The Lens Method is a way of writing that incorporates expert perspectives without surrendering your narrative. You maintain your thesis, your voice, your accountability, while using practitioner experience as proof.
Expert experience is raw light. It illuminates, but scatters without direction. The writer provides the lens—deciding what matters, what connects, and what it means for a specific audience.
The person who identifies the pattern owns the pattern.
An expert knows what they did. The writer knows why it matters to someone else.
Where this came from
I didn't set out to develop yet another marketing method. I was just trying to solve a problem that kept showing up.
Even with experience—running SEO campaigns, working with clients, building things—a single perspective can only take you so far. Four experts in the same field will create a stronger piece than one. We all bring different experiences to the table, and we're often writing about topics where our first-hand knowledge is incomplete.
The easy path is desk research. Read what's already published, synthesize it, add polish. But that content feels thin. Readers can tell when a writer is just rearranging information they found elsewhere.
The other path—the one that kept pulling me—was talking to people who actually do the work. Interview practitioners. Get the real stories, the specific numbers, the hard-won insights. Then use that material to make an argument.
But here's what I noticed: when you bring experts into your writing, you can either amplify their voice or lose yours. Most content does the latter. Quote roundups where the writer disappears. Interview transcripts with thin transitions. The expert becomes the authority; the writer becomes a conduit.
This isn't new
Non-fiction authors have done this forever. Malcolm Gladwell interviews hundreds of people for each book, then presents his argument using their stories as evidence. James Clear built Atomic Habits on research and practitioner insights, but the framework—the 1% improvement, the four laws—those are his synthesis. The experts provide proof; the author owns the thesis.
And Clear did something else worth noting: he actually changed his own life through habits. His personal experience grounds the book alongside the research. That combination—lived experience plus synthesized expertise—is powerful. Pure personal essay has its place too. Some of the most compelling writing comes from someone who simply did the thing and reflected on it honestly.
The Lens Method isn't the only path to credible content. It's one approach for situations where your personal experience alone isn't enough—where you need external expertise to make your argument land.
Journalists do something similar to this method, but they defer authority. They report. They aim for objectivity. The story belongs to the facts, not the writer.
What I'm describing sits between journalism and personal essay: you maintain your narrative, but you use experts to support it. You're not reporting what they said. You're building an argument and using their experience as proof.
from expert
from writer
owned by writer
Threading that needle requires skill. It's harder than either pure journalism or pure personal essay. But it produces something neither can: content with both credibility and voice.
When it crystallized
In 2024 at Backlinko, AI search disrupted everything. Traditional SEO tactics were suddenly unproven. Nobody knew what worked anymore.
We had to figure it out together. Strategists, writers, editors collaborated on briefs, challenging each other's assumptions. Three or four people contributing their perspectives to a single piece. Then distilling all of that into one author speaking directly to a reader.
That's when language started forming for what had been intuitive. The chaos forced clarity. When multiple voices need to become one, you have to get precise about who owns what.
The approach had already been showing up in earlier work. A piece on information gain interviewed three content leaders—Caroline Gilbert at Angi, Nisha Vora at Rainbow Plant Life, Sam Balter at Wistia. Each had built something remarkable. Each had insights that would make the argument stronger.
But here's the thing: Caroline didn't call her approach "proprietary data plus reader empathy." That pattern came from connecting her work to the other practitioners. From building the argument about what makes content defensible.
Could she have written that article herself? No. She knew her own experience, but not the pattern across practitioners. That synthesis belonged to the writer.
The ownership test
This has become a useful way to evaluate any piece of content that incorporates expert input:
Could the expert have written this themselves?
If yes, you're a conduit. Authority flows to them.
If no, you're the author. You brought a frame, a synthesis, an audience understanding they don't have.
The ownership spectrum
Most content fails this test. The writer collects quotes, arranges them nicely, and disappears. The experts get the credibility. The writer gets a byline.
The Lens Method inverts this. The experts provide evidence; the writer provides meaning.
What makes authority stay with the writer
Thesis before interview. Come with a question or hypothesis. The interview serves your inquiry, not the expert's agenda. For the Information Gain piece, the question was about what makes content defensible—that shaped which experts to approach and which questions to ask.
Qualification and selection. Choosing who to interview is itself an act of authority. You're saying: "This person's experience matters for what I'm trying to teach." This phase is often underestimated. It might mean researching many candidates to find a few who have both credible work and insights that serve the argument.
Pattern naming. The expert might not name what they're doing. When you identify and name the pattern, you own it. That naming is an act of authorship.
The contextual layer. Micro-translations throughout: "Here's what this means for you." Connecting expert experience to tools and contexts your reader can use. The expert doesn't know your audience; you do.
Selective attribution. Not everything the expert says makes the piece. You choose which insights to elevate, which quotes to feature. From hours of conversation, maybe one line crystallizes the argument.
Accountability. Your name is on the piece. If something is wrong, you're responsible. That accountability is part of what makes it authored work.
The practical reality
This method requires relationship management.
Finding subject matter experts. Getting them to respond. Figuring out the best way for them to share information—a written response, a video, a call. All viable, but each requires coordination.
Tracking expert outreach
It helps to treat this like a CRM. Tracking who you've reached out to, who's responded, where they are in contributing to a piece. The outreach itself is a skill. Specificity and genuine appreciation for their work opens doors that generic asks don't.
Here's the thing though: this work is genuinely interesting. Actually talking to experts—whether they've been doing something for decades or they're beginners figuring it out—is fascinating. It humanizes your research in unexpected ways. And if you can have a real conversation, you land on nuanced insights that you'd never get from an edited written response. The friction is real, but it doesn't have to feel like a chore.
That said, the difficulty creates a moat. Most writers won't do this work. Which is exactly why it's worth doing.
Why it matters now
The bar for credibility keeps rising. Readers are skeptical of single-voice authority ("who is this person to tell me?"), pure expert content ("is this just self-promotion?"), and AI-generated synthesis ("where's the real experience?").
The Lens Method threads the needle: real expertise from practitioners, shaped by a writer who takes responsibility for making it useful.
This type of content gets shared. It gets featured in newsletters. It compounds over time. Because it demonstrates depth in a way that desk research can't replicate.
The compounding effect
Each piece builds assets for the next. Expert relationships that can be tapped again. A growing network of practitioners in your space. Credibility that makes outreach easier. A body of work that demonstrates editorial perspective.
The method gets easier with practice. The first outreach is hard. The tenth is a warm note to someone who already knows your work.
This is a working document. The method continues to evolve through application.