Writing thought leadership content
Thought leadership enables you to demonstrate your expertise in a particular field, profession, or topic.
Many professionals and marketers these days strive to promote thought leadership through strategic content.
They write the content to show their command over their subject area and demonstrate to their audience how passionate and deeply involved they are in the subject matter.
Thought leadership content can include
- Infographics
- E-books
- White papers
- Blog posts
- Newspaper and magazine articles
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Original research-based articles and blog posts
- Social media updates
The main stress through thought leadership is original thinking, research, independent opinions, and an ability to predict future.
Thought leaders can evaluate industry trends.
They participate in ongoing debates.
They keep a tab on the current events and have something valuable to add to them.
When it pays to publish thought leadership content?
Thought leadership takes time to nurture.
You cannot suddenly start publishing authoritative content without making a name for yourself for being there in the hub of activities.
This Search Engine Journal article suggests that before starting on publishing your thought leadership content, increase your visibility.
Building thought leadership through content takes prolonged reputation management.
You need to manage public relations and social media.
You need to remain active and interact with your followers.
Participate in ongoing conversations.
Begin to be recognized as an expert in your field, or at least someone who always has something valuable to say.
Once people begin to recognize you, you can start publishing smaller pieces of leadership content, gradually moving towards comprehensive work that people will trust and pay attention to.
Why should you publish thought leadership content?
It earns you respect among the peers.
It makes people trust you.
People pay more attention to what you have to say.
They take your words seriously.
When it comes to doing business, people prefer to work with leaders rather than someone they don’t know.
Thought leadership content is good for your SEO.
In most of the cases, thought leadership content is written in long form – that is, you may write anywhere between 3000-5000 words.
Google prefers long form content because it provides comprehensive information at a single spot, to its visitors.
More people link to thought leadership content than average content.
This further improves your search engine rankings.
Thought leadership content improves your domain authority and your overall ranking potential.
It gets shared more on social media, further improving your visibility.
It can be repurposed into smaller content pieces.
How to develop a thought leadership content strategy?
Developing your thought leadership content requires planning and strategy.
You need to clearly identify your area of expertise.
What original research have you done?
How is your solution different from the solutions being provided by other businesses or thought leaders?
Why is your take different?
How have you overtaken challenges and tackled problems within your business?
What have you learned from your mistakes?
How will you publish your thought leadership content?
You may like to read the entire blog post in the above-mentioned link.