the shallow end. People sample your ideas there; they don’t really build a relationship with you there. Relationship platforms are where trust actually compounds: your long-form content, a blog or a newsletter where you have room to show your thinking, and the real-life connections you make in person.
The mistake I see most often is pouring everything into discovery and almost nothing into the relationship layer. The smarter pattern is to use social to get noticed, then deliberately move those people toward the places where the relationship can deepen. If you check out my LinkedIn profile, you’ll quickly see I’m doing everything I can to use the attention I get there and channel it towards my newsletter, where I can connect with people on my own terms.
A presence in real-life communities, physical or virtual, is a strong relationship platform in its own right. Answering questions in a professional Slack with your peers, speaking at events (on stage, like I often do, or chatting informally at a meetup) works really well for making an impression. Granted, it’s way less easy to scale, but that’s why it’s important.
Step 2: Find your message
Knowing who you’re talking to and where tells you nothing about what to actually say. That’s the next move, and it’s where most expertise either becomes magnetic or stays generic.
The good news is you’ve already done part of the work. If you know what’s the one thing you need to position yourself for, you can easily figure out topics related to that thing that you need to speak about. But to really showcase expertise, you need to have a clear point of view. Gone are the days when a good write-up of theoretical basics was seen as useful enough for people to trust you. To stand out now, you need to voice an opinion.
This is what I call remarkable content angles. An angle is your particular point of view, the lens you put on a topic. “Remarkable” here is Seth Godin’s sense of the word: literally worth making a remark about, because it’s interesting, significant, or a little unusual. It doesn’t have to be something nobody has ever said. It just has to be genuinely yours, and a little different from the recognized “hard truths” in your field.
Where do these angles come from? Three places, all of them already inside you:
- Your beliefs: the things you feel are true about how your industry should work.
- Your ideas: the things you know are crucial to doing the job well.
- Your story: the things you’ve learned the hard way, the experience that shaped how you practice.
Speak from those and you come across as a real person with real, earned opinions, which is exactly what anyone wants in an expert they’re about to trust.
When you’re choosing which angles to lead with, I have a slightly unserious but reliable test: think about the last time a post in your field genuinely annoyed you. That flash of irritation is information. Edit out the ranting, and underneath it is usually a conviction you hold strongly enough to defend.
From there, four questions help you sort the strong angles from the merely true ones:
- Is this something I feel strongly about?
- Is this uncommon in my field?
- Will my audience genuinely care about it?
- Does it align with what I actually sell?
The angles that score well on all four are the ones worth building on. And “building” is the right word, because the recognition comes from circling the same handful of angles, consistently, across different topics and formats and moments. In film criticism there’s a name for this: auteur theory. A director’s films are all recognizably theirs because they’re variations on the same core obsessions. Do that with your content and you become recognizable in the same way.
Here’s one example in the wild. Basecamp has built its entire public presence around a single angle: work doesn’t have to be crazy. That one belief shows up everywhere they do — the book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, the Rework podcast on saner work practices, the LinkedIn posts of the founders about ruthless prioritization and protecting focus. Different formats, months on months, the same core conviction. You always know what they stand for, and who they’re for. That’s a remarkable angle doing its job.
I go much deeper into all of this. In the resources from my session, I provide a worksheet you can use to surface and score your remarkable content angles, and directions on how to keep varying the same few angles across different audiences and timely topics without the fear of repeating yourself.
Step 3: Engineer consistency
The biggest differentiator between a brand that’s visible and one that’s flailing often comes down to consistency. It’s the unglamorous work of putting one foot in front of the other, being there, sharing insights, even when client emergencies come first and your personal visibility comes last.
Here, finally, it makes sense to talk about AI. The kind worth using here is AI you’ve set up carefully, fed real context, and taught to sound like you. That’s a completely different tool from the slop engine most people picture. I can talk a lot more about creating your content creation setup with real, useful context, but that’s a separate post that will be out soon. In the meantime, you can check out this masterclass on scaling AI content.
If you take one thing from this section, take this: start before you feel ready.
The sooner you start, the sooner publishing your thoughts and promoting yourself stops feeling strange and starts feeling normal. And that first post can be small. Pick one belief from your list, write a few honest paragraphs about why you hold it, and put it on whichever platform your audience already uses. Keep it short, and let it be imperfect. The only requirement for post number one is that it exists.
With that out of the way, here’s the system that keeps a presence consistent without grinding you down:
Have one place to store idea nuggets.
The obvious benefit is that you never start from a blank page. The hidden benefit is better: the act of capturing ideas trains you to notice more of them. Start writing them down and you’ll suddenly be catching two or three a day. The exact platform matters only as far as being handy. I use a paper notebook, but anything works: Evernote, Google Keep, Obsidian, you name it. As long as there’s exactly one home for your insights and you don’t procrastinate from the writing by fiddling endlessly with a complex color-coded Notion setup. Make it stupid simple to start.
Build your foundational context documents.
In the context of AI work, I’ve started calling these knowledge blocks (hat tip to Chris Penn and Trust Insights). These are actionable descriptions of your audiences, your positioning, your story, your brand voice. They’re useful for your own clarity, and they’re what lets you set up an AI project that genuinely sounds like you and serves your audience, surfacing the key messages you care about.
To make that concrete, here’s a slice of my own brand-voice block — the document I point every AI tool at so it stops sounding generic and starts sounding like me. This is just one of the voice characteristic sections, telling AI exactly how to put this into practice across a variety of channels. I load this document in every content creation project I work on and reuse that foundation whenever I write.
Talk your ideas out loud.
My favorite way to turn a nugget into a finished piece is to say it first, usually as a voice note on a walk. The AI then helps edit and assemble, but the idea and the phrasing started as mine, so what comes out the other end still sounds like me. I find Wispr Flow to work great and you can get an extended trial for a full month here (referral link, I also get a free month, but don’t get paid).
The Slow AI movement
When I work with AI, on client content or my own, I keep one person in mind: Carlo Petrini. This isn’t an MIT professor or a notorious futurist you haven’t heard about. But his philosophy is a must for all of us. He started the Slow Food movement in the 1980s by protesting a McDonald’s opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome. As Carl Honoré puts it in In Praise of Slow, the Slow approach is about doing things at the right speed, and as well as possible rather than as fast as possible.
Applied to AI, that means speed is almost beside the point. The real value is that a well-built model can push back on your thinking and make your ideas sharper, if you set it up to.
So I do, explicitly. I tell it to act as a skeptical editor: challenge my weakest claim, ask what I’m assuming, hand me the strongest counter-argument before it’s allowed to agree with me. The back-and-forth that follows, the “no, that’s not what I mean, try again,” is not a bug. It’s the whole point.
And there’s evidence this matters. In a 2025 working paper, researchers Liu, Wang, and Yang used a temporary ChatGPT ban in Italy as a natural experiment: when the AI went away, marketing content got measurably more distinctive and audience engagement actually rose by about 3.5%.
Don’t run from AI completely. Lean on it as a collaborator, but don’t let it take the lead role. The human staying in the loop is what keeps you out of the beige.
The real reason to do this
I’ll leave you where I left the room in Kraków. There’s a line I’ve borrowed and reshaped from the speaker coach John Zimmer, who originally said it about public speaking but it applies beautifully to our topic here:
They tell you not to be nervous about personal branding. The truth is you should be terrified.
me, paraphrasing John Zimmer
Now, I don’t mean you should be terrified of building a visible personal brand. You should be terrified of what happens if you don’t: all the people your best ideas could have helped, never getting to hear them.
That’s the reframe for anyone who finds this whole thing a bit cringe. Sharing what you know, generously and in public, is closer to a public service than a vanity project. The expertise sitting in your head can’t help anyone while it stays there.
So pick one thing. One belief, one idea, one lesson you’ve learned. Put it out this week, before you feel ready. Then keep going, and give it time, measured in months rather than days, before it starts turning into people in your inbox. That’s how the whole thing works. It’s how it started for me, anyway, on a small stage in Sofia, sixteen years ago. And it’s why many events I go to now are places full of friends – ones I’ve already met in person, and ones I’ve only met online because something I wrote resonated with both of us.
If you want to get started quicker, I pulled everything together in a single package: the slides, the audience-persona process, the brand-voice exercises, and the AI sparring-partner prompt I actually use. Join Marketing Matters, my weekly note on the thinking, trends, and tools for experts who want to be seen, and I’ll send you the lot.
