Originally Published May 11, 2018
One of the best ways to build trust with an audience and establish your authority in your field is to become recognized as a thought leader. Thought leadership involves creating any type of content that showcases your expertise and provides unique perspectives about industry trends and challenges, as well as solutions to a particular audience’s needs.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or employee of an organization, when content is consistently shared, it can help you reach a wider audience, turn your message into a movement, land news coverage and speaking opportunities, and greatly increase your profitability.
The best way to get started is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What problems are they experiencing? What are their barriers to success? What do they often overlook? What are their immediate needs and how can you make their lives easier with how-to information that provides solutions? Once you provide your responses, you can create multiple types of content that can help you stand as a thought leader in your industry.
How to Stand Out as a Thought Leader
1. Host a podcast that challenges a widely held belief or assumption about a particular community and interviews changemakers as guests.
2. Share an article published in a major publication that forecasts trends in your industry that will drive success for the upcoming year.
3. Share a YouTube or Facebook Live video where you share your insights about a recent controversy or take a stand against social injustice.
4. Share a case study, which highlights a customer’s success story and details the process you used to solve a particular problem.
5. Share an infographic that depicts survey results and customer insights about an industry resource or tool.
6. Create a newsletter that curates content around a particular industry theme or provides a roundup of tips from leading experts in the field.
7. Create a hashtag campaign that aims to amplify a message and encourage social media followers to share their stories.
8. Host a webinar where you teach your four-part framework as a solution to a common problem in your field.