You’ve got burning questions about your thought leadership. I have answers!
In 2019, I started working with clients as a thought leadership consultant. While thought leadership has evolved in the past four years, the core questions people ask me about thought leadership have stayed pretty consistent.
These are the questions I hear most often from aspiring thought leaders:
- How do I start showing up as a thought leader?
- What should I talk about online?
- Why should I care about thought leadership in the first place?
When I looked back at my top-performing content of the year on LinkedIn, I wasn’t surprised that the posts were all answers to these common questions. If you’re thinking about your thought leadership strategy for the year to come, I rounded up my best advice for you below.
How do I start showing up as a thought leader?
Do you need a pep talk to start a personal thought leadership practice? This is for you.
Keep. Showing. Up. Thought leadership is a practice that builds on itself over time, and eventually, it starts to look like this lovely continuous cycle:
MORE RESOURCES: You can also think about your thought leadership practice as building a “perch.”
What should I talk about online?
Okay, so maybe you agree that you want to dive into practicing thought leadership and talking in public about your work. But…what…do you talk about? That blinking cursor can be intimidating.
I give you one of my favorite terms of the year: “barbecue content” – the stuff you’d talk to colleagues about at a barbecue. (Hat tip to Jason Mountford.)
When you think about “barbecue content,” you immediately loosen up. Toss all that formal jargon aside and think about how you actually talk to people who share your interests.
One caveat: At a barbecue, you might talk about your kids, your relationships, and your dog. You don’t have to talk about any of that in public if you don’t want to. You can be a thought leader and a private person. But you can also talk about your work in a way that feels approachable and friendly.
MORE RESOURCES: If you need a little more guidance on what you should talk about, try this list of conversation starters.
Why should I care about thought leadership in the first place?
Alright, if you made it this far, let’s get a little visionary and talk about what all of this will mean in the future of the Internet. Will all of your collected thoughts and blog posts and LinkedIn posts and bylined articles and podcast episodes even mean anything down the road?
I say YES! While it’s true that the internet is becoming noisier and noisier, one of the disciplines that has made the web so noisy is actually losing its foothold. SEO will likely become less dominant in the near future, as marketers lose the ability to game search engines. How you code your blog posts and where you drop in specific keywords? That will become much less important.
And what will become more important: You! Your unique, special, fun, memorable IDEAS will become the most important part of talking about your work online.
MORE RESOURCES: How to talk about the values that drive your work, and how to build a legacy.
TL;DR: What are the questions that keep you from developing your thought leadership practice? If you need a mantra to push you forward, here’s my advice in a nutshell: Keep showing up. Talk like a human. Your ideas matter!
